Call me before you’re dead; we’ll make some plans instead
Well, I’m not exactly a music expert, but answering this week’s Friday Five is more fun than talking about the hurricane. So, away we go:
1. Who is your favorite singer/musician? Why?
I don’t really have a favorite. I’m notoriously flighty when it comes to my music, and I can burn out on a song in roughly twenty-four hours. So, if I were to declare a favorite today, I’d only be proving myself a hypocrite tomorrow.
I’ve more or less always felt that way, not that it helped me very much. Considering that in high school, you declared your personal, social and political philsophy either through the sports that you played or the music you listened to, explaining to people that I more or less judged music “by the song” tagged me as being unforgivably wishy-washy.
2. What one singer/musician can you not stand? Why?
I really can’t stand Tori Amos. And not really because of her politics, and not really because of her personality — I’ve seen the interviews with her, and I know she’s been through a lot. Something about her just completely turns me off.
3. If your favorite singer wasn’t in the music business, do you think you would still like him/her as a person?
Ah, I’m glad I read ahead here. I was just about to answer this.
No, I probably wouldn’t. I like to think that I’ve got a pretty diverse group of friends, so I hope that it’s not just snobbery that keeps me away from liking Tori Amos. But I just catch such a bad vibe off of her that I think she’d be one of those people I’d smile at in the hallway, and then quickly move on.
She seems to have enough friends as it is, anyway. Her vortex of pain and tattered dresses is fully enough occupied that the absence of a person like me would hardly be missed.
4. Have you been to any concerts? If yes, who put on the best show?
I think the last concert I was at was an EdgeFest, back when I was in university. I went with a friend of mine, his (now ex-)girlfriend, his brother, and another friend. In a fit of wisdom, I wore a really heavy sweater and boiled to death in the heat, and got a sunburn so bad that I was delerious for much of the afternoon.
The next day at work, one of the other clerks at Blockbuster came over and said to me, in her very tiny voice, “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Doesn’t what hurt?” I asked.
“Your sunburn. Doesn’t it hurt? That looks like it hurts. Hurts a lot.”
Of course, I thought she was referring to the sunburn on the back of my neck, which never really bothers me. I didn’t realize that I had also burned the hell out of the tips of ears, and they’d puffed up into horrible yellow puffy water balloon ridges. And to think, all that time that those customers were looking at me with sympathy, I thought they just felt bad that I worked at a video store.
Hmm? What? Oh — Green Day was performing, and they put on probably the best show of the day. They pulled a guy up on stage to play bass on one of their songs, telling him that he better not be bullshitting them about if he was good with a guitar, because there was a shitload of people in the audience just waiting to punish him for lying.
You can’t argue with that.
5. What are your thoughts on downloading free music online vs. purchasing albums? Do you feel the RIAA is right in its pursuit to stop people from downloading free music?
I’m a Canadian, so I know that half of the fun of polling questions is how they’re phrased — go through a few referenda on the stability of your country, and you get sensitive to that kind of thing — so this is actually an easy one to answer.
I’m fully in support of downloading free music online, because it isn’t costing anyone anything. I pull down game soundtracks and other, similarly obscure music all the time, because I have no other avenues for getting them. There’s a very good chance that if I could buy them, I probably would, which leads me to the secondary question.
Do I think the RIAA is right in trying to stop people from downloading published music for free? Yes. Do I like the way they’re going about it? No. But the truth of the matter is that when people (i.e. me) download music that’s been ripped from a CD that someone bought in a store, it’s violating copyright law.
Now, I don’t think that this is going to bring the music industry to its knees, and very honestly, if the RIAA fully understood the whole phenomenon of file-sharing, they’d probably spend more time trying to make money off of it and less time brutally suppressing it. But I also find some serious flaws in the logic of those who justify file sharing on grounds such as the following:
To the first two points, I say simply, the arts are a way to make a living. In Western society, they have been a way to make a living for a very long time — I very sincerely doubt that there are any artists out there who pause while snorting cocaine from between a fan’s breasts to think to themselves, “Gosh, I hope today’s the day that I write the song/compose the poem/draft the novel/paint the picture/take the photo that changes the world, and that I get nothing from it but the satisfaction of artistic birth.”
Musicians especially. The rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle does not include austere living in a spartan workspace. If they’re making too much money, then good for them — you’re giving it to them.
