Indieoma

“People don’t fucking listen to this shit, they just wanna… have it. Weird isn’t it.”

Here’s what I think angrily about when I think angrily about music copyright.

1.
Downloading is a red herring. As an interim technology, it’s no more of a long-term technological asset – or threat – than CD ROM. For me, the future of the consumption of music will surely be the ability to listen to any piece of music ever recorded, wherever and whenever we like, including an urgently flowing river of new recordings, without any conscious need to know how we’re ‘receiving’ that music. We’ll just pick and choose from the immense user-friendly list of everything and go about our day with the headphones on.

In actuality, as it streams from a cloud-sourced collaborative database, I do think we’ll be paying in some way to access that music and some of the revenue collected may even filter back to the artist if they’re very fucking lucky. Maybe it’s through a government cultural access taxation initiative. Or, much more likely, the continuation of private industry feeding us adverts every few songs or charging a subscription. But none of that matters: the point is it will become less conscious ‘how’ we’ll get the music, we just will.

Yes, accepted, culture has been drastically shifted by the switch from physical product to digital information. But that move isn’t anywhere near done yet so we’re worrying too much about the mid-period.

Yes, accepted, part of the cultural shift has removed the incentive for – and assumption of – payment. Oh shit. But I think that is largely as temporary as downloading itself, since once we are all re-converted to streaming and effectively ‘renting’ our music from the grand library of everything (especially on mobile devices instead of big old computers) we will tacitly re-accept the concept of payment. I barely paid for anything on my Mac but I happily paid 60p to play Ronnie O’Sullivan World Championship Snooker on my iPhone.

2.
The need to own is a learned need. More than that, it is learned from the top down as part of the multi-layered bundle of societal shepherding tools employed by our corporate controllers. I think the instinct to own is the devil, in essence (and I really mean this) evil, whereas the instinct to… well, in this case listen to music, create and participate, gawp, humbled on one’s knees, at beauty hung on a wall in front of you, these are all pure, in the first instance at least.

Counter-intuitively, despite the vinyl collections and groaning hard-drives of iTunes playlists, despite the shelves of DVDs and the secret cellars of stolen paintings, really our most honest human instinct is just to consume the arts without possessing them. Just as our most honest human instinct would be to travel lightly across the world and only put down temporary roots by necessity.

Very, very occasionally, perhaps, when it really blew our mind, we might like a souvenir mug. But whenever even the most ardent materialist hoarder freak does a proper clear-out he or she feels immensely relieved, sofas taken away in vans, bags of clothes waddled to Age Concern or simply files and files and files deleted. Capitalism will truly die (and soon) when we remember that a life travelled without being weighed down by stuff isn’t so bad and when you just have a very few, relatively precious possessions, the journey is a fuckload more fun. But I digress.

3.
The pro-copyright (anti-downloading) crowd are regressive morons. They cannot (and should not) police the current downloading environment; they’re not clever enough and anyway this wholesale global theft is a just punishment. For these most venal industries already set up a whole history of methodologies to rip off, brutalise and render addicted their creatives, to bum them silly, before responding to organic, bottom-up cultural shifts with unfathomable stupidity and greed. These are dazzling, gorgeous missed opportunities to turn each of their trades into something unimaginably wonderful.

Pro-copyright artists, me included, need to accept that our desire to maintain a sense of propriety over our work simply isn’t important enough to warrant taking away the freedoms of those who’ve ignored it. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. The crime is tapping on keys in front of a screen in a bedroom. Deep seated instinct has told people for generations that this kind of thing couldn’t possibly be a Wrong, before the technology ever made it a possibility.

And again, I don’t think we even really want to own it. If we could reconcile the sharing of music for free with still earning enough to live, we’d just want the credit and a round of applause. As I type Peter Mandelson’s buddies are looking at ways to charge people a fee to appeal their banning from the Internet that may have taken place under the ludicrous ‘three strikes’ rule. Another sick fuck neo-liberal ironfistism that will save nothing and threaten everything.

A lot of us were given opportunities to roll with this reality way in the 1990s and we came up wanting.

Empathy!

But

4.
The anti-copyright (pro-downloading) crowd are geek-fetish morons who need to accept that they have broken the law and fucked us over. Only then can they excitedly go back into salesman mode for the shiny future. They demonstrate massive disinterest in – even contempt for – the section of the creative community that has attempted to make our creativity the core of a real career. Almost always, whether they like it or not, we are the people who’ve given the most of ourselves to creative practice.

The superstars are fine. The totally unknown amateurs are fine. It’s those of us who exist stuck in the lower-middle, where we scrape by, pulling in small incomes from other small sources in a world where small income is by its very nature anathema to the profiteers. Maybe we were wrong all along but we’re the fucking good guys, we’re the ones who didn’t compromise art for business and you stole our tunes to stick on your compilations.

You weren’t promoting us, you were promoting yourself and you didn’t give a fuck about our prospects when you ripped and burned. You only thought of the ‘promotion’ defence when you found yourself on the back foot.

Those established (i.e. non apprentice stage) music makers who preach the free distribution of music tend to be:

A) the ones who’ve swallowed the corporate meta call to diversify and sell items of branded merchandise to augment the diminishing or non-existent profit from their actual music making,

B) use snippets of many other peoples’ music themselves without permission anyway as a core part of their own creativity

and

C) are amateurs or hobbyists with alternative careers providing a chunk of their income.

Empathy!

5.
So; all the entrenched positions are spurious, mired in false premises and an inability to understand not only the opposing view but also the temporary grey nature of the debate itself. Even thinking about the music copyright issue is uncomfortable, a plague on both their houses, both sides are thoroughly embarrassing, distracted from their own practices and from any sense of energetically moving forward. Neither side has any right to shout what they have been shouting.

6.
At least, happily, audio compression and the propensity towards low sonic expectation that grew up with the portable MP3 player are also temporary. Fundamentally, they only even exist because of limitations on information storage. Thank fuck for that. It’s such a revelatory shock after a period of listening to music on MP3 to return to full uncompressed music, we can’t lose that perfectionism. I’m well on my way back to vinyl heaven.

What I think angrily about when I think angrily about music copyright is hot air.

Links to the other Digital Economy Bill and Piracy And Pieces Of Eight posts:

Digital Economy Bill Feature Intro

Simon Indelicate – Digital Economy Bill

The Indelicates – Corporate Records Business Model

Stop Disconnection Demo – 24th March 2010

Dan Bull – An Interview – How does a pro-filesharing musician plan to make some cash?

Piracy Feature Intro

Julia Indelicate – Bands And Branding

Chris T-T – The Ballad Of Simon Indelicate’s Christmas Fudge

Simon Indelicate – Fudge Really Has Nothing To Do With It

Matt Stockman – Introducing Sharabang Records – a record label which gives songs aways for free

Ric Rawlins – Pirate Radio And The Internet

Ric Rawlins – Film Review – The Boat That Rocked