Many years have passed since we first gained the ability to “file share” and otherwise download .mp3s without the permission of artists and record labels. Some of us may recall a day when we found this practice “immoral” or, at least, “objectionable.” I’m sure most of us with these memories next remember our first rationalizations for the unauthorized downloads we began making.
“I only download stuff that’s out of print.”
Slap Happy, “Who’s Gonna Help Me Now?”
“I only download major label stuff.”
The Rolling Stones, “Empty Heart”
“When I really like something I’ve downloaded I make sure to go out and buy the CD.”
Sound familiar?
Driving home last night I heard an upcoming preview for a segment on this evening’s NPR’s Marketplace show about illegal downloads. A person interviewed in the preview clip said something to the effect of, “Would you ever say it’s all right to walk into a record store and steal a CD?”
I thought about this for at least a half a second: I would never say that’s all right. However, with each new unauthorized download I occasionally make (and I make plenty more authorized ones, if you need one more rationalization), I do not equate illegal downloads with theft. In fact, this evening I began wondering if downloading was akin to – I haven’t quite put my finger on it – something like sightseeing, after you’ve already paid your way on vacation. Are these .mp3s floating around out there the information highway’s form of natural wonders, cool roadside diners, license plates from distant states?
I’m also curious: is there anyone left who refuses to download unauthorized tracks on what I’m sure is solid moral ground? All these blogs any of us may visit – is there one Townsperson among us who resists the urge to click on an .mp3?
I look forward to your thoughts on this matter.
I think illegal downloading in moderation is akin to taping songs off the radio. And, once the “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign subsided, no one was really bothered with the latter, as I recall.
I think it’s one thing to download a song or two. But there’s people out there with thousands of albums that do these “record review” sites, and I couldn’t believe that their collections were so massive and so many of these people were so young. That’s when I found out that they downloaded everything they have as the whole album illegally. That’s just not right. Granted, most of them are just reviewing classic rock albums that people read reviews of to validate their opinions, but it’s still wrong.
I don’t have issues with grabbing a song or two to sample (or to check out on a blog or Myspace or whatever). Most of the stuff I buy, that’s the only way I’ll get to hear it first. But how can someone seriously review (or pretend to seriously review) music listening to mp3’s? I’m not the adamant vinyl junkie I was in 1987, but cd’s today are huge improvements in sound quality. mp3’s are really kind of like radio, and who would review an album on a radio?
So downloading albums is totally wrong (unless it’s Kings of Leon’s second one, because the DRM on that made it so I couldn’t rip my cd for my use on my mp3 player, which is fair use), but grabbing a song or two to check out before buying is fine by me. I’d hate to be a record label these days. People think all your work is worth nothing more than their criticism, and that’s not healthy. I need some kind of filter, and independent labels make great filters. If people keep stealing whole albums, it won’t be worth it for those labels.
What’s with subscription services? Are they cool? I don’t know that I’d want to know that everything I ever wanted to hear was at my fingertips. I ordered a new cd that’s coming out next Tuesday, and I’m totally stoked for it. I can’t wait to go to the store and buy that and a few other things and hang out at the listening station and all that. Clicking “download now” just isn’t the same. There’s no sense of adventure. But then I’ve never tried it so it might be neato.
Pissed Jeans, from allentown, pa, now on sub-pop, are a perfect case study in the problem 2k describes.
before their album was released, there was a considerable hype and buzz around them. in the spirit of the frenzy, some reviewer somewhere uploaded it to “yousendit”, where it got downloaded in the tens of thousands, enough to considerably dent sales.
so file sharing is and isn’t the same as home taping. the basic mechanics of it – here’s an album i bought, rip it to your iTunes, my friend – are the same.
but thanks to the internet, the more complex mechanics of it allows for situations like the home-taping scenario above to happen much more quickly, at an exponentially higher volume and rate. and in that way, it isn’t like home taping at all: now, we have the ability thousands of people “tape” what we bought. back in the home taping era, I probably taped other people’s albums or shared albums i bought about 4 or 5 times per year. now, if i wanted to, i could do twice that every day without ever leaving the house or doing any of it in real time.
it’s not as if interest in music is dying as sales numbers plummet. maybe soon, there will be no labels, just people posting their music on the web…
Good comments so far, but are we still avoiding the “moral” stance, in some way? Tracks downloaded from MySpace are put up there by the bands and labels, in many cases. This is the totally fair “free sample” use of downloads. I think it’s easy for just about all of us to agree that downloading entire albums is “wrong,” but I know many of us who have done that on occasion. That may be wrong enough for many of us to say, “I would never do that.” For those of you who have or who do, however, do the various ethical issues enter into your thinking? Do you feel you have sound reasons for overcoming those hurdles?
