Well, this has gotten quite a reaction. After lots of hilarious social media back and forth, I decided that I needed to amend this with one more type of pre-Internet piracy, that of the Community Library type. A true classic. So many people mentioned that I don't feel like I can even cite someone as the source of it. Thank you social network!
Furthermore, let's get one thing straight--it's not cool when artists don't get compensated for their work. Compensation has meanings intangible and tangible, but hell yes filthy lucre is one of them, and that's how it should be. Hopefully between voices like my own, Lowery's, White's, and many others, we can figure out the bizarre quandary that the recorded music industry has found itself in with regards to monetary compensation.
On June 16, a 20-year-old NPR intern named Emily White wrote a short blog post called "I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With." In it, she breaks down her history of her relationship with and procurement of music. She notes with some wonder that she really hasn't bought much of it. Kazaa; Spotify; mix CDs; ripping music from her college radio station's library of CDs; legal; illegal; subscription model services; gifts from friends; everything except... buying The Thing and owning it. Probably a pretty typical story. She then ends by acknowledging that the brave new world of music revenue streams has some serious problems, she states a vague and earnest desire for something like Spotify but with broader catalog reach and a better revenue share for musicians--the kind of big-thinking-out-loud that is a common Millenial habit, and just seems to drive older people batty--and she's out.
Then David Lowery, a 51-year-old former alt-rock star from the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, and now an economics teacher at University of Georgia, wrote a response. It's called "Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered." It's very long, touches on a lot of themes related to music and commerce, and got a lot of attention. I'm almost 40 years old and for a while it actually started displacing the torrent of pictures of friends' children that is my usual Facebook feed. That's an achievement. I would have shrugged it off as your typical crank-attacks-kid-in-media story if it weren't for my peers' reactions.
The aspect that my peers really bonded with, and horrified me, is that Lowery seems to feel that the theft of music is a new phenomenon that is unique to the young people of today. His piece full of things he needs to tell Emily about Emily and her digital klepto peer group. He's pretty qualified to do this because he's taught college for a few years. And man did my peer group eat it up. It was all over my facebook feed. Where did they get this awful new behavior? We never did this!!! Are these the wages of Attachment Parenting??? It really started to mess me up.
So look. I was in this band called The Dismemberment Plan, that was a large-club act in the late-90s and early 2000s. We were never as big as Cracker but we did ok. I'm 39. I still make music. I make no money from it anymore. I've had my ups and downs. It's all good. And I stole the f*** out of music before there ever was an internet, David, and then Napster came along and s*** got real. I'm going to take a moment to describe some of my memories and methods of wanting music so badly that I just reached out and grabbed it even before Napster made it easy and cool. Apparently, none of my cohort ever did any of this stuff; I had some majorly goody-goody friends it seems. Either that, or they are doing that generational-amnesia thing. We are reaching That Age... Anyways, like my man Usher says, these are my confessions.
Straight Up Shoplifting
This wasn't that common, actually. I was a middle-class kid with an allowance. But I had friends in low places. We used to go to the Olsson's in Old Town Alexandria, VA, now closed (probably because of little internet thieves like Emily White; my actions had no discernable impact on their P&L of course.) We went into the back cassette tape room. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling cassettes. My God. Public Image Limited! 10,000 Maniacs! Guadalcanal Diary! The Fat Boys! I WANT TO HEAR THEM ALL AND I CAN'T HEAR ANY OF THEM. So you'd strip the plastic wrapping off when the pot-smoker cashier went to Armand's for a slice, because it had this little magnetic strip that would get the anti-theft thing going at the door... slip it in your surplus army jacket... and shove that damn tape into your walkman as fast as you could, when you were out of sight.
Dub Clubs
Me and my friend Ed would agree on what records we both wanted, go together to buy the vinyl versions along with packs of blank cassettes, and then go home and dub copies... splitting custody of the vinyl in the end. For whatever reason, our favored venue for this was the Waxie Maxie's at Skyline Shopping Center. Poor old Olsson's. It's true--young people that steal have no brand loyalty! Ed would buy the Monkees' Greatest Hits and Tinderbox by Siouxie And The Banshees; I'd buy One Step Beyond by Madness and Listen Like Thieves by INXS; and then we'd dub all four. Sitting together, listening to the music, and discussing it. I learned a lot about how to listen and analyze music this way. (BTW, all four of those long-players are great. All of them hold up. Any curious young people should steal them on the internet.)
