Filesharing

I've been reading a lot lately about music downloads and RIAA lawsuits against filesharers. Recently, there was an article on Alternet that seemed to have a fairly balanced view of things. Honestly, I get a little pissed when I hear the music industry say, "We've lost such-and-such revenue [usually several hundred million dollars] because of illegal downloads." That's pure speculation. How do you know what money you might have made had people not been downloading MP3s illegally? That's like a bitter White person saying, "If I'd been Black, I would have gotten into Harvard." You just don't know. There are too many outside factors to take into account (most of which the Alternet article mentions): the general economy, the rise in CD prices, the quality of and publicity for new music, etc.). The article poses the question of whether people are downloading music to "sample" what bands they might be interested in or to get free music instead of paying for it. I'd say it's a little of both, and I'm going to use myself as the profile of a typical music downloader.

I've been a music fan for a long time. In high school and college, I was well-known to friends and acquaintances as someone who both had an eclectic taste in music and was willing to make a mix for almost anyone at the spur of the moment. For example, I would meet someone (usually the friend of a friend). Somewhere in the course of conversation, music would come up, and she'd say she likes a certain band or a certain kind of music but that she didn't have enough of it. The next day, she'd have a bonafide, carefully-crafted A.Y. Siu mix. Averaging a distribution of about four to five mixes per friend/acquaintance, I got about one or two back from each person as a token of reciprocity. The mix tapes I received fueled my collection further. Usually, I'd hear one or two songs from an artist a friend had put on a mix, and I'd go out and buy the album. This happened for Bjork, Dance Hall Crashers, Portishead, Poe, and a number of other artists, especially many artists who do not get a lot of radio play time--the point being that it is through "illegal" sharing of music that record companies get loyal customers and fans. Where that started to get out of hand is with people getting (through Napster) shared music from people they didn't even know. In the past, with mix tapes, if your friend didn't have a song, and the friend of your friend didn't have a song, you didn't have the song. With the advent of Napster, people went crazy, downloading music from people in other parts of the country or even the world.

I have to confess, after an initial hesitation, that I soon began downloading from Napster. It was addictive and easy. Any song you could think of (whether someone mentioned it in passing during a conversation or your favorite radio just played it during your ride home) you could download in a matter of minutes and own forever. Honestly, though, like a food binge, downloading from Napster (then Audio Galaxy, then Kazaa) left me ultimately unsatisfied. Delay-of-gratification can be a good thing. Not being able to get a song for months can whet your appetite. You long for the song. You save up for the CD. When you finally get it, you appreciate it.

I had a hard time, though, buying CDs. Oftentimes, I liked the CDs for only one or two songs. Am I really going to pay $18.99 for two songs? Occasionally, I would buy a CD, but there just didn't seem to be that much good music at the turn of the millennium. The early- to mid-nineties had some great artists emerge (Toad the Wet Sprocket, Aimee Mann, Julianna Hatfield, Veruca Salt, The Beautiful South, Beck, among others), but I wasn't too thrilled about the late 1990s and early 2000s. The only CD my future wife and I bought was The Backstreet Boys' Millennium because we liked the whole album and there was something about owning an album, not just a bunch of songs.

There were also some logistical problems with downloading MP3s illegally. First of all, sometimes there were no original versions of the songs I was looking for--only remixes. Every user would have the remix because each user had downloaded it from the other users who had the remix; it was a vicious circle. Secondly, the sound quality wasn't always the best. Sometimes downloads would start, stop, and start again, leaving skips and weird noises in the music files. Last of all, connection speeds were not uniform. We had DSL or a cable modem (I forget which now), but a lot of other users had 56K modems. Certain files would take over an hour to download sometimes.

There was a larger problem, though, linked to instant (as opposed to delay of) gratification: junk. When I had the opportunity to download any song I even considered liking, I ended up downloading a lot of junk I didn't really want. All the music began cluttering up our hard drive, until we began burning data CDs. Then, the CD back-ups began cluttering the computer desk. I missed "the old days," when CDs were only $9.99-$12.99. I remember, during my middle and high school years, a $15.99 CD was considered exorbitantly expensive. If a CD had only ten or eleven songs, it didn't seem warranted to me to be priced close to $20.

Then, the lawsuits happened. Napster shut down. Audio Galaxy started filtering out copyrighted material (almost 100% of their content). It was getting harder and harder to get illegal music. So, did I, as the RIAA assumes would logically happen, say to myself, "Damn it. I can't get illegal music any more. I guess I'll have to go out and buy real CDs after all"? No, of course not. There was nothing I wanted to buy, and the prices were still too high. I simply listened to my old music and got tired of it. The radio stations were playing lame (and not terribly varied) playlists. Every time I turned on the radio it was either "Then I saw her face" (Smashmouth Monkees cover), "I can't stand to fly," or "This is the story of a girl." Very few radio hits interested me or give me the excitement that, say, The Story did when I first heard their song "Mermaid."

Now, my wife and I each have iPods (20GB and 15GB, respectively), and we buy songs occasionally from iTunes for $.99/song. It's not a bad deal, but the selection is also very poor. It did not have any of the songs I wanted, all of which I had to order through Amazon or download illegally (the French song "Ca Plane Pour Moi," Run D.M.C.'s "What's Next?" and the Space/Catatonia duet "The Ballad of Tom Jones"). Given the option of a comprehensive selection of songs at a reasonable price with high-quality recordings, I would definitely buy music over downloading it illegally.

Obviously, the RIAA and others have their own theories, statistics, and studies, but I'm a real-life, anecdotal example of a typical music-listener, and I don't think I fit their profile. --A.Y. Siu