December 5, 2008
- Downloading Music is Good (and progressive!) -
A friend of mine who was always against downloading (since it does sort of hurt the musicians) sent me an article that completely changed her mind about downloading music. As a long-time proponent of music downloading, I was happy to read an industry insider’s viewpoint on why I was right (don’t we all love that?). I think this pretty much removes any last feeling of guilt anyone might have about downloading music (for those of you who do…)
However, I think there’s an even greater value to the article than just that. Take out any references to “music downloading” or “music industry” and it is a great critique on society as a whole. Some key lines:
- It was like the world’s largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering.
- The RIAA loves to complain about music pirates leaking albums onto the internet before they’re released in stores – painting the leakers as vicious pirates dead set on attacking their enemy, the music industry. But you know where music leaks from? From the fucking source, of course – the labels!
- If the industry tried to have some kind of compassion – if they said, “we understand that these are just music fans trying to listen to as much music as they can, but we have to protect our assets, and we’re working on an industry-wide solution to accommodate the changing needs of music fans”… Well, it’s too late for that, but it would be encouraging. Instead, they make it sound like they busted a Columbian drug cartel or something. They describe it as a highly-organized piracy ring. Like Oink users were distributing kiddie porn or some shit. The press release says: “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure.” Wh – what?? That’s EXACTLY what it was!
- For the major labels, it’s over. You’re going to burn to the fucking ground, and we’re all going to dance around the fire. And it’s your own fault. Surely, somewhere deep inside, you had to know this day was coming, right? Your very industry is founded on an unfair business model of owning art you didn’t create in exchange for the services you provide. It’s rigged so that you win every time – even if the artist does well, you do ten times better. It was able to exist because you controlled the distribution, but now that’s back in the hands of the people, and you let the ball drop when you could have evolved.
- Maybe taking the money out of music is the only way to get money back into it.
- It’s time to show artists that there’s no limit to what an energized online fanbase can accomplish, and all they’ll ever ask for in return is more music.
- The major labels are like Terry Schiavo right now – they’re on life support, drooling in a coma, while white-haired guys in suits try and change the laws to keep them alive. But any rational person can see that it’s too late, and it’s time to pull out the feeding tube.
- Steal the music you want that’s on the major labels. It’s easy, and despite the RIAA’s scare tactics, it can be done safely – especially if more and more people are doing it.
If you take the underlying pattern there and apply it outside of the music industry/downloading, you have a pretty great approach for a lot of the problems we’re facing today.
(massive) counterpoint: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than-the-old-boss-full-post/
Comment by Ian — June 12, 2012 @ 3:43 pm
AWESOME article, thanks! I recently read that Apple’s gameplan for the publishing industry is to ‘remove all the gatekeepers’. Presumable they mean all the OTHER gatekeepers… :)
That last section especially:
*
“My only explanation is that there is just something fundamentally wrong with how many in the tech industry look at the world. They are deluded somehow. Freaks.
Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry. They do not value content. They only see THEIR services as valuable. They are the Masters of the Universe. They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks.
I’m using this language for good reason. There is a quasi religious tone to many tech convention speeches and press releases. What other industry constantly professes utopian visions for all humanity? What other industry would dare proclaim they were liberating artists? Students? Workers? What other industry thinks they are mystical shaman “Let’s send our magic objects, our laptops to poor children in third world countries”. What other industry genuinely believes they (and only they) possess the lapis philosophorum? They have even created their own God. A Superhuman intelligence that they (naturally) have created. The singularity. Their egos know no bounds.
Not only is the New Boss worse than the Old Boss. The New Boss creeps me out.”
Comment by speedbird — June 13, 2012 @ 4:37 am
Yup, the white knight of the tech industry is starting to get dusty. I think we all have negative sides, and its better to acknowledge them and work with them than to believe the hype that we’re somehow better than what went before. Which I admit sounds hockey, but a denial of that very fact is exactly what I see being at the heart of the problem here.
Comment by Ian — June 13, 2012 @ 9:45 am
While I think of it, some lyrics ;D
*
“Time will find a way
A way to make your world
go round
Present an empty day
A canvas for your words
To paint the things you see
A chapter still to come
Don’t you know that every picture holds a story?…”
…
“If I could feel some kind of feeling
Send a message to my soul
Tell my mind to lose control
If I could live a life with some meaning
One that love could not deny
From a shattered soul like me…”
…
“You
You legend deep inside
Religiously denied
Denied…”
- Ultravox, ‘Brilliant’ album, 2012
Comment by speedbird — June 15, 2012 @ 3:27 pm
Some interesting lyrics there. Kind of depressing, but what else would one suspect from a 80s New Wave band, 20 some-odd years on? And I mean that as a more as a compliment than anything else.