Taping Off The Radio
This was hilarious. I would psychopathically hound DJs at Q107 or WAVA to play this or that song. I would call the request line until my finger fell off from dialing. Please Please Please play Life In A Northern Town by Dream Academy in the next 20 minutes I have soccer practice at 4!!!! And then I'd sit. With my finger on the record button on my boombox. With more laser-like focus than a Central Park squirrel waiting for a German tourist to drop their pretzel. Please don't let the preceding song overlap too much; Please don't talk over the intro you douchebag DJ; Please no ads for Jerry's Ford ruining the ending. I always kept a tape ready in my boombox in case of suprises. The day that Q107 played "Ship Of Fools" by World Party--an unusual tune in the context of 80s pop radio, with weird sounds and misanthropic lyrics, my idea of a good time and probably an error that got a DJ fired--I swear to god I knocked over every piece of furniture in my room to hit record.
Mix Tapes
Duh. Do I have to explain this one? Suffice it to say that if mix-tape-making technology had been successfully eradicated, I probably wouldn't have gotten a girlfriend until I was 33 years old.
College Radio
I went to William and Mary, a school for intelligent grinder kids and a tragic mismatch for me. But, we had a very robust FM radio station, WCWM, that was one of the older FM stations in Virginia. I think around 2,000 watts. You could hear us in Norfolk on a clear day. So we had a very solid vinyl catalog, and we were getting torrents of promo CDs. Our vinyl 45 collection was actually really amazing--Cannonball Adderly, Aretha, Ray Charles, all that stuff. I basically lost my mind taping things. Everything from Jesus Lizard to Charles Mingus. I do not know, for the life of me, how I could have stopped myself from making those dubs. I was like a crackhead--if they sold crack at CVS, and it was free. On top of that, would I walk out with some promo CDs? Oh hell yes. Although I remember once the Music Director asking me if I wanted a CD single of "Get Off This," David Lowery's piss-take of the entitled young that he recorded in 1992. (Homeboy seems to have some lifelong obsessions, huh?) I declined. My housemate had a dub of that record and played it all the time. He loved "Euro-Trash Girl."
Community Libraries
Public libraries were one of the most important--and strangest--sources of old-school pirated music. You took them home to dub, but of course like anything from the library, getting them back was a titanic mental struggle and often times you'd just end up with it in your collection.
At least when I was a kid, the music at public libraries were these sad little bins with about 200 records max. I can only begin to imagine how these "collections" were "curated." They tended to have five types of records:
Now, all of this happened well before Napster, which showed up when I was 26. I could write an essay about Napster, and the impact that had on my generation in our twenties, and the battles we thought we were waging against Metallica and big evil major labels that were destroying music... but most people know that story. (Except for maybe my peers? I think they think Emily White invented Napster when she was 10, not Sean Fanning and Sean Parker.)
(GOD I wish I had Spotify when I was 17. It kills me.)
Music is so important to people. It is majorly important to young people. And to me? Literally somewhere below water and air but above food. And I just went for it. I bought a lot of music; I got a lot of free music from whatever sources were at hand; I just had to have it by any means necessary. If you duped a copy of a Dismemberment Plan record in college or something, it's cool. I guess I'd like to have the money, but you know what, I hope you just listened to it with even 1/10 of the consciousness I gave to the music I listened to as a kid--copied, stolen, or bought. And you know, maybe take some of the sermonizing from my peer group with a grain of salt. I think some of them did some of the things I did. Or... maybe a lot of them.
Michelangelo Signorile: Thank You, Madonna, for Still Being Madonna
I made use of the HQ-VHS tape format & Timer-Recorder to schedule my favorite radio programs which were edited later on. Audiophile grade FM component and a video editing deck, made the process much more pristine. Also the occasional official ‘crew-bootleg’, which you had to swear on your first born to never duplicate or you’d never work again. 30 years later, a massive music library having all purchased as I wish the originals, which I then rip for my iPod and Music-Server. As a professional & creative, I believe even though you buy a CD/DVD (like software, art) you only acquiring the right to have/use the material, you do not own it, all rights should be retained by the artist or the entity of ownership (with compensation). Digital age has forced the issue, some artists have been vocal about tracking down violators.
