Every time I listen to Vienna Teng’s song, “The Hymn of Acxiom,” it gets creepier. It’s beautiful, it’s haunting…and it’s all about how big data is keeping track of every trace we leave, piecing together a more and more detailed picture of each of us in order to feed us back the perfect, tailored life, and isn’t that what we wanted?
Tracking. Privacy. Social media. Filter bubbles.
And I always think, “I need to post something about this on Facebook…”
And that just creeps me out more.
With all the Les Miserables reading and listening I’ve been doing lately, I decided to dig out an old mix tape of excerpts from Forbidden Broadway. It’s been years since I’ve actually listened to an audio cassette. Most of my music collection was on CDs to begin with, the iPod and my phone have long-since replaced the tapes I kept in the car, and playlists with shuffle have replaced mix tapes.
My two-year old, on seeing it, immediately asked, “What is this?” I tried to explain it was a way they used to record music before CDs, that it has a roll of tape inside, more like a measuring tape than sticky tape, that you have to be careful not to touch the edge (which he promptly did — hooray for leaders). Then I tried to demonstrate how the tape rolled from one side to the other, using the time-honored method of sticking a pencil in and turning it quickly.
And I couldn’t find a pencil.
More accurately, I couldn’t find a hexagonal wooden pencil. A mechanical pencil, sure. A bunch of pens. Some round wooden pencils. But nothing that would actually fit inside the capstan and turn it.
Demo of old technology defeated by…a lack of another old technology!
Defeated, I put the cassette in the tape deck on the stereo and played it. It sounded hollow and distant, with too much noise to actually listen to it. Some media age better than others. I’d bet the CDs I recorded it from (wherever they ended up) still play just fine. I wouldn’t be surprised to find my parents’ vinyl albums still play as well as they did twenty years ago, as long as they’re clean.
It makes me wonder what state the rest of my tapes, both audio and VHS, are in. I was planning to try to sell some of the pre-recorded VHS tapes if I could find someone who wants them, but now I wonder if I should play them first or just send them to e-waste.
So, NPR ran a post by an intern who doesn’t get the whole paying-for-music thing — or, rather, realizes now that she ought to, but doesn’t want to pay for physical media of specific songs or albums.
The Trichordist responded with an open letter about the ethics of file sharing, which is a great read from the artist side of the fence, but also mixes up several issues. In particular, it misrepresents a large part of the “other side.” He starts off saying that Emily White seems to have succumbed to “false choices” presented by “Free Culture,” then goes on to present his own false choices, somehow managing to characterize rampant piracy, Creative Commons*, and the tech industry as if they’re all the same thing.
The issue is not simply “pay for everything” vs “take what you want because you can.”
Among other things it’s about recognizing that distribution channels have changed, so business models must as well. It’s about trying to come up with a system that doesn’t put unnecessary roadblocks in place. It’s about enabling those who do want to share their art in different ways to be able to do so easily.
Edit: It’s also about, and here’s where the tech industry comes in, recognizing that technology does change the legal landscape. Remember the debate over whether Google should pay up for thumbnails in image search results? (Kind of like requiring card catalogs to pay to use the title of the books they refer to.) Or Congress trying to decide whether copying a media file or program from disk to RAM constituted a legal “copy” subject to copyright restrictions?
Edit 2: And then there’s the matter of opening up the gray areas, or rather the areas that most of us intuitively see as gray, but that current copyright law treats as black and white, such as fan art and fan fiction. Technically, a six-year-old’s scrawled Mickey Mouse is illegal. Technically, software companies can tell you how many backups you’re allowed to make. Enforcement is spotty (fortunately), but that means if someone wants to get you in trouble for something else, all they have to do is report you.
If you want to make music and I want to listen to it, I’m happy to pay you for it. I have a lot of music on my iPod, and yes, I’ve paid for it. My last MP3 purchase was a week ago. Heck, I’ve bought music from Jonathan Coulton, who gives it away for free (under a Creative Commons licence, I might add).
So yeah, I’m willing to pay for music. But I don’t want to have to pay separately to listen to the same music on my home sound system, on my computer, on my phone, and in my car because your publisher has decided to put DRM in place that makes it difficult for me to move that music around. If you live on the other side of the planet from me, I want to be able to give you money directly and download the song over the internet instead of having to wait for publisher A to make a deal with publisher B and ship physical media around.
Technology has presented us with new ways of distributing art. Something like Pandora or Spotify would have been impossible before broadband internet. So let’s find ways to make it work for everyone instead of characterizing everything that isn’t pay-per-song as no better than looting.
It doesn’t help to complain about one set of false choices and then present your own.
*He cites the Creative Commons’ tax return to indicate the backers of the Free Culture movement, so it seems clear he looks at them as the same thing.
I’m listening to The Bird and the Bee right now. Every single track on the album is labeled as [Explicit] because of the song called “F——ing Boyfriend,” even though that’s the only song that actually has any explicit lyrics.
Both iTunes and Amazon have two versions of the album. One is marked explicit on every single track. The other has edited the one song, and isn’t marked.
I suppose that might have made sense in the old days when an album was only ever sold as a complete unit (with maybe a single or two)…but in today’s digital market, the base unit isn’t the album. It’s the song. If the song itself isn’t explicit, it shouldn’t be labeled as such. That would be like giving Spider-Man an R rating because Sam Raimi also directed Evil Dead.
Some consequences:
Last night I noticed @BadAstronomer posting ideas for a Twitter meme, #fishpopstars. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: take a singer or band name and make a pun with the name of a fish.
Katie and I came up with these:
Some favorites from the event:
It looks like it’s still going on if you’re in the mood for fish puns.
