In Defense of Music Downloading: Why Internet File-Sharing is Necessary for the Survival of Music
February 15, 2004
by Matthew Scrivner

The record industry is lying to you. At the 46th Grammy Awards this month they announced a new initiative that would promote an “ethical viewpoint about music downloading.” This is happening because the industry is running scared right now. The power has shifted out of their hands and into the hands of music fans. Without control you see, they will be unable to tell you what to listen to, when to listen to it, and how much you should pay for it.

Here’s the simple truth: Music is a form of information. It is vibrations of air created by instruments and human voice, translated into meaningful patterns of harmony, melody, and rhythm by the human mind. It’s information. Just like the old tree-falling-in-the forest bit, without the human mind to make sense of it, it’s meaningless noise. All music requires a listener, an audience, because it cannot be separated from its content. It cannot, no matter what they would have you believe, be wrapped in cellophane and sold back to you for $18.99. But they have spent the last seventy-five years building an empire controlling this particular form of information. They want you to believe that music is a product, something to be consumed, that the $18.99 you are spending is the legitimate purchase of the experience of that product.

What you are really paying for though is the medium, the object, the means by which the experience is transmitted to you; but the experience is yours and never let anyone make you believe that it’s not. Now, along comes powerful personal computers and the Internet, technologies that when combined, inherently decentralize control of information by altering both the medium through which the experience of music is transmitted, as well as the access and availability of it. This has threatened the structure of power and control held by the business behind the music. Despite their best efforts, despite injunctions and lawsuits, the recording industry continues to lose ground to technology, and they know it. And so, in a final attempt to get that power back they have finally decided to take the issue of music downloading into the realm of ethics and morality. They want you to believe that Internet file-sharing, that MP3 downloading, is unethical, and therefore, implicitly, immoral. They want to equate it in the minds of Americans to theft.

Let me educate you to one singular fact about the morality of music: there would be no American music, no jazz, no blues, and sure as hell no rock and roll, if it weren’t for theft.

Before compact discs, before cassettes and eight tracks and vinyl, before radio, hearing music live was the only way it was done. Sometimes you paid for these live performances; sometimes you heard them as you watched the funeral procession stream through the streets of New Orleans, or while you drank hard liquor in a dank Chicago bar, or when your tribe sat crouched around the fire and chanted up to the myriad gods for the grain, for the rain, and for the sun. What you heard, no matter where and how you heard it, became yours, got stuck in your head, and you’d whistle it through the next day while you worked; it became a part of you, a part of your life. In that sense, it defined your culture as well; and indeed music and culture cannot be divided anymore than can the language a people speak and their culture. We are, as a people, what we listen to.

So no matter who wrote that song that you heard, or who performed it, or whether you were in church or in front of your computer in your underpants when your heard it, when your ears picked up that vibration of air, and your brain translated those vibrations into meaningful patterns of melody and rhythm, the result was information that you wholly and entirely owned. This is the same ownership you have of every thought in your head. In that sense, the term theft is misleading. There is nothing to steal in music but “the moment,” that energy of inspiration, that unnamable force of “wow” that makes good music good. That “moment” is freely shared between musician and listener since it is the thing that fuels the music, the thing that gives it power, life, that spark of meaning that makes it interesting, fresh, and worth listening to. Without it, music would be empty, a scarecrow with no spine.

A hundred years ago, if I heard a song at church, and rode my horse home and found myself humming it, I was stealing? And fifty years ago, if I heard a song on the radio, and it was so catchy that I found myself singing it out loud later on while I cooked dinner, I committed theft? And ten years ago, when I waited hours for the top 40 count down to play that one song just so I could tape it to cassette for my girlfriend, I was taking something that wasn’t mine? It’s never ever worked that way before, despite what they would have us believe. No one has ever been sued for singing their favorite song around the campfire. No one has ever been sued for making mix tapes for their best friends. Why is it that the presence of the internet has made this so much more the case?

