What's the dope on sharing music? I'll start.
I'm Al. (Hi, Al.) I share music. (Boo.) Actually, I've only recently begun using one of the more popular file sharing programs, which started as an interest in seeing just what the hell it's all about. (It's about selfishness and piracy, dummy.) So far it's been enjoyable in moderation. I'm getting to hear some stuff I'd otherwise never have heard, and as such I've been prompted to go out and buy some records from musicians whose orbit I'd not known about prior. And no, I'm not disclosing which program I use or what handle I use just so the evil RIAA can add me to their list of the fallen. (Pussy.)
It's a touchy subject anyway. You can actually feel a greater strain of ethic at work when the subject is broached, like some hazy "wrong" floating around the ether, much like that mirror thing that snapped up Zod and his cronies at the beginning of the first Superman movie. I don't want to end up like them (even though that nuclear bomb released them, giving them unearthly supermanlike powers at the beginning of the second one), so I try to go about it in moderation, hoping my conscience won't notice. But something tells me that the practice is more widely accepted than I really understand. Does it depend on what you are sharing/downloading? Is there a statute of limitations on out-of-print material? I know how the corporate machine feels about it, but I'd like to better understand how the smaller businesses feel. I've heard from some that it's not minded, as it is a way for musicians to get heard. But then you'd think that musicians and label owners would like some essence of control in how the music is heard. I'll stop there before this becomes circular logic.
Posted by al on January 31, 2004 10:04 AMaround the time napster came out i also got a cable modem for the house computer- so i went nuts downloading anything and everything. coil, arcane device and nurse with wound obscurities. every yellow magic orchestra and haruomi hosono title. tons and tons of hip hop and jungle. after a while i noticed i was never listening to the gigs of stuff i downloaded- i just archived it away on cdr.
in the last few years i've used downloading as a way to sample music before i buy it- i think i still feel that the mp3's aren't "real"- if i like what i hear i feel the need to buy the release. i also have never felt comfortable saying i've heard something, or list it in my "currently playing" list if i've only heard mp3s.
also in the last few years i've been buying more vinyl- i just like the look and feel of it and it just feels like a more substantial purchase.
i'm not going to say filesharing is wrong but taking a new release, especially (but not only) a limited independent product and ripping it to share is something i'm never going to do- it just seems rude, for lack of a better word.
I've found that the whole business of trading files and CD-R's, which I never got too enthusiastic about anyway, required that I invest way too much effort in producing and distributing the stuff I sent out and finding places -- real as well as virtual -- to stash what came in.
Just speaking from personal experience, now... Once you start trading, you've elected to become a member of a subculture... no, that's not fair; too many negative connotations; better to say community... a community, one that is growing by the second, which requires you to observe certain rules of behavior and amass new varieties of political savvy (how the hell am I going to get my hand on a first gen copy of that _____ show? Well, it's all about who you know....) It gets wearying. And, I would say, beyond the damage iot does to some -- not all -- artists, one of the unethical aspects of it is how easily one's enjoyment of music can disappear into a hungry void of networking. It's embarrassing how little of the music I've had time to listen to.
I have a much easier time accepting the idea that working musicians have their own samizdat system regulating the distribution of and barter for otherwise copyrighted material.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 31, 2004 11:15 AM
There's definately ethical questions to filesharing, but for me, I think I feel the exact opposite about than other people do. I feel an ethical *obligation* to share music, a duty to give others a chance to share in some of what I've accumulated (this only goes as far as rare and out of print material, that has little potential to be reissued.)
Joe's right, when you get into the whole filesharing thing, you are tacitly accepting a role in a community. The right thing to do, then, is to take a proactive view, and to put stuff up that other people might not have, and to add to the scattered archive that's out there. A lot of the music that I'm interested in happened while I was still a toddler, and since much of it remains fairly obscure, I don't really have that good a shot at finding old DDAA or SBOTHI lps for non-collector prices, without means like this. It gives young 'uns like me a chance to trace out geneaologies, and to really see where some of what's happening now comes from. Filesharing programs are like card-catalogs to a great big, fragmented library.
So, st least, as long as there's no UbuWeb for the 80's post-industrial underground, filesharing will have to do.
Posted by: Nirav Soni at January 31, 2004 2:48 PM(UbuWeb was supposed to be link to http://www.ubu.com)
Posted by: Nirav at January 31, 2004 2:50 PMyeah, i used to feel a bit bad about it, but you know what? since i've released my first stuff i've noticed that i even hope it will eventually show up on slsk (what's that? - hehehe) in fact, if it doesn't in a couple of months i'll probably feed it into the system myself. it's not an ethical question, it's a promotional one. i'm pretty sure that in the field of experimental music, which is extremely low-selling (not only compared to pop - i mean what are 500 copies anyway?) the effect of filesharing on sales is ultimatively a positive one.
an example: 2-3 years ago, i didn't have an idea who oren ambarchi was. then his name started to show up on slsk - people who had music i knew i liked had ambarchi stuff, too... it was all over the place. i started wondering and downloaded a couple of things. it's not that i buyed exactly those records afterwards, but i did buy ambarchi stuff, and i "discovered" him trough filesharing. now oren has become pretty big, but i could tell you dozens of examples of people who i probably still wouldn't listen to if it wasn't for filesharing. and in the end i think i even buy more records (summed up) than before. i just buy less bullshit and more goal-oriented.
with huge sellers that might be different, because everyone knows who timberlake is, he doesn't need that sort of promo. so there, money gets lost for the industry... but in "our" world? ...nah, i think we profit.
Posted by: tomas at January 31, 2004 3:37 PMAn interesting article on the social dynamics / systems of social distinction on peer-to-peer networks.
Free Riding on Gnutella by Eytan Adar and Bernardo A. Huberman. (www.firstmonday.org)
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at February 2, 2004 5:55 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................