I'm a 31 year old American expat living in Oslo, Norway, with my bulldog, Ada, and my husband, Johannes. My interests include interaction design, especially information architecture, philosophy of mind and ethics, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, feminism, yoga, fat acceptance, knitting, pottery, and cooking.Modern Music (Alchera Project 34, Option 5)
…Which brings me to this month’s Alchera Project. This month we’ve been given the option to write about how the music industry is changing with the advent of easily replicable music formats. I’ve got a collection of around 9000 mp3s, about 43 gigs worth of music, and like I said, I’m very proud of it. It’s comprised of files that I originally got from Jason when he set up my computer for me in 1997, rips of my CDs, and both legal and illegal downloads. Most of the legal downloads came from Emusic, to which I’ve recently re-subscribed.
I can’t say I’m proud of the fact that I illegally download music, but that doesn’t stop me. Why do I download some songs and buy other songs on CD? At this moment I’m listening to an illegally downloaded song, “Ready, Steady, Go” by Paul Oakenfold. It’s pretty typical of songs I download–individual songs that I’ve heard someplace and really liked. In this case, it was playing in the club scene of “Collateral”, which Johannes and I watched on DVD the other day. I’ve downloaded a lot of those songs playing in club scenes in movies (Blade, The Matrix, etc.). When I’m not familiar with artists, or only like some of what the artist produces, I’ll generally just download.
The last few times I’ve bought music on CD, I’ve had a difficult time burning it into mp3 format, which is intolerable for me given that I only listen to mp3s, either on my computer or mp3 player. We haven’t even got a stereo system. I was never able to rip the latest Duran Duran CD and ended up having to download the mp3s, which made me wonder why I’d bothered to even buy the CD in the first place. I’ve got so many CDs now that I’ve never listened to directly–I’ve only popped them into my computer’s DVD drive to burn them. Thereafter they moulder on the shelves of my CD organizer.
I just bought the new Anneli Drecker CD after having been unsuccessful at downloading it (illegally). It was actually available for download at the same place I bought the physical CD, but the download cost 99 kroner (about 15 USD) and was in WMA format, while the CD cost 178 kroner including shipping(about 27 bucks, and yes, that is a typical price for a new CD here in Norway). Given the relatively small price difference and the fact that the miles were encoded in WMA and probably had some lame-ass copyright protection, I just opted to purchase the CD. If it hadn’t been a Norwegian artist, I would likely have worked harder to download the songs illegally. Norwegian artists are almost all I bother do purchase anymore; I download the rest.
So what do I think about all this? I think that if legal music downloads were available at a reasonable price, I’d generally buy them. More music has to be available, though–not just mainstream music or music from large labels. The prices have to be reasonable, too: a buck is on the high end of reasonable, while the 10 kroner I’d have paid per song for the new Anneli Drecker album (about a buck fifty) is not. I think that if there were some way of donating to artists directly, I’d probably do that if I was happy with work of theirs that I’d downloaded illegally. In any case, I’d rather donate directly to the artist rather than having most of my cash be siphoned off by middlemen. Copy protection on digital music files and CDs pisses me off, to the extent that I’ll download illegally rather than jump through those hoops. I do not take well to people telling me how I can and cannot use my property.
So I still shell out some cash, and I still fire up Soulseek from time to time. But I don’t feel entirely comfortable doing either.