This made me think though:
“Present an empty day
A canvas for your words
To paint the things you see”
Which echos, kind of, our previous “you create your own reality” discussions. Or at least, every moment is a new “all and everything”. But if each day is empty and new, from where do the things come that you are painting? Its like everything is just the rehashing of old stuff, and the new only comes as emptiness. Which, to me, is NOT depressing, more thought provoking…
Comment by Ian — July 6, 2012 @ 10:16 am
Welcome back!
Didn’t mean to be depressing. I find this stuff deeply optimistic. An 80′s New Wave band who fell out 25 years ago but who have finally buried the hatchet and still seem able to make music. The ‘canvas for your words’ makes me think of the first chapter of Genesis. But it does beg the question of the power of words.
Actually thinking back a lot of New Wave is both very dark and also massively ironic. Show the darkness for what it is through music, and move on. Case in point: Tears for Fears (they of ‘Mad World’ also) c. 1985:
“Welcome to your life
There’s no turning back
Even while you sleep
We will find you
Acting on your best behaviour
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world
It’s my own design
It’s my only must
Help me to decide
Help me make the most of freedom
And of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world
There’s a room where the lies won’t find you
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
When they do I’ll be right behind you
So glad we almost made it
So sad they had to fade it
Everybody wants to rule the world.
Say that you’ll never never never never need it
One headline, why believe it?
‘Everybody wants to rule the world’”
Dig further back into the archives and you hit Cold War bedrock like ‘Vienna’ and OMD’s ‘Enola Gay’…
Comment by speedbird — July 8, 2012 @ 3:34 pm
No worries, I was more just riffing on the lyrics, no actual depressing-ness occurred. :)
Having coming of age (or at least, stumbled upon the idea of popular music) as the whole New Wave movement was peaking/ending, I think I missed its historical significance. For me, there was just the pointing out the darkness, no real understanding of what came before, what lead to the need to have the darkness pointed out (the fading of hippie ideals, the death of the paradisaical future of the 70s, the paranoia of the Cold War).
Then to go from that to the Seattle Grunge era, I was pretty well inoculated against the idea that depression-for-depressions sake can serve any purpose. But the idea that the culture was moving through a “show the darkness and move on” phase was something I missed. I can understand it now, but my inner-80s-child never quite caught on. I saw the sense of powerlessness, but missed its causes…
Good stuff to think about though, and it adds the shine of noble truth to something I’ve always thought of as more a big cultural sigh of exasperation and ennui.
Comment by Ian — July 9, 2012 @ 11:43 am
And speaking of hippie idealism and the death of hippie idealism, here is a REALLY INTERESTING take on it. One lead inexorably to the other…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/opinion/the-downside-of-liberty.html
Comment by Ian — July 9, 2012 @ 12:23 pm
Man, I learn things in these discussions. I’d never really stopped to think about the bigger picture of what I was listening to back then. So I read your link about hippies and bankers. I was going to say I came to New Wave really just as it peaked with the Pet Shop Boys’ “please” album, which was honestly like nothing anyone had ever heard (and still bears a listen)… and what’s it all about? Money, the rise of high finance and basically a prediction of the pickle we find ourselves in now. All painted in irresistible sparkly electronica. I can remember the feeling of being able to see forever… and being able to see a time of turmoil to come.
Comment by speedbird — July 10, 2012 @ 2:10 pm
Who’s being depressing now? ;) Naw, I’m teasing. I am glad our discussions are benefiting you as much as they are me, I’d never even think about most of this stuff if it didn’t come up here. And on a less intellectualized level, I have that album, somewhere on my hardrive, and will be digging it back up tonight. :)
If 60s and 70s were the high point, and the 80s predicted future lows, aren’t we due for a return of the rising tide sometime relatively soon? Please…?
Comment by Ian — July 10, 2012 @ 4:59 pm
Oh yes, I think it’s all playing out now. We’re just beginning to see through a quarter-century of confusion caused (imo) by the sudden invention of IT.