The only ones who used to rail against live bootlegs, for instance, were the labels; artists rarely, if ever, voiced a concern. Why? Because they knew that the person who bought the bootleg live album was a true fan, the kind who purchased most if not all the records, saw the artist perform regularly, and bought a fair share of artist merch. When folks crucified Metallica over the Napster thing, they willingly or not overlooked that Metallica had always permitted their audiences to freely tape their concerts and that the band's complaints were about the massive free and illegal dissemination of their studio albums. Big difference. (And of course, swapping shows among Deadheads was/is legendary.)
If sites that do "file sharing" were disseminating live bootlegs, rehearsals, soundchecks, nary an artist would complain. But when it comes to studio albums proper, well...
But since it was commercial radio, they were only playing one or two songs being off an album, so we still wound up buying the LP's. They sounded a lot better than our crappy tape recordings and there was just something great about owning a record.
What is different today is just the sheer volume of music being illegally downloaded. I have friends who easily have more than a hundred thousand music files and tens of thousands of e-books, all illegally obtained. And they are probably not the exception either.
I'm not sure what can be done about it. Perhaps some smart person will figure out a way to sell music files for mere pennies and make sure that the artists get their fare share. Would a lower price convince enough borderline people to pay for music to make it worthwhile? I have no idea but I hope so.
I went through a period in the mid 90's where I bought a crap ton of CD's, from like columbia house..cause they had the buy one get 11 free thingies..yeah..I had SOO many names.
Internet came along and it all started innocently enough..my friends and I trading songs through email
(you HAVE to listen to this one) I discovered napster and loved it..and today...well, there are more internet radio stations than any one person could ever listen to.
All the pre-internet piracy techniques mentioned are active and have a greater tendency toward (or implications of) fandom. The record you stole was one you wanted badly enough to steal (or perhaps that wasn't the case then you were just a youthful klepto). Taping off the radio required active participation. You had to wait for the radio show to come on, or perhaps the announcement that after the break "Yellow Leadbetter" was coming up and be poised to record what you wanted to capture on tape. That behavior has been replaced with younger folks (and I'm only 30 and an active musician and consumer of music) passing multiple gigs of music as data back and forth on external hard drives or iPods/Phones just to have it and maybe get around to listening to eventually.
So, while the new terror class (shout out to that great band from Kent, OH) are just using the tools before them, its different. its disengaged and that hurts the artists making the music directly.
Another source for my music that is not on the list was the used CD store. I payed for a ton of music this way that never made its way back to the artists. The irony was that most of the"used" music I payed for at my local CD stores in Los Angeles came directly from employees who worked for the major labels or radio stations who unloaded tons of "not for resale" CDs to line their own pockets. None of these record sales counted towards actual sales for the musicians but the used stores in LA were full of bins of them. Often I found music that was not yet out or by bands I had never heard of but liked the music. All of it at used CD prices. I wonder how many current music executives bitch about "the kids these days" stealing music" secretly sold "not for resale" inventory to these stores?
I have to agree with most of his conclusions. . . however, the the story by travis morrison, @the Huff post 'culture blog' is equally true and engaging... he says we always stole music when we were young and it's not exactly a new phenomenon..funny, but I know I have always prided myself on my tastes in music and paid for virtually every single record or CD in my collection -- unless it was given to me as a gift -- and thats the truth. I only made cassette recordings from records in order to listen to them in my car/automobile...and if an 8 track tape was available ( WE) bought that too!
- I have some strong opinions about 'youtube' - but they don't touch on that subject In either the David Lowery essay or the 'Huff Post' Culture Blog article
The eventual upshot of "social" and artistic global digital dispersion is that the social and the artistic will (re)folk-ify. The cultural value of mass communication has always been nebulous, and now that individuals are a more integral part of the mass stream, the value of their contributions (artistic or otherwise) has joined the soup. At the same time, as computers enable more sophisticated art production for a greater and greater number of people, the volume of good creative output will continue to increase and the idea of selling it will seem even more absurd than it already does. The logical move is a sort of computer-enhanced return to a "folk" model of artistic production and reception- sharing, place, immediate community, etc. will replace profit-driven mechanisms. All of this is already underway of course.