Now, let’s take this argument to another level. If you yourself are a musician, you must steal. You must take what came before you and reshape it into something new. You take what you hear from others and you steal the best parts of it intentionally, and transform it into your own new musical idea. Every musician has done this and every musician will continue to do so, or music itself will die. There are pieces of ancient tribal drum rhythms in old cotton-picking spirituals. There are pieces of old spirituals in Louis Armstrong. There are pieces of Satchmo in Buddy Guy and B.B. King. There are pieces of Buddy Guy and B.B. King in the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. There are pieces of the Beatles in probably every rock and roll band that has ever come since. Music, as information, is essentially an organic meme, a thought virus, an intellectual infection so powerful that it has been transmitted to us from the beginning of time. When the first of humanity stretched goat skins over wooden bowls and began to thump, they transmitted their secret mimic of heartbeats to us, a message encoded on bone from the past. This message cannot be contained or controlled. Doing so, kills it, and leaves us in nothing but silence. When you hear the latest Radiohead song, you are also hearing almost every song that ever came before it. Does this mean that Radiohead is stealing? Hail to the Thief, goddamnit, for he is the one that leads us into the future of sound.

So all the economics of it aside, we need to acknowledge that stealing is necessary for music to be good, for music to grow, for music to continue to be what it is – an exchange of ideas, a giant conversation in the voice of untongued tones. It is an inevitable aspect of the process. And if this process is inevitable, if theft is indeed the natural consequence of hearing and being a part of a musical word, than for anyone, any group, any government, any business to attempt to control that natural process, it tantamount to oppression. It is your right, your basic right as a human being to hear beautiful sound and to share that beauty with others. Somewhere along the way we have sold that right away. What did we get in exchange for this transaction?

Nothing but a bunch of rules telling us under what circumstances we are allowed to access that which is already ours by right.

One of those rules is shaped on the misleading concept that artists will not get paid for their work if the free (i.e., uncontrolled) exchange of music continues. The argument goes that the musicians that make all the great music we enjoy, are being deprived of money they need to live, and without it would therefore not be able to share more music with us. Seems clear enough – and I need to be explicitly clear that in principle I agree with this; I have no objection to any musician being paid for his or her work. I think this is exactly what should happen. Music enriches our lives, and those that produce it should be rewarded. But do not be misled into thinking that music downloading necessarily equates starving musicians.

Fact: there has been no concrete proof offered so far that music downloading has caused financial loss for musicians. While there has been a downward trend in record sales in the past three years, that downward trend matches a similar downward trend in the rest of the economy. In a time when dad can’t find work and mom is working retail to make sure the mortgage gets paid, you can sure as hell bet Johnny isn’t going to have an extra $18.99 to buy the latest release from Hot Pork Deathpie. Conversely some studies are showing that music downloading may be helping smaller labels and their artists get attention in an industry that is normally dominated by the major labels.

Fact: Musicians and artists do not receive the majority of their income from royalties on record sales. It’s the record companies that are making money off of record sales so it’s only natural that the record companies are the ones trying to convince you that music downloading is wrong. Excluding small and independent labels, most musicians make pennies for every dollar that goes to the record company. Yes – those pennies made by the musicians add up into millions over time, but the real question is – why is the record company screwing both the artist as well the consumer, then turning around and telling you that screwing them back is wrong, that it’s unethical?

This is all about power. The Internet is a far larger force in our lives than anyone predicted it would be. Had they known beforehand what an effect it would have, I can guarantee you that control of it would have been much tighter, access to it would have been far more limited, far more expensive, and it’s content far less open and free.

Here’s a news flash if you still haven’t realized it: the record industry does not have the best interests of their artists in mind. They only care about one thing: money.

Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno identified this problem and recently launched MUDDA – Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists. The goal of MUDDA is to eliminate record companies from the equation and let the artists themselves set their own prices and agendas. Now granted, this is just another pay-per-download service, and apparently, not as well implemented as iTunes. But it is a way to allow fans to reward artists directly, undermining the power of the fat-cat middleman.

Other bands, such as Phish, have released music for download on their website, and openly encourage the free exchange of bootlegs between fans. In both cases, what’s best for the artist and the fans is what is being addressed by the solution. Any solution proposed that does not take your best interest, and the best interest of the artists you love into consideration, is dubious, and should be rejected.

Internet downloading should continue. If it is theft, then it’s theft in the tradition of Robin Hood and the results of it are the natural exchange of ideas between people that make music what it is. The record companies only care about decentralization of power, they have it and don’t want to lose it. If power is decentralized, and you and I are the ones who control what we hear, and more importantly the medium and means by which we hear it, than the cream really will rise to the top, the artists that get recognition are the ones that will deserve it, not the ones we are told we should recognize, whether by marketing campaigns, radio payola, or Grammy awards ceremonies. When you login to download, what you are really doing is fighting oppression, and insuring that the future will be a place where the unhindered exchange of information will lead to inspiration and vibrant, powerful music for us all.

(Matthew Scrivner is a volunteer staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine.)