I have this article from like ’83 or something which I must forward. Clive Sinclair* talking about a future where no-one works because the machines do all the work. What do people do? More important things than ‘work’! His point (other than a radical definition of ‘work’) is that machine intelligence is coming, and that machine intelligence is not the same thing as human intelligence. People aren’t natural workers. But now we’ve been increasingly forced into a place where ‘intelligence’ is ‘what machines do’… and I think the glimmers of light around the edges of that Shadow are just starting to show.
(* whose bootlaces I am not worthy to untie)
Comment by speedbird — July 11, 2012 @ 7:25 am
Ooh! A respectable vision of a future without work? Sounds good to me. Cut my desk shackles Ma, I’m free!!! Please do forward at your earliest convenience. :)
I hope that shadow explodes into a star burst, and I hope it happens SOON.
Comment by Ian — July 11, 2012 @ 1:18 pm
A few articles about this have found their way into my life recently, thought I’d share:
http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2012/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/why-are-we-working-so-hard
http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index1.html
All relatively long, but worthwhile reading…
Comment by ian — July 12, 2012 @ 11:13 am
To return to the topic of music downloading, here’s El P for the win:
http://stereogum.com/1083302/el-p-on-file-sharing-and-the-artist-audience-relationship/top-stories/
Comment by Ian — July 27, 2012 @ 11:55 am
He’s describing shareware, right? Did that ever actually work for software?
Things were different pre-digital-recording because every copy degraded the quality. So if you liked the music you basically had to fork out for the CD. Now ‘music’ seems to have no physical form at all, which makes for a very different game.
Comment by speedbird — July 27, 2012 @ 5:20 pm
Nah, I think he’s describing things like torrent sites and file sites like MegaUpload. Basically, napster never ended, it just went behind the scenes… And a lot of albums still leak out ahead of the release date. It all just flows out like water, quickly and easily. I like that he basically says “fuck it, I’ll just make good shit and hope people will support me”. Rather than getting caught up in trying to stop the outpouring of the water, he’s trusting it to carry him. This, I think, is the only way to come up with an actual solution to the problem.
Comment by Ian — July 28, 2012 @ 4:46 pm
“fuck it, I’ll just make good shit and hope people will support me”
That’s what I mean, that’s what I understand by ‘shareware’ anyway. And no, I can’t think of any other way this will play out.
Heck, that’s how Mozart worked. Composition has ALWAYS had this problem! But his aim at all times was to have a wealthy patron who would see his genius and support him. Perhaps that’s the future of the ‘music industry’: patronage.
Comment by speedbird — July 29, 2012 @ 12:45 pm
I mean, this is why plagiarism is a sin: because it is copying WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. There’s nothing wrong with copying /per se/ as long as the debt is acknowledged in an appropriate manner. Sometimes that’s money, sometimes it’s just a nod. It’s up to ‘society’ to decide, I guess. But there always has to be acknowledgement.
Which begs the question: why do certain of our University undergraduates (I understand it to be an increasing number) see no wrong in plagiarism?
Comment by speedbird — July 29, 2012 @ 12:55 pm
Oh, OK, I gotcha on the shareware now. And no, I don’t know if that ever worked out. ut then, software developers generally don’t go on tour, or have any kind of cultural cache, really, so there’s a bit of a difference there, though the similarities are more pronounced.
As for plagiarism, I think the idea that its not wrong is the idea that everything is just information placed into a certain order. The problem is not so much that plagiarism is wrong, but that originality and creativity are not held up as virtues. If society gave us more of a reward for being creative, instead of just having the “right” answer, then there’d be less obvious plagiarism, I think. But I know, when I was writing papers and I knew what the teacher wanted, I often felt like “well, here’s the info, but I have to find a slightly different way to word it if I don’t want to get busted for copying it. Maybe today’s kinds just give less of a shit because copying has now become SO much easier than being just-creative-enough to hide your sources. It’s a systemic problem finally being made obvious by a generation able to afford the energy required to not care, because not caring is so obviously the easier choice.
Comment by Ian — July 29, 2012 @ 6:27 pm
I’ve been thinking about that plagiarism thing. At school you’re not expected to provide sources, because you’re working at the level of ‘common’ knowledge. By the time you’re a postgraduate you’re expected to provide sources for everything, because everything interesting is not ‘common’ knowledge. So the degree is presumably supposed to be a transition in which the student leaves with some understanding of the difference. Though having said that there is a history of scientific fiascos caused by people believing what they read without question.
