John Harris writes in today’s Guardian about the prospect of witnessing ‘something once precious [music] rendered not just cheap, but pretty much worthless’, thanks to file sharing undermining the music industry; and that, deprived of a healthy income from record sales, music will in the future be ‘offered up as a vehicle for advertising’, with product placement inserted into lyrics, and tracks recorded exclusively for marketing campaigns.
What is it, though, that is being threatened by Soulseek, Bittorrent and the like? Music itself? John Harris suggests that ‘illicit downloading has created a generation who expect music for nothing’. According to Wikipedia, music is ‘an art form whose medium is sound organised in time’. Note that the medium is not CDs, or DRM-protected digital downloads. What is being endangered is recorded music, or more accurately, recordings of music. This is a significant development in itself, and may well deprive artists, not just label fat cats, of income they used to enjoy; but let’s not pretend it is a God-given right to digitally encode music and profit from its distribution. It was simply an accident of technology and economics. Mass production, in the days of vinyl, was well out of reach of the general public. Scarcity was therefore a given; of course people want to buy records, so demand was there: thus the record industry flourished. The humble cassette tape was a warning that this scenario would not last forever; file sharing on a large scale is upending the game.
Is the game such a good thing? The record industry is not equal to music; it is a parasite that leeches (to use a file sharing term) from people’s love of music, allowing some of the vast sums of money it makes, or used to make, to trickle back to the artists. The industry itself has already changed music a lot; in the case of pop music, undoubtedly for the worse. Music as product is a horrible concept; just take a look at Billboard to see what the mass production of music has created.
Every change has its victims as well as its beneficiaries. Before we took for granted that the most natural way to listen to music was to turn on a machine and listen to a recording, people relied on local musicians within their community to provide them with live music. The record industry itself destroyed a lot of livelihoods.
I am not suggesting that file sharing will herald the return of troubadours and minstrels plucking quaint stringed instruments on every street corner. But it may well bring about a change in emphasis from record sales to live performance. It is an ill wind that blows no good; and anything that shakes pop music out of its sales-driven artistic vacuity cannot be altogether bad.
A little coda … I remember, when we were setting up Inna Riddim, in its first incarnation as a music email bulletin, someone asking us what our motivation was. The questioner suggested: “Is it just out of love for industry, or … ?” I almost choked on my beer. How anyone who loves music could feel the same for the industry that prostitutes, dilutes and distorts it, is beyond me.