With the recent RIAA crackdown on University students, the morality of file sharing has been a hot topic. On the surface it seems pretty simple: It’s wrong – don’t do it. Unfortunately, the issue isn’t so black and white for those of us who grew up in the digital age.
Downloading music illegally is stealing. Every mp3 is a composition someone poured a piece of themselves into, and when you take it for free, you’re pirating their livelihood. But still, I do it occasionally, and I suspect a lot of the rest of you do, too.
It’s not our fault really, either – it’s the culture we grew up in. I remember when Napster first started to blow up, and I don’t recall ever questioning whether it was right or wrong; at 13, I had other issues on my mind. And with dial-up, we were talking a couple hours for a song, and downloading whole albums was essentially out of the question. Now with cable Internet and bit torrent, you can have an artist’s entire catalogue in the time it takes to make a sandwich.
Is that any worse than your friend burning you a box set? I don’t really see how it is, and no one seems to object to receiving a burned CD. I suspect that has something to with the baby-boomer generation growing up making each other dubs of tapes, partnered with the guilt-easing knowledge that your friend paid for it (or someone down the line did).
With downloading the blood is on your hands (or rather, your IP address) and I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for people who get caught and prosecuted. Everyone knows it’s illegal, but the risk of actually getting caught is so low that it’s not much of a deterrent. But that doesn’t mean what the RIAA is doing is any less shitty or stupid.
The recording industry needs to get with the times. Downloading has gashed their bottom lines, but it’s not going to stop, and it’s going to have to be them that adapts. CD pricing is finally starting to fall, but until the major labels embrace the Internet the way the indies have then sales are going to continue to tank. Further alienating your consumers by suing them isn’t a great way to garner goodwill and loyalty either.
Digital is the future, and while people tend to want to own a physical product after shelling over their hard-earned money, the convenience of iTunes is impossible to ignore. And with iPods being more ubiquitous than Discmans or Walkmans ever were, the mp3 has become the format of choice for seemingly everyone under 40. The analogy between the music industry and the film industry (Kodak, not MGM) is a great one – 35mm cameras have become a niche industry and film sales plummeted as digital camera sales soared. But now these companies have found other ways to make photography profitable, and best of all, people take more pictures. If downloading music means people hear more music, surely that’s a good thing.
More exposure is always better, and with Clear Channel killing radio with its bland drivel, the easiest way to discover new music is downloading it. I know that I’m not your typical music consumer (in that I buy a couple CDs a week and countless more records), but I don’t feel so bad about downloading leaks of the new Battles, Wilco and Feist albums before they come out when I know I’m going to buy a copy of each the day they’re released. Countless times I’ve downloaded something on someone else’s recommendation, discovered a band I never knew I loved and went out and bought their albums. So while that might not be typical behavior, I know I’m not the only one who does that.
And if you just can’t bring yourself to spend money on a CD, there are other ways to support a musician, like concerts and merchandise, that are actually a bit more profitable for the artists themselves. That shouldn’t totally absolve downloaders of guilt, but it should lessen the shame a bit.
– Write cargo at lcargo@umich.edu.