The highschooler is presumably supposed to have internalised enough knowledge of a subject that they can produce an acceptable account without referring to a text. Some of this will be application of certain techniques to previously unseen material. I suppose plagiarism then happens when students think that *internalisation is pointless*.
Perhaps we should just stop setting ‘factual’ essays as homework assignments, because the temptation of Wiki is just too great. Homework assignments can be for application of technique; exams can be to test internalisation.
Comment by speedbird — July 30, 2012 @ 7:33 am
Isn’t it though? I mean, if its possible to write an entire paper from Wikipedia, which I can access at any time from the smart phone in my pocket, why bother internalizing?
Obviously there are reasons, on the intellectual level, but at the same time, saying “cause what if you don’t have your cell phone on you?” or “what if society crashes” isn’t going to get kids interested enough to bother writing a paper.
The idea of using essays for other purposes than internalization is a good one though. Expression, creativity, application, self-discovery. “come up with something you can’t google”. THERE’S a homework assignment…
Comment by Ian — July 30, 2012 @ 10:53 am
>> Isn’t it though?
Well that’s the six million dollar question.
Comment by speedbird — July 30, 2012 @ 4:44 pm
Yeah, I guess so. The New or The Old?
And reading over my last comment, I realize that I did not quite communicate the fact that that is NOT my point of view, it was an attempt to Devil’s Advocate the plagiarizing student…
Comment by Ian — July 30, 2012 @ 5:22 pm
We have the technology to reword him. :)
It is a valid question. I guess the point of education is the acquisition of skill (don’t ask me to define ‘skill’, apparently that’s a field of study in its own right). So assignments of whatever sort must encourage the use, or test the application, of the appropriate skill. Maths: manipulation of symbols. History: interpretation of evidence. English: use of language. Physics: prediction using models. Etcetera.
Now the disconnect: employers are always DE-skilling…!
Comment by speedbird — July 31, 2012 @ 2:35 am
Hahaha! :D
re: Skills, you have a good point there. School is meant to help us develop skills, but they need to be relevant to living in the world and the educational system is not keeping up with the rate-of-change of society (not that many systems are).
Employers are always de-skilling…. I like that, but I’ll have to think about it for a little bit. As in, they need employees to be specialized and predictable in order to run successful business models?
Also, I like your descriptions of the different subjects. They sound much more enjoyable when described by what you can learn to do with them. Almost like magic… :)
Comment by Ian — July 31, 2012 @ 10:06 am
I understand ‘de-skilling’ as ‘we need to employ cheap stoopid people and eventually robots’.
I came up with those descriptions just now because of this discussion… pretty cool. But those desciptions would be a pretty hard sell to a typical 11-16 year-old, I’m guessing; they’re so abstract. Meaning that the skills aren’t irrelevant and probably never will be, but that the whole of Education probably needs remarketing. Why DO I need maths when I’ve got a calculator on my phone? I mean, really, WHY? (Here’s a sketch of an answer: because the machine does arithmetic, and arithmetic is only a tiny bit of mathematics – and you have to DO some arithmetic because it’s the FIRST bit of mathematics.) But the same question needs asking of all subjects.
Comment by speedbird — August 1, 2012 @ 5:56 am
Yeah, I really like these discussions too. They feed me, and they bring stuff out of me. I feel like a garden that’s just gotten rained on…
Here, here! (Hear, hear! ?)
Either way, yes. Educators too, need to be encouraged to experiment and be more creative, find new ways of inspiring the kids. Of course, when the goal is to employed stoopid hoomans then this becomes frowned upon and attacked, but still, that is a direction that I think would be good to go in.
And I think Picasso said something similar about painting to what you’re saying about Math. Learn the basics so that you can go beyond them. Something I know in my heart to be true, but that I struggle with all the time…
Comment by Ian — August 1, 2012 @ 9:10 am
I’ve heard that all the great abstract artists could actually paint likeness, but chose not to.
Pianist Jacques Loussier is a case in point here: studied classical piano but became one of the all time jazz greats.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0apnw0GGKI
Hmm… learn to do what the machine can do so you can go beyond it…
Comment by speedbird — August 1, 2012 @ 11:27 am
yeah, learn the basics, so you know what they were meant to do, then do that better. :)
Comment by Ian — August 1, 2012 @ 1:06 pm