Tuesday, October 5, 2010

What’s mine is yours?

What follows are some thoughts on a topic that has fired up the grey matter of a many before me. In fact, you might like to skip the next few hundred words and be content with the following statement.

“If you copy music that you have not paid for you are stealing.”

OK, simple enough. So if you are happy with that, I’m happy too.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that and since the arrival of cheap mass-produced audio technology capable of copying music in the privacy of your home, this has been a growing problem, albeit a relatively insignificant one until the ground breaking, world changing, life altering, arrival of digital audio. Combined with personal computers and the internet, mass illegal downloads have become the new reality.

Now, we aren’t talking about the music piracy of the 1980s. More often than not this amounted to making a dodgy copy of "A Kind of Blue" on cassette so that you could listen to it in the car for a couple of weeks until it got chewed or it melted. Today, the piracy we are talking about is the ability to make an absolutely perfect replica of the original in a matter of seconds, add to this the technology that makes this replica available, via the internet, to whoever wants to download it free of charge, anywhere in the world and we are talking about a change to the musical landscape of colossal proportions.

Why am I concerned about this? Well as a professional musician, believe it or not, I do attempt to make a living from my music, and this includes the sale of my music via recordings.

It seems to me that a change is taking place in the attitude of music consumers. There are now many music fans around the world who know nothing about life before the digital age. They have no direct knowledge of the technologies that were in place before the digital revolution. An ever growing percentage of the music buying public don’t know what it’s like to order an LP from the local record shop, wait for six weeks for it to arrive from a warehouse somewhere in Germany and then crowd around a turntable with a bunch of friends to hear it reveal it’s mysteries.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a good thing; I’m not arguing that vinyl is the only format for audio, and I could certainly have done without the six week wait, but one thing for sure, we appreciated the value of the music, it was not cheap. If you wanted to hear Eric Dolphy live in Berlin, you waited and you PAID for it.

Today, it is not uncommon for students to be listening to their ipods where every track in the play list has been downloaded illegally. This is not hearsay; I know it to be true. I also know that the students in question would have no difficulty in purchasing the music legally – but why bother when they can get it for free? And there you have it, the mind-set has shifted, music has become free, a valueless commodity! This philosophy is, of course, completely at odds with that of the musicians who have invested vast amounts of time, creativity and money in producing the music in the first place!

As I mentioned in my opening, many people have pondered this and related topics as the technology has evolved. Check out Tenor saxophonist and composer Ellery Eskelin’s thoughts on the subject. http://tiny.cc/8x7IV

You can also check out British pop singer Lilly Allen’s blog here http://tiny.cc/iH3rQ but even more eye opening are some of the comments below it!

For a different approach, here is a link to a rave on the subject by altoist and composer Steve Coleman. http://bit.ly/1cGfuf

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