I think that I'm the poster-boy for this. Earlier this year -- fed up with my tiny Lower East Side apartment toppling over with all of my CDs and records -- I began ripping my entire music collection onto a 250 gig external hard drive attached to my iBook. It took about four months of ripping, and the entirety of it ended up being about 200 gigs. Then, a few weeks ago, I took about a quarter of my CD collection to Other Music and sold it, and I'm readying another batch to sell off as we speak. I struggled for a while about doing it, about how much fondness/nostalgia I have for the physical artifact, and finally I just decided that it wasn't worth it. That -- not to get too romantic here -- music isn't made in a pressing plant, so why the hell should I act like that CD is the music rather than being just a vehicle for it?
I didn't start file sharing until last year. A friend got me into some private file sharing group with an FTP server, and while I occassionally upload things, I am primarily a downloader, snagging maybe an album or two a week. My day job these days is as the managing editor of a prominent legal file sharing website/service focusing solely on independently made music, and my position affords me a limitless account of downloads, so on some days I'm snagging as much as 10 gigs of MP3s onto my backup external HD here at work.
None of this has anything to do directly with the ethics of MP3s -- something that I honestly find dull -- but my point is that pretty soon the whole ethical concept of digital music will be a moot one, like a farmer still stubbornly hanging onto his horse and buggy clopping along the interstate pondering the ethics of the internal combustion engine. The shift of music to a conceptual -- rather than a physical -- artifact is already complete. Think of the kids aged 12-20 right now who only relate to music via MTV or Kazaa. Do you think they really care if they have liner notes?
Of course the artists still need to get paid, and I guess I'm doing my part by participating in the cash side of the download age. But all we need is one label-less artist to have a successful album solely via the web, and suddenly the major label/MTV/Clearchannel axis can be sidestepped altogether, and perhaps the rules of engagement can be rewritten, even if only slightly.
I didn't start file sharing until last year. A friend got me into some private file sharing group with an FTP server, and while I occassionally upload things, I am primarily a downloader, snagging maybe an album or two a week. My day job these days is as the managing editor of a prominent legal file sharing website/service focusing solely on independently made music, and my position affords me a limitless account of downloads, so on some days I'm snagging as much as 10 gigs of MP3s onto my backup external HD here at work.
None of this has anything to do directly with the ethics of MP3s -- something that I honestly find dull -- but my point is that pretty soon the whole ethical concept of digital music will be a moot one, like a farmer still stubbornly hanging onto his horse and buggy clopping along the interstate pondering the ethics of the internal combustion engine. The shift of music to a conceptual -- rather than a physical -- artifact is already complete. Think of the kids aged 12-20 right now who only relate to music via MTV or Kazaa. Do you think they really care if they have liner notes?
Of course the artists still need to get paid, and I guess I'm doing my part by participating in the cash side of the download age. But all we need is one label-less artist to have a successful album solely via the web, and suddenly the major label/MTV/Clearchannel axis can be sidestepped altogether, and perhaps the rules of engagement can be rewritten, even if only slightly.