Thus, if their albums really are overstuffed with crap, then don’t listen to them. And by “don’t listen,” I literally mean, “Do not allow the music to enter your ears,” and not, “Don’t buy the album but then go home and queue it up on Kazaa.” Musicians who are not listened to fall into obscurity; obscure musicians are forced to get part time jobs at Blockbuster, and eventually stop making music. Then they’re not too rich, and you’ve won your moral victory.
I’m not really saying anything original here, though, and nothing of any mpact. The truth of the matter is that file sharing has taken one of the great entitlements of the internet — Everything Should Cost Nothing — and combined it with a ravenous market. Music fans love their songs, and if they can get them for free instead of paying for them, then that’s what they’re going to do. Everything else is really just so much rationalizing.
So I'm done having killer mysterious headaches and surprising personal calamities and getting doubly suprising promotions. I Twitter now (peep that HA HA HA see what I did there) and I'm back to blogging, so it's now officially more than you can stand.
feh
September 19th, 2003 at 11:38 am
I don’t necessarily disagree with your stance on the Great MP3 Debacle of 2002-2004 (although I do think that the RIAA has gone well past shooting themselves in the foot and are now working their way up the torso area), but I gotta point out a bit of a problem with your logic:
[The downloaders' arguments:]
- In a free society, all media should be free anyway
- Musicians/Record Labels make too much money anyway, so fuck them
Which you counter with “If they’re making too much money, then good for them — you’re giving it to them.”
Er, I think the point is they’re sort of NOT. Giving it to them, that is.
That’s also pretty much the entire basis for every RIAA action thus far - the lack of dollars winding up in their pockets for music they hold copyrights to.
Mike
September 19th, 2003 at 2:21 pm
I don’t think I expressed myself well enough. Regardless of whether you buy the music or download the music, you’re still perpetuating the music.
Whether I’m stealing Metallica’s last shitty album or actually purchasing it, I’m still keeping Metallica in circulation. I will be more likely to, say, request it on the radio, buy their tee-shirts, read magazine articles about them, watch television shows on which they perform, tune into their music videos, and generally reinforce their popularity. They will be the subject of discourse. They will be in the press, as Metallica chose to be.
If people really want to punish artists, then they shouldn’t patronize them at all. To enjoy someone’s music without buying it doesn’t say that I’m punishing greed or fighting the system; it just says that I’m benefitting from the system without contributing to it.
Freshmaker
September 19th, 2003 at 3:12 pm
Mike has it exactly right on that last point: Artists should have realized long ago what a great marketing tool file-sharing can be. I bet you can find songs out there right now from folks who’d otherwise never have been heard from again. And I bet that will lead to, for some of them, at least a renewed interest from small venues.
Yeah, ripping is a violation of copyright law. The RIAA, though, has gone so far as to subvert U.S. law rather than adapting to changing technology and customer preferences. I feel no small amount of schadenfreude seeing them villainized for this.
Jenn
September 20th, 2003 at 8:48 am
Word. I’m pickin’ up what you’re puttin’ down on this. I definitely agree with what you’ve said in this entry…including the stuff about Tori Amos. *shudders*
Cranberry
September 21st, 2003 at 2:44 am
Don’t musicians make most of their money from tours and appearances, not albums? If people are listening to their stuff online for free, but then running out and attending their shows, buying their merchandise, requesting their videos, etc., they’re actually helping a band out. Record companies are the real losers here, I think, and I don’t feel really bad for them. Maybe if CDs were cheaper, more people would buy them — they really are way too expensive right now.
Mike
September 22nd, 2003 at 9:04 am
I’m not sure about the “musicians make their money from touring” assertion, because I’ve never really seen the numbers broken out anywhere. It’s just sort of been floating around since the days of Napster, kind of like the suggested math that makes the total cost of producing a CD $0.02 cents and $14.97 profit.
I guess my point is that none of these things are really in the minds of most people when they’re downloading music — it’s not a political decision that they’re making, and all of these arguments exist solely to justify breaking some laws that keep them from saving $15 per album.
Josh
February 8th, 2004 at 7:04 pm
wow, um those last 2 comments were so unoriginal…and yes, it IS true that artists make most of their money off tours/merchandise nowadays, and there ARE a lot of artists who got their start form filesharing
plus, most people who download a CD/burn a few sonsg fromone eventually buy it…check it out im too lazy to post the link but that figure exists