geeks talk music (cont’d)…

I mean, it sure would be nice if EVERYTHING was free, you digital hippie you, but I don’t steal music on Bearshare just because I’m a nare-do-well cyberpunk anarchist… I steal music because I don’t happen to think MOST Cd’s are worth $17… especially if I only really LIKE 4 of the songs. I buy CDs from about 4 or 5 artists that I really like, but short of that, I don’t really BUY Cd’s anymore. I realized the other day when I was organizing my CD collection and ripping it all to mp3 (Illegal, by the way… according to your “license agreement” with the record company… to copy music you PAID for onto your computer… not so with AppleMusic) just how much music I USED to buy, but now I’m a little more judicious with my money. Example… Ani DiFranco… love her old stuff… her bangy-acoustic-guitar stuff… hate her newer stuff… jazzy-horny stuff. So I don’t buy her albums anymore. I listened to some samples at B&N the other day and discovered that from her new CD, I liked the sound of about 3 songs. So what did I do? I jotted down the titles and spent a couple of hours navigating failed downloads and offline hosts, but eventually got all three of them from various Gnutella-based p2p thingers. (Turns out even these three aren’t so hot.) End result. Record company is out $15… I’m out a couple of hours.

If this had happened a week later, I would have headed right for iTunes… bought the three songs I liked… the whole process would take less than 5 minutes. End result? Record label gets $3 and I save an hour or so… which is WORTH $3 to me… but not $15. It’s not about the record company NOT getting my money… it’s about getting them to stop bitching that filesharing is ruining their business and getting with the program themselves… getting them to step up to the plate and give us something BETTER. Some record company talking-head was quoted as saying something like, “The record companies can’t stay in business trying to sell people something that they can go get for free.” I saw a quote in response by someone saying, “I’d like to introduce the record companies to a little something called BOTTLED WATER.” What are you paying for when you buy a bottle of Evian for $1.29? Quality… convenience… portability… coldness… and it’s priced RIGHT. That’s all I’m asking for.

And I don’t think the record companies HAVE done a market analysis to see if they’d come out ahead. Rather, I think that they are throwing us a bone and they chose Apple because they are a little niche market and don’t think Apple has the market share to effect them one way or another, but they can still point to this and say, “See, look what we’re doing… look how forward-thinking we are” while at the same time sticking to their old model. But I think this thing is going to explode beyond their expectations. I think it’s going to change the way music is distributed and marketed, and I think if it all goes right, a system like this will begin to REWARD artists who can actually WRITE ten good songs a year, and the record execs will stop trying to cram one-hit-wonders on us, cuz when they do, people will just buy the one hit. This could be the death of the “American Idol” phenomenon.

Or I could be wrong.

Either way, I feel like I’m benefiting in the short run. All those “retrospective” albums with rehashed material but 2 “previously unreleased” tracks? Well, now I can get those tracks for $1.98 instead of being scammed out of $16 for a bunch of music I already have on other cd’s! I can’t see that as anything but good.

Anyway… I’m done ranting about this. I’m gonna go read about the cosmology of Plato for a while.

D.