Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own John Biggs takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
What was the first thing you bought in January 1990? If you said “Food” or “a tankful of gas,” you’re lying or weren’t born then. You bought …But Seriously by Phil Collins. On CD.That CD defined that season and everyone — including you — had it. And why? Because it was a disk and you had to have the disk to enjoy the music, right? And the disk is caught up in the music and the music is caught up in the disk. You might have been hungover, in love, or heartsick, but you bought that album, cracked it open, and put it on your Sony CD player and listened and dreamed and cried.
Try doing that with a download. Try hugging your iPod on a cold January morning, realizing that it was just another day in paradise and there were folks out there who had less than even you. Some people didn’t have CD players. Some people couldn’t afford CDs. Phil Collins spoke through that little silver disk. You opened it up and you saw Phil’s face and you knew he understood what it felt like to be cast off, abandoned, poor. Just like Phil. Albeit with considerably more money.
The CD and the DVD and, soon, Blu-Ray is more than just a flat piece of metal sandwiched betwixt plastic sheets. It’s art made flesh, the corporeal expression of the record executive’s art. You can no sooner sell a song divorced of its shiny plastic coating than you can sell a pair of shoes without a leather upper and a soft, creamy rubber sole. The medium, buds, is the message.
What we fail to understand — and what the record and movie execs do understand — is that access to media should be difficult. You should go through the same heart-wrenching creative birth pangs Phil Collins or Marilyn Manson or Pat Boone goes through every time you go to buy an album. You need to feel alienated at the store, used and misused at the register, and then elated when the finished product finally plops down on the passenger seat of your Ford Probe and you drive home for a bit of solitary listening. Wayne Newton didn’t sing so you could just click a button and download his oeuvre. He sang so a man in a plant in Budapest can stamp out CDs and send those CDs to Scranton and you can go buy that CD. The cast of Police Academy had to suffer to make that movie so it’s the least you can do not to go to a garage sale and buy a used copy on DVD. You go to Tower Records and… wait… you go to Circuit City… wait. You go to Best Buy and maybe Wal-Mart for a while and buy it, pay the tax, and own the music the way Bootsy Collins does. You pay to live the music.
I feel sorry for record labels and movie studios. People like you feel you should get everything for free, every day of the week. You don’t walk up to a theatre expecting to let in with a smile and wave. You pay. You don’t walk up to a hurdy-gurdy player expecting him to dance a jig and twirl out a tune without a tuppence thrown into his jaunty cap. You don’t expect the man who owns a black bear cub to make that black bear cub ride a bicycle without you paying a few kopeks for his trouble? Yet you expect an entire industry to bow down to your every whim — today music on computers, tomorrow on microwaves, the next day on satellites whooshing through space — if you won’t buy their bits of plastic. Is it any wonder that downloading and freeloading have the same number of syllables? You are swine.
The number one reason I’m not a huge backer of download only media, nailed me this past weekend.
I was reorganizing my iTunes library, and moves the folder that contained my iTunes purchased TV shows. Afterwards, iTunes couldn’t find the shows. No problem, right?
I direct iTunes to look in the new location of the folder, problem solved, so I think. For some reason, iTunes still cannot see the files. I go to check out the files. Everything seems to be normal, until I check the properties of the files. Every one of them is now a 0 byte file, basically nothing.
The files were fried. Of course, like an idiot, I hadn’t backed them up to DVD. So, now a couple hundred bucks in television shows are down the tubes. And, as far as I know, Apple doesn’t have a system for allowing people to re-download purchased files when they are destroyed.
It was an expensive lesson in why I should backup my files. For me, it’s the reason I won’t be buying my shows from iTunes anymore. I know I should backup my files, but I also know I won’t. So, it’s hard copies and rips, for me, from now on.
If I cannot put it on a shelf and show it off to my friends (both of them) than I do not want it. Downloads are great for music since music sucks and I want to hide the fact that I bought Snow’s Informer CD. Movies are different – how can I show how cool I am unless you see the DVD of 8 1/2 on my DVD shelf?
Humm not as good as previous stances, but still enjoyable read. Thanks John.
The one thing I do agree with in this article is that yes, it is an unreasonable stance. If you’re going to hit on digital media in general, why did you choose CDs as an example for the media we need to be saving? CDs are, after all, digital, just in a hard form instead of the raw data. That being said…
It would be one thing if your stance implied that digital recording (be it music, movies, photography, etc.) is ruining the art, then sure, I could understand. LPs do have a much warmer, more organic sound than CDs or any other digital media could hope to produce (at least for now). The second you put something down digitally, you’re essentially breaking down the organic information, and thus losing both quality and feel. This is one of the main reasons I’ve been very supportive of the push to return to analog recording, as that new Radiohead album I just got in the mail is SOOO much better in the LP format. It gives a richness to the music that just… well, it’s more than I could eloquently describe.
As for the difference between CDs and digital copies… what’s the point, exactly? It’s basically the same thing. Why don’t you just, y’know, burn your mp3s to a CD? Wouldn’t that be essentially what would’ve happened in the processing plant anyway?
And pertaining to the supposed “feeling” that one gets in going out and buying a CD, I admit that I used to have the same idea. I wanted a physical copy of my whole musical library, or at least the ones which were halfway decent, so a) I could show it off to my friends and b) so I could feel like I was doing the artist justice. The problem with this manner of thinking is that first of all, your friends don’t care what kind of music you have, and second, the artists REALLY weren’t making much money off of that anyway. You feel SORRY for the LABELS?! WHAT?! That, being a musician, is absolutely unacceptable to me. The record industry as it stands is the primary reason why music SUCKS so much right now anyway, and the pittance that they’d been giving out to the artists, who support their entire business structure, is ridiculous and insulting. You want to support an artist? Go out and see a live show, or go on their website and donate directly to them. I say the big name labels are getting what they deserve for running a crooked, self-serving business model for years, and they’re flipping out now because their misdeeds are finally catching up with them.
And finally, yes, consumers are getting greedy. But I feel no remorse for going on soulseek or what.cd and downloading an album. Why? Because first, it makes me feel like I’m sticking it to the man, but more importantly, because I give my money to the artists themselves, who are the ones who deserve it in the first place. If I download something I like, I give back. If it’s crap, I’m going to delete it anyway, no harm, no foul. People need to see music downloading for what it really is anyway: marketing for the live shows. It used to be that the live tour was used as a promotional device for the album release, but nowadays the role has been reversed. Sure, I don’t go into a record store and expect to get it for free. That’s why I download the music on the internet, so I don’t have to feel bad about not feeding into the corrupt and immoral system that the music industry is running right now. The movies are a bit different, because you have all of the people involved in making it, and it’s hard to give back. But producing an album SHOULD only really require 10, maybe 20 people, who should be paid by the artist, or indirectly by the (preferably independent) label who supports them. So really, it’s a non-issue.
In summation: if you want a hard copy, go for it. I’m all for LPs and other analog media, because they do have a totally different experience involved with them. But I’m not going to sacrifice my hard-earned money to get music on a medium that I could produce myself for CHEAPER than what they charge, AND be ripped off by the big labels, who turn around and give only a small percentage to the real deserving party, the artist.
Phil Collins sucks anyway. So did Genesis. So why do I care whether I get a CD or not, it doesn’t change the (terrible) quality of the music.