On a life spent illegally downloading music

I remember the first time I used Napster. I was in ninth grade, spending the night at my friend Lindsey's house. "Listen to this," she said. She had downloaded a dozen or so songs by a band I'd never heard of, called Dashboard Confessional. (I thought the singer was a woman.) My family, devoted Macintosh users all, didn't have access to Napster (much less a CD burner or a sufficiently fast internet connection, even in the dialup days) - Lindsey's new toy was a revelation. We spent the entire night downloading music, one song at a time. By the next morning, we had downloaded four songs. Awesome.

By the time I got to college, things were in even better shape for the young and broke. My college unwittingly played host to "the network" - thousands and thousands of movies, games, television episodes, and songs shared among every student on campus. Some particularly industrious hosts held close to a terabyte of stuff all by themselves. Others prided themselves on having new TV episodes up and available within hours of their airing. Nobody had cable or Netflix, and only a handful of us patronized the super-cool record store downtown.

So I'm one of those people - a child of the digital generation who downloads music illegally without a second thought. Kind of. Like a lot of people my age - mid-twenties-ish - I still spend plenty of money on my music consumption. The difference is that I spend most of it on concerts and T-shirts. I still buy music. I paid $5 for that Radiohead album a couple of years ago, because that's how much a Radiohead album that isn't Kid A is worth to me. Last week I downloaded James Mercer's side project, but I'll probably pay money for it when it comes out in March.

"But those aren’t baby bands who had to do it themselves from the start. Newer acts may well be cottage industries — in wired cottages — for life." (NYT)

Sure, when I see a good local band at a bar or club, I buy their CD - but that doesn't happen too often. For one thing, I am not hip enough to go out three times a week. For another, most local bands are pretty terrible. Most of the music I listen to I heard on TV or the radio - same as ever. The difference is that if I hear a song I like - on a TV show, on the radio, whatever - I go online and download it for free. But what's changed, really? As a kid, I taped songs off of the radio all the time. The difference is that now, there is way more out there to download, right? Thanks to the internet, every whosit with a guitar has a chance at fame! If anyone ever hears it. I totally thought that the whole MySpace music thing was going to change the world, but it hasn't. The tastemakers are the same people, but now they're in worse financial shape than ever, so they're promoting even fewer artists.

So, unless you're really good at marketing yourself - or unless your label (if you have one!) thinks you're The Next Big Thing - you're basically screwed. Sure, you can buy my friend's band's CD on iTunes, but does anyone? (I did, Noah!) Sure, Radiohead's stunt worked, but that's because they're Radiohead. And I notice, with the kids I work with, that everything they listen to is manufactured. The younger kids and the 'tween set listen to Disney popsters and Taylor Swift, the teens are into whatever rap guy is big at the moment. There's way too much garbage out there for us to become our own tastemakers. And so the world is basically unchanged. There was no MySpace revolution. The pool of what we actually listen to has only gotten smaller. Other than the occasional tidbit on NPR or tiny college radio stations, when is the last time you heard independent music on the radio?

"But the flip side of disintermediation — not having to rely on any middleman for approval or distribution — is a near-infinite slush pile. All the filtering that used to take place out of earshot, in A&R and club bookers’ offices, can be bypassed." (NYT)

ON THE OTHER HAND! There are artists that succeed - that have gotten their "break" on YouTube or MySpace. Not many of them, but it does happen. I do know a handful of teens - again, not many, but a few - who are into making mash-ups, filming their own music videos for their favorite songs and putting them on YouTube, and tweeting to (with?) their favorite artists. None of this could have happened before the internet. The music industry has changed, but it's not the artist who suddenly has power. It's the consumer. Much like we see in television - with fan movements bringing back cancelled shows (Chuck, Jericho), fanfiction writers re-writing plot points for their fellow fans, and consumers making choices about how they want to watch their favorite shows (TiVo, Hulu, BitTorrent) - listeners are now better equipped than ever to listen to music the way they want to. Pay for it, steal it, interact with it. For the first time, we can dig through that slush pile ourselves if we want to. There are countless websites that can direct you to the good stuff, most of them run by random people out in the world - not the record execs. Not Simon Cowell.

It's not a revolution. Our music tastes, as a culture, haven't suddenly diversified. Most of us still listen to whatever the record companies put on the table. But we don't have to. And that's pretty cool.

P.S. PBS: It's Sarah McLachlan. With an H.

Interesting: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/jan/08/long-tail-myth-download

On another, TOTALLY NSFW note, this blog.
If you didn't get enough inane and/or deeply offensive rap lyrics from that PBS site, I recommend you check this out. Commentary ranges from seriously hilarious to roughly as offensive as the lyrics, but whatever. Also, does anyone else look back fondly on the days when "Drake" was Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi? And can we just take a minute to note how totally not gangster Degrassi is?