THE MEANDERWALKER

I really havent.

I used to buy CDs on a weekly basis all throughout highschool. I was one of those “alternative kids” who went to rock shows and wore band tees (when I wasn’t in my school uniform.. heh). I have 5 CD books full of them, drawers and drawers full of empty plastic CD cases. But then I went to college, and lived in dorm room where I was never more than six feet from my CCI ThinkPad laptop. While I still occaisonally walked down to SchoolKids to buy music, I started to acquire more and more of my music from friends (burned CDs), from buying albums at shows I went to (CDs and LPs), and then from soulseek (mp3!).

That being said, I’ve engaged in a lot discussions with people over the last three years or so, basically arguing that “piracy” (as they call it) isn’t as bad for the music industry as they think it is. They just need to begin using it to their benefit and start doing things the way we want them to… you know, change as the market demands. I also argue that “piracy” only works to the detriment of “pop” musicians (who release an album with one single and if people can download that one song, they are content to not purchase the CD), while it has grown the “independent” music scene over the past few years since people can listen to a lot of different music with no monetary risks. If people like what they hear for free, they’ll pay to goto the band’s shows. And they’ll buy CDs and LPs and other swag directly from the band at the merch table, which benefits the musicians much more than if you went to Best Buy instead and they received all of one cent from that CD sale… if that.

This article in Newsday talks about piracy in this light. This is the jist of it…

“So what’s the problem? The music industry says it’s piracy, that fans are able to download music from the Internet for free, which cuts into sales. True enough. But that’s only a small part of the answer. The industry’s real problem is its inability to recognize that its customers have changed and so has the way they want to receive their music.”

As mentioned in that Newsday article, Steve Jobs recently published an article on the future of music buying/sharing, in which he discusses this exact dilemma. Everyone knows that music bought from the iTunes music store is protected with Apple’s digital rights management system and can therefore only be played on authorized computers and ipods and cannot be easily shared. And the only reason why Apple employed this DRM system was because that was the only way Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI (who control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music) would allow them to legally distribute music over the internet. Even though Apple put this lock on the music it sells through iTunes, people still buy millions of ipods, and 97% of the music on the average iPod does not come from iTunes. But that’s not to say “piracy” over the internet is the problem, though.

That’s where CDs come in. I know that a lot of people, and I am also included in this, get their first iPod and immediately begin ripping their CDs so they can put them on their iPods, or even just have on their laptops which a lot of us take everywhere with us, too. Carrying the majority of your music collection in a tiny box that fits into your pocket is infinity times more convenient and awesome that having multiple CD books, plastic cases and inside booklets, and dealing with scratches and other inconveniences of CDs. This where music companies should change how they think about distributing music, and stop being so afraid to accept that we, the consumers, want our music immediately. and over the internet. and on our tiny mp3 players as quickly as possible so we can put in our little white headphones and go grocery shopping in hipness. Oh yeah, and we want it to be free and compatible with any music machine, if possible.

“Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.“

I’ll let you read the rest of the article where Jobs talks about the alternatives for music distribution in the future. It’s pretty interesting. And I like how Steve Jobs really seems to understand the reality of the situation is willing to adapt to it.

And while I am a proponent for positive changes that will ultimately benefit the music industry and let them start making money again, I don’t really ever plan to start paying for music ever again… if I can avoid it. ever.

So in conclusion, if you want to bring your external hard drive full of mp3s over to my house, I will be more than happy to exchange many gigs of mp3s I have on my external hard drive with you, too. That’s how everyone does it now, right?