We Can No Longer Own Music, It Seems

solarbird is a musician, someone who writes, performs and records songs. She is both familiar with our current recording industry and not happy about what is has become. She notes the pain of losing the old recording industry business model:

Now, people who came up in that system find it collapsing around them. That’s brutal, and there is real suffering for it which should not be ignored. Leaving aside the corporate end, and the gatekeepers, and the eat-all-your-money-and-own-your-everything and lawsuit-happy RIAA and MPAA ass monkeys, there are artistic contributors – musicians – of the old system who used to make a living and now don’t.

That sucks. I sing the praises of trying to find new ways to do all this a lot, and of the opportunities, but the wreckage is real. A lot of it’s deserved – Burn, Warner Pigs, Burn – but as always, a lot of artists are going to take the worst of it. That’s unfair.

Sadly, in an effort to preserve a dying business model, the recording industry has taken the scorched-earth approach, suing here and there and here again in a vain attempt to assert its former dominance and protect their phoney-baloney jobs. DRM, for example, has crippled computer functionality based not on an actual threat, but on the threat of a future threat if the hardware or software manufacturer preserved that functionality.

Ah, but the really sad result? Taken to the nth extreme, it now seems we no longer actually own the music we buy.

People not only see music “ownership” as meaningless, they see themselves as being played for suckers and contemptible rubes. They see examples being made of people like them in court. They hear clowns from the MPAA talking about how leaving the room during commercials is stealing from TV networks. They post a family video with music from an album they bought and paid for in the background, and get a DMCA takedown and threatened with loss of internet access.

Music fans see constant haranguing from the industry telling them what they can’t do. And they see other people saying fuck that, and doing it anyway. . . .

So guess what: people aren’t buying music so much anymore! Is it surprising that people won’t pay for something they do not see as having value? It’d be far more surprising if they did. Forced sales through threat and intimidation only get you so far. “Here, give me $5 for absolutely nothing. Oh, I might sue and destroy you, but it’s even more likely if you don’t pay.” “Fuck you, no! Oh hai, bittorrent.”

Once you’ve shattered that money-for-value association – and it’s good and shattered – even DRM-free music files become clutter. They’re something to have to keep track of and back up and worry and think about. And with little to no ownership value, who wants to bother?

I've been angry about this situation ever since Napster, but recently have noticed that, like so much in modern society, the ability of someone who had no hand in the production of a given piece of art to profit as long as the rights can be renewed on that art proves a fairly recent experience. Every one so many decades ago who drew Steamboat Willie and made Mickey Mouse an icon are dead, dead, dead, yet the Maus himself is still marking legal boundaries like so many mousey urine trails and enriching those that today manage the Disney rat warren. Again, that never happened before the reproduction of individual pieces of animation and sound were both technically possible and difficult to reproduce. Songs are no different here, sadly. Anyone can sing them, but few can own a particularly good sung version.

Queerly, what's coming down the pike is territory humans covered a hundred years ago. Sheet music used to be sold then like recordings are today; but everyone who read and memorized that music could perform it wherever they liked. Likewise with plays. Buy the scripts and have at it. What worries me is the continuing battle against the inevitable that solarbird notes is waged by dynastic recording executives. When the internets can be turned against anyone through intrusive skullduggery to reveal the "content" hidden on all our drives, thus allowing them to cry havoc and let slip the legal dogs of war, we are all potential criminals in society's eyes. And since so many of the news outlets are outright owned by dynastic rights holders of entertainment content, don't expect a fair trial in the court of public opinion any time soon.

It's the ultimate disservice to the citizenry, when the specter of lost profit quells the needed debate over who owns what and why.