I bought a “Beach House” CD, listened to it with full attention, loved it, came to know each and moment of the album. I bought a Mastodon CD and a Ravi Shankar CD. Then I stopped downloading music on Soulseek illegally even though it was so normal among my acquaintances to do so. I felt I had become like a child who was used to getting every music track I wanted immediately, without having to pay for it in cash, subscription, or advertising eyeballs. I even felt like taking was somewhat excusable because I didn’t have any money, even though I would despise this attitude in others. After all, that would make me a Robin Hood who stole files from the poor and gave them to myself. I looked over my digital collection and found 1970s French prog, Enya, the entire Rush library, and thought, “How did I ever accumulate all this?” Definitely not by paying. So I deleted Soulseek from my computer out of guilt, and lost all those music files when my computer died besides.
But I was still going to the library and burning CDs. I knew it was probably illegal, but avoided checking because I knew it would guilt me into stopping. Then I read a blog post by a professor of the economics of music at a college in Georgia. He demolished, systematically, the whiny, narrow, and entitled view expressed in a separate blog post by a music intern at a public radio station. This intern, although living a music-centered life, had admitted to burning hundreds of CDs onto her computer, and never having bought an album in her adult life, and then asked rhetorically, “I just want immediate access to any song I want, at any time. Is that so much to ask?” The professor completely rebutted this and then connected the decline in artist compensation to the illegal but profitable file sharing culture online, where major corporations such as Google get a take of the advertising money while claiming that their hands are technically clean. He also, convincingly, connected the dirty digital revolution with the suicide of a musician friend of his.
So finally I stopped with the library shenanigans because I was obviously being dishonest with myself. The next step will be deleting the files from my computer. There are not a whole lot, but still it will be painful. There is an additional problem: although I now abstain from illegal downloading and CD burning, I am not suddenly helping artists get rewarded for their work: I am buying just as few CDs as before, and simply listening to more podcasts and radio instead. And I am still within the law if I check out music CDs from the library for personal use only within the borrowing window.
Perhaps, like the critics on the radio show Sound Opinions seem to think, the music industry in its traditional form is fucked.
Included: a wood duck box sitting in the middle of what was a pond at Dodge Nature Center in late September. Hopefully we will get some snow soon to alleviate this drought.
pseudoisaac 