To get down to the nitty gritty, do you fee you have sound reasons for overcoming any of the obvious ethical hurdles to downloading one or two songs by an artist that you find on a blog? How about 100 individual songs by 100 different artists? Are the standard rationalizations valid? And what do we say to this guy on NPR’s Marketplace?
As for subscription services, I do the Emusic thing (which you can try for free as a test run through RTH), and I like it for legally grabbing a few tracks at a time by bands I might not like if I shelled out $15 for an entire album. I can make my own little “greatest hits” by cherrypicking a few songs from a handful of a band’s albums that sound like they’d hit the spot in 30-second samples. I also get to check out stuff I would never buy on my own, like the Ethiopian stuff. It’s not the same as buying a new album, but the disappointment level is much lower and, for me, the adventuresome level is much higher. Emusic has almost no classic rock, few boxed set bonus tracks, and all those other easy grabs for me, so I have to work to find my 30 songs per month.
I do a few subscription music services – some in England and some here. I heard a band called Love Is All who are from Sweden playing at the Record Exchange. I bought the vinyl, and also bought more of their songs on another website that wasn’t available here. I also bought the new Richard James off of my eMusic subscription, because it was only available on import prices and would have taken four weeks or something to get the thing – FOUR WEEKS?!? I’ll also probably listen to the new Super Furries that way as well, simply because it’s faster and more convenient. If I really like the album, I *will* buy it because I have all of their other albums and I’ll want to add it to my collection of unsigned copies (ha ha) to be signed by Gruff (possibly later tonight, hello). Sometimes I use an album for a PR tool, and it works too. It’s one of the easiest ways to get word out for a band and get people excited without giving them a crap description like, “they sound like Bad Brains crossed with Kiss, getting down and sweaty on a barroom floor with The Killjoys. So you should come and see them play, their guitars will rip your face off!” Not that I’ve ever said that. Feel free to use that quote. You know? I also do a lot of borrowing from the library for older stuff that I never had the chance to test spin and don’t want to walk in and ask for. Like say, The Spin Doctors (okay, I’m kidding, alright?). I’m kind of in a jokey mood. Speaking of which, should I still send you that Springsteen Mr. Mod??? Email me, yo.
I know. I’m totally busted. I’m trying to be a part of the solution, but apparently I’m only part of the problem!!!! Should I be writing to a Dear Abbey column here? I probably have that pulp song you need around here somewheres… but it’s a real CD – I swear!!
Sweet Sally C
I’m through with morality! Someone take me away!!!
P.s. I do find that I do far more vinyl collecting now than recent record/CD collecting – partially because I get a lot of CDs for free (because of where I work in my off-time) and partially because I’ll do a trade or buy it at the show rather than in a record store – although when I do make special orders, it probably makes up for that because those are usually 60 and up if I can’t find it anywhere else. I do far more gaging by how a band plays live nowadays rather than what I hear online for newer acts that really grab me.
I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it. I think a new paradigm is going to have to emerge. Maybe it already is.
The potential upside is if this brings the music industry to its knees (you may say that I’m a dreamer) and the perception of big bucks is taken out of the equation then the only people that will make music are the ones that have to. If you’re an artist, you know what I mean.
But that doesn’t mean that they necessarily have to starve. They’ll have to make money via tours, t-shirts and what-have-ya but it will be harder for sure and I think that’s a good thing. It could be more like the fine arts. Not many get into making fine art for the big dollars. Though that doesn’t mean that you can’t end up with Jeff Koons money either.
I see downloading major label stuff as sticking it to the man.
