On Dit

The Ethos of Immediate Gratification

(OPINION)

Being a generation extended more privilege than any before, is it unreasonable for us to expect music to be easily attainable?

Being at uni has left (many of) us poor, politically left-of-centre, and desperate to appear hip. We support musicians and their work, but come on – paying for it? Besides, any chance to give a ‘fuck you’ gesture to those corporates who care more about their money than their artists is one worth taking, right?

Musicians are too often victims of their own art form. Albums are divisible – movies and paintings are not. Sure, there’s a sizable market for illegal downloading and distribution of films (particularly pre-empting or coinciding with cinematic release), but few download individual scenes. There’d be a palpable sense of missing out – you’d wonder what happened before and after.

Not so with music: the primary traffic is still for individual songs. Yet the realisation most file-sharers do not come to, or choose to ignore, is that each download goes some way to ensuring music becomes an unsustainable profession. Piracy is not theft, as digital copies of films and music are easily reproducible, but it is deprivation of income. The majority of recording artists are struggling independent ones who, if they’re lucky enough to release something at all, lose money on it and only earn it back through touring and merchandise sales. The time and energy it takes to write a few songs and tour an album renders it a full-time job like any other. The only difference being musicians suffer because their line of work is more interesting than ours.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) haven’t won any friends with the relentless aggression of their pursuit of file-sharers. It’s a ham-fisted, misguided quest that has resulted in exorbitant lawsuits being raised against the dead, those without computers, 12 year-olds, and the Russians for US$1.65 trillion. Cases like these make it easy to forget that, in their own peculiar way, the corporates are just representing their clients – musicians.

What is more ignoble, and far less defensible, of the music industry is its failure to meet the changing demands of music consumers. Just as vinyl was superseded by tape, which was replaced by the CD, so it appears we are in the throes of another revolution. Digital storage of music has its ups (a big collection won’t take up a whole room) and its downs (it isn’t really much of a collection, is it?), but ever since Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy became the first #1 based solely on downloads, the line has been drawn in the sand. Either through refusal to move into what we call the 21^st century, or an apparent ignorance of what we actually want, record companies (in tandem with music stores) have continued to ludicrously overcharge for digital music and are only now having their heads turned by the prospect of wide-scale digital release (a hallmark of the convoluted market structure they operate in, but that’s economics). Musicians have been moving with us, many offering full albums for online streaming or legal download. Radiohead experimented with a pay-what-you-want release for their most recent studio album, but it’s the novelty of such measures that currently attracts media attention. Most major record companies are extremely reluctant to relinquish creative control.

There’s recognition that a lot of the downloading and distributing that takes place is well intentioned. People download an album, enjoy it, and pass it on (in digital form). That way the one download will be copied several times. The same can be, and is, done with physical copies of music – all you have to do is burn a CD. But that initial purchase would have found its way back into the pockets of those who wrote it, recorded it, and played it. Too much of that would’ve ended up in the hands of the pen-pushers, sure, but at least some would’ve gone where it ought to. The compulsion to download is a cultural and generational one. We’re savvy enough to exploit a situation where we can get our music and films for free. But we’re not sticking it to the man so much as we’re sticking it to the men and women who are responsible for the music (and films) we love. How would we feel if told that we’d done a great job with our latest project at work… so great, in fact, that we wouldn’t get paid for it?