pirates of the world unite!

check this out:

[google -166095432964105847 Good Copy, Bad Copy]

my thoughts on the matter? I’m wary of the “universal license” or the “blanket license” that so many of the pro-downloading industry-type people seem to advocate because, as an independent artist whose music is distributed over the internet, people would be forced to pay the record companies that i hate for the right to download my music and I would never see a penny of that money unless i came to some sort of arrangement with the record companies – something i have no desire to do. Frankly, i don’t want to be selling my music at all, I want to abolish capitalism.  I ask people who enjoy my music to support it financially because I’m fucking poor, I need money to pay my rent, and it costs me money to make the music in the first place.  Not like I’m making much money off it, I get maybe one donation for every thousand or so downloads, but at least no one can accuse me of “selling out” or losing sight of why I started making music in the first place…

The challenge of file sharing is not one of “the corporations need to adopt a new business model to be successful”, it’s “the corporations need to go out of business”. They are no longer necessary. They served a somewhat useful function by (in theory at least) filtering out the crap and putting good music on the air back in the bad old days when all available mass media was unidirectional and “consumers” could never be “producers”.

Thing is, they were never very good at that function, most of what they put on the air is garbage, and the technology has moved on so today the line between “producer” and “consumer” is so thin it’s practically nonexistent. Anybody with a microphone can record their own songs, upload them to a website, tell their friends about it, and see if it spreads. That’s what I did and I’ve had thousands upon thousands of downloads from all over the world in the last 6 years. The record company suits and music marketers are dinosaurs, they are worse then irrelevant, and they should do us all a favor and go find more suitable jobs for themselves marketing any of the other billion useless products consumer capitalism wants to cram down our throats.

In my ideal world music (and media in general) is free or very cheap to anyone who wants it . The radio stations are all community owned and run cooperatively by people who live in the communities they serve and broadcast all kinds of music, both locally produced and pulled off the thriving global file-sharing networks, according to what the rotating volunteer dj’s want to play and what the people want to hear. There is no marketing of music at all, everything is viral and word-of-mouth, and the artists who get big and get heard are the ones doing the coolest and most innovative stuff. It’s an anarchist meritocracy, something like Kool Herc’s block parties back in the day, only on a global scale and over all the airwaves all the time. And, as a result, billions of people have access to all kinds of crazy creative new music they never would have heard of otherwise and the process of learning and sharing from each other in a real meaningful way through music kicks into high gear.

In that kind of world the racial segregation of music that happens on todays corporate stations would be little more then a distant memory, and musicians would finally be judged “on the content of their characters” – and the content of their lyrics – “and not on the color of their skin” or the budgets of their record label’s PR firms. Oh yes, I have a dream. A dream that may not be deeply rooted in the American Dream, but which is an essential part of any dream for real large-scale social and cultural change in this country and this world.

All the talk about “incentives” and “protecting artists” is complete and utter bullshit. First of all, it’s not artists whose interests the RIAA et all are trying to protect, it’s the slimy-ass corporate assholes who control the old means of distribution and are trying desperately to gain control of the new means. As for the artists, anyone who needs a cash incentive to produce music has no fucking business making music in the first place. The fact that our music industry is dominated by the kind of people who insist on getting paid to create music is the #1 reason why virtually all mainstream music is garbage. If no one ever paid me for another download I might be kind of discouraged and I’d have to spend more hours as a wage slave (at least until we finish that whole overthrowing capitalism project), but I’d still keep making music and I’d probably continue paying out of my own pocket to put it up online for people to download. Anyone who wouldn’t continue is in it for entirely the wrong reason. Humans have been making music since long before we evolved into “humans”, it’s a basic fundamental part of our nature, and that impulse absolutely does not need a cash “incentive” to manifest. I say it’s about time people who use file sharing and pirate music took a real stand on this issue instead of pussyfooting around.

Music is not an industry and there is nothing immoral about humans sharing it with each other. The goal of the pirate movement needs to be the destruction of the corporate music industry, period. Let the artists and the fans work out an equitable and mutually beneficial arrangement, but the corporate hacks are interlopers who need to be thrown out on their ears.

Posted: July 12th, 2007 under economics, hip hop, music, open-source & coprights.
Comments: 3

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