Actually, there was an awesome article a few weekends ago in the Sunday paper about Rick Rubin (founder of DefJam) becoming co-head of Columbia Records and how he’s become like the great hope or whatever of the recording industry. It was a really nuts article and I highly recommend it for afternoon interesting reading, and the op-ed articles are free at nytimes.com too, so no worries if you don’t have a subscription.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1190223399-dlQrmI0L/f0Le+N3hvAsJQ
Clearly, I have no general problem with downloading, as I assume that the majority of visitors to Little Hits are right-clicking and selecting “Save link as.” My personal feeling — and this applies to things I download from eMusic as well — is that downloads and discs burned from downloads are, as objects, akin to those hissy cassettes of my friends’ albums that I made in junior high and high school: they’re markers, something that will do until I purchase the physical object.
As for the morality of it: meh. There are more morally correct things to do and less morally correct things to do, and in the continuum between, say, volunteering at a food bank and starting a pre-emptive war under false pretenses, downloading the occasional track is far closer to the former than the latter. That said, everyone has limits: there’s a site I stopped visiting because its owner was quite blithely putting up full album downloads, with cover art, of recent releases that are both in print and easily obtainable. Not cool.
On the other hand, what’s the morality of buying used CDs? I mean, the band isn’t making any money off of those either, so wouldn’t those morally opposed to downloading logically also be opposed to used CD stores?
This is so wrong I don’t even know where to begin. The fact that you’ve never tried it, but yet you’re commenting on it, speaks volumes. Anyway here are my comments.
These days, most of the music I check out comes straight from downloading. That isn’t to say that I don’t buy things (I still do, a lot) when I really like them a lot or at gate/garage sales or hell, even on yourmusic.com sometimes, not to mention buying CDs and records at shows, which directly supports the artist.
However, I feel very little guilt about the fact that I download a ton of music like a fiend. It’s not so much that’s akin to the radio but rather to taping an album from a friend when I was in high school or college, except that I’m doing it digitally.
As for the sound quality, it really depends on what you’re using to play it on as well as the quality of the files themselves. I download only 192 bitrate or higher (sometimes lossless) and when I put them on a cd-r, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and a store-bought CD. Furthermore, I have pretty nifty computer speakers and great in-ear headphones for my iPod. So yes, if you use the standard earbuds (and dl iTunes’ awful 128 bitrate files with DRM bullshit on them) or play them through the standard speakers that come with most computers, digital music will sound like ass. Then again, it’s akin to playing a CD or record on a cheap boombox vs. a nice stereo with good speakers, etc.
And keep in mind, though I listen to more and more music on my computer at home or on my iPod at work these days, we still have a stereo in the living room, a radio in the kitchen and a 6-disc changer in the car, so I haven’t gone all digital by any means.
Thus, despite your suspicions and reservations, I advise that you start! You’ll be a believer and believe me, the buzz is there once you find something online that’s long out-of-print that you would have NEVER been able to find otherwise. That’s the biggest thrill, in addition to dl’ing an advance of an album weeks or months before its official release date.
However, if you really like it, buy it (preferably from them directly) or just send them a check for $15 or so.
I dunno berlyant. When I find some review site just stole all their stuff, then I really have no idea what the bitrate is and I don’t know that this guy is giving the band a fair shot. I didn’t say mp3 isn’t high fidelity, it definitely is. I like the variable bitrate ones just fine, and I can only tell the difference if it’s quiet, I’m listening on my stereo and I get an urge to listen and see if the cymbals sound swishy. If I’m just listening, I don’t really notice. Lower bitrates can wreck the whole experience, though (and I listen to satellite radio – you wanna hear compressed? It’s only good in the car).
I never cared if I couldn’t get something before it was supposed to be out. It’s like going to a movie on the first day and standing in line. Go a few days later and by the next weekend, we’ll all have seen it anyway. Maybe I’m just old and don’t want to pay for little files. I like cd’s and records (cd’s more – they’re more drunken user friendly by a mile) because half the fun is decidng what I’m going to take with me to listen to.
Virtually nothing is unattainable even if it’s OOP. They just cost more. Finding an mp3 rip of some ancient album isn’t that exciting to me. It feels like someone taped it for me, which is nice, so I can hear it, but then I’ll probably never buy it even if I find it, and I’ll miss out on that great OOP smell (hopefully not too cigarettey). But ever since the Internets, I’ve had good luck finding whatever I’m thinking I want, it’s just whether or not I want to pay for it.
But I’ll keep buying from the store. They keep a nice storefront, help make a crappy neighborhood much better, and they support the local guys. I don’t care if I can get a cd for 9.98 at Best Buy and it’s 10.99 at Music Saves (or even a little more). They give me every tenth one free so I always try to put like a fifteen or eighteen dollar special edition at ten in the pile, I don’t have to pay first when I order, and if it takes months for them to find something, they don’t expect me to come in and pay for it right away, nor do they get pissed if I find it elsewhere first. Like I said, I need some kind of filter. There’s only so many hours in a day and I can’t just listen to music constantly.
I doubt I’ll ever download whole albums fo’ free. Hell, Suburban Home records will give you fifty cd’s for fifty bucks if you let them pick them. Five for 25 if you pick your own. Isn’t that more than reasonable?
I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but the story that got me thinking we might dig in on this subject can be found here:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/09/19/face_music_3/
A tax on internet fees that would be distributed through royalties always seemed like the best fix to me, but I’m a tax-and-spend liberal.
I’ve argued for the same thing. Let’s be realistic here, people. You can’t beat free and I believe the time will come (if it isn’t already here, at least in part) where the concept of people paying for a CD will be as antiquated as someone collecting ’78s is now.
Thus, the only way to ensure that artists collect royalties is via the method dbuskirk suggests above. The only kind of subscription service that will work, other than that, is a flat-fee, all-you-can-download method like emusic used to be. With that said, a method like that would just serve to mainly benefit the suits that benefited from the old system, at least if how royalties are calculated today is used as the model here.
Plus, I wanted to make another point here. Townsman saturnismine made the following comment earlier in the thread:
This is misleading and false. There’s no way to prove that the 10K or so people who downloaded Hope for Men (which I’m one of, BTW) would’ve bought it instead. Time and time again, it’s been shown that pre-release leaks (at least high-profile ones) like Wilco, The Shins, The Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and others haven’t had an adverse affect on sales. I mean, many of the people downloading have a limited budget for music (and other things), so thus you’re just arguing for limiting access for these people to hear more music and that’s just wrong.
I’ve always argued the opposite. The more people who hear your music, the more likely it is that they’ll wanna hear more or go see you live, for example.
Nevertheless, I will concede that many who download won’t buy it (and why should they when many have gone all digital anyway). That’s where the royalty/subscription/tax idea comes in. It should be like cell phone or internet service, a flat fee for unlimited service.
Who, among the non-music fan/non-downloading sector of Internet users would want to pay a tax to support those of us who download illegally? I really sense people are skirting the issues: 1) Is downloading illegally a form of theft? 2) Does it bother you if the answer to that question is “Yes”?
Honestly, do you feel that the fee you pay to surf the Internet already entitles you to a few well-chosen downloads? This gets back to my “sightseeing” analogy. I think I do feel this is the case – to some extent. Where that extent ends I’m not sure. I also think that artists would rather be heard than not heard at all, so there’s some merit to what Berlyant is saying, no?
OK Mr. Mod, just to avoid the charge that I’m avoid the main questions here, I’ll answer a few that you posed in your previous post.
No. Like you, I feel that since it’s a digital (and most of the time, compressed) representation of a physical product that’s essentially 0’s and 1’s, I find it very hard to equate it with stealing a CD or any other physical item for that matter. The flipside of that is that I feel it’s very hard to justify paying for it as well, at least the way it’s set up in the present system, especially when the competition is free and in that case, free always wins.
Even if the answer was “yes”, which I don’t believe it to be, I would still say “meh”. I have to echo what thegreat48 said. In the grand scheme of things, there are much bigger and more important things to worry about.
Perhaps there could be a system set up through an ISP where you pay an extra fee to have access to unlimited downloads? In other words, everyone won’t have to pay. Then again, I have to admit that, for me at least, part of the thrill (and the buzz I mentioned yesterday) of going to my favorite sites to dl music is the fact that there’s a slightly illicit quality to it, much like kids who drink, smoke and do drugs aren’t supposed to. If it was legalized, that aspect (though it’s minor and not why it’s appealing) would be taken away.
You’re a good man, Berlyant!
berlyant, that’s a load of crap. If you truly believe this isn’t illegal, then where’s the rush from doing “something illict?” You know it’s wrong. You don’t care that it is because it’s hitting apleasure center in your brain that you like hitting, so don’t be disingenuous about it. I’m not saying what you’re doing is good or bad, because I’m full of crap enough to know that I shouldn’t be listening to some of those mp3’s, but I don’t download them (because I like albums).
Why should anyone have to pay for other people’s musical enjoyment? Like that tax on blank music cd’s or cassettes? Where a musician recording his own music gets to give money to a major label that won’t sign him? I don’t know, maybe the stealing music is going to change things for the better, but I don’t know. Most of the bands I like hardly sell anything and make their money touring and selling t shirts and then ending the tour and going back to work at a job like mine. It seems kinda crappy to knowingly rip them off.
2000 Man, thanks for being a stand-up guy about this. Judging by the lack of response on this topic, I wonder if few Townspeople even download music from the Internet.
I went through a Napster period, but I no longer download free stuff from the internet to any extent. There was a time when I haunted a few blogs, and they turned me onto a bunch of stuff that I ended up buying. But I got out of the habit. Nowadays I might get out of print stuff (Neil Young’s Time Fades Away is a good example), but I have too much music to listen to already.
Anyone who has done research into how the major labels conduct business knows that very little, and sometimes none, of the purchase price of a CD bought through a major retailer, brick or click, makes it to the artist. I think this is one way many people justify pirating music.
I think taxing all internet users because a minority of them download pirated music would never fly. It’s unfair to those who don’t download, and anyway you know that when this money was split up it would go mostly to the Celine Dions of the world (and their enablers), not the Comsat Angels.
What I’ve always wanted is the ‘celestial jukebox’ model, a subscription service that lets you listen to all, or at least most, recorded music. In the library business, we call this the ‘just in time’ model as opposed to ‘just in case.’
First off, I’m sorry for not responding to this sooner. Work’s been busy here and I was away for part of the weekend. Now onto my response.
No what’s “a load of crap” is your absolutist assertion that what I’m doing is illegal. As of today, there has been no legal ruling that prohibits torrent sites from doing what they do, though of course the same cannot be said for other, more traditional p2p (peer-to-peer sites). And of course the reason those laws are implemented and enforced in the first place is for the benefit of the labels, not the artists, due to the heavy and insistent lobbying of the RIAA.
Plus, it’s awfully presumptuous of you to assume that I don’t care about what I do. I always try to support artists by buying directly from them either at shows or through their sites. Many times, this has happened because I have the ability to download and therefore sample their albums beforehand.
Plus, I like albums, too. Again, sincce you’ve never done it, is your assumption that people only download individual tracks? This isn’t true. Even in this day and age, I still listen mostly to albums from start to finish, though admittedly sometimes I’ll listen to my iTunes or iPod on shuffle.
Again, I’ve repeatedly advocating supporting artists in this position whether it’s by seeing them live, buying a CD or record or t-shirt or whatever. The truth, however, is that I have a limited budget and thus I won’t buy everything that I download. Plus, you’re not ripping them off if more people are exposed to their music and thus more likely to see them live, etc.
As for your issues with an internet tax, I second your reservations and acknowlege that like what Big Steve said, any legal ruling would benefit the haves more than the have-nots. I just think that independent artists should be compensated for their music, but I’m admittedly unsure how it will play out or what the solution is.
Maybe it’s an incorrect assumption that musicians should be able to make a living from their music. Maybe it would be better for music and musicians if the paradigm shifted and people made music part-time. The means of production and distribution are now in the hands of the artists. What’s lacking is a new income distribution model. So much of the energy of the old income distribution model is geared towards a very small number of artists making it big and the corporate infrastructure cutting its losses. Maybe we’d be better off without all the careerism.
You got this right, BigSteve. I still wonder if some one-time price for the rights to the masters of a song would be possible. Artist A puts a new song up for the highest bidder – the bid may be no less than $50 or more than $100,000. Artist A collects the $50 and moves onto a new recording. Individuals or groups could bid on the rights to this master. Then they could decide to resell it or post it on their blog for all the world to download. What’s to lose? Maybe 10 less musicians get wealthy from making music?