I like music. That’s not the boldest statement to make, but it’s a true one. I don’t know much about music or the music industry which makes it the perfect subject to opine about. If you’ve read a significant portion of this blog, or if you know me personally, or if you just have a sense of what’s right in the world, you’d know (or assume) that I like music. Who doesn’t? I don’t really trust people who don’t like music. I’d say the same thing about people who don’t like animals. I think if you don’t like music or animals, you might not have a soul.
I mean, I really like music. Given the choice of watching TV or listening to music, I’ll almost always choose music. It’s playing when I clean, it’s playing when I exercise, it’s playing when I cook, it’s playing wen I’m just bumming around. As a little kid, I used to go to sleep to music. One time, maybe as a first grader, I was falling asleep to “Riders on the Storm” and my father came in to to move the teetering radio that I had propped next to my head (we couldn’t go to sleep with headphones – they might strangle us). With cat-like reflexes, my arm whipped up and grabbed the radio before he could move it. I like music – always have.
What I don’t like is the musical industrial complex. I don’t like that music, like almost everything else, has become a behemoth of an industry in which talent doesn’t always win out and the rewards seem to flow to almost everyone but the artist. This isn’t new. One of the biggest crimes in the music industry was how so many early black blues and jazz artists had their sound stolen and replicated by white artists who made it big… The great failing of capitalism and the industrial revolution is that power (and profits) moved away from the the workers and creators. With the exception of a select few superstars, managers, marketers, and middlemen often fare better than the music makers.
As a consumer of music, I try to do my best to support the artists. This means going to shows, and always buying music. When I hear a song on YouTube that I like and listen to a few dozen times, I make it a point to buy the song, if not the album. When Napster first came out as a file sharing service, and you could rip songs to your hard drive “for free,” I initially downloaded a bunch of songs, and then, feeling guilty, went back and bought them. It was a combination of feeling like a thief (I was) and having a strong belief that musicians and artists should be paid for their creations that made me purchase every song I had ripped. If I ever feel “justified” in stealing music, it’s when I get cheesed at the music industry and the technological drivers of commerce. I had a lot of tapes before CDs came out. I fought the battle against converting for the longest time – I thought analog sounded warmer and I didn’t think I should have to pay for the same album twice.
I’m going through a similar Luddite phase now when it comes to streaming services. Up until about two weeks ago, I never had an unlimited data plan, and with the amount of music I listen to, streaming services weren’t all that of an attractive option. My last three phones have been iPhones (before that, I had an iPod) which means I have iTunes. I have an extensive library of close to 4,000 songs. I love music. I hate iTunes. For one, when iTunes first came out, any music you purchased through the service would only work on apple products. They were attempting to limit the number of “copies” a person could have. For this reason, I bought and downloaded most of my music from Amazon. I wanted to be able to listen to it on my phone or my laptop. However, in order to get the songs on to my phone, I had to go through iTunes. This was fine for a while until a song or album would get corrupted, or the syncing would get… well…. out of sync.
In the early days, before tech companies realized that people like to share things with other members of their families, iTunes made it very difficult to sync across devices and computers. One of my greatest fears through the early 2000s was that I’d plug my iPod into a different computer and lose all of my songs. You can only have your iTunes library on one computer and syncing with a different library erases the current library. As frustrating as this was, I made do with the system for a long time. That was, until I had to get a new computer and tried to move my library from one pc to another. For one reason or another – not everything transferred. If I remember, I spent a few weeks comparing the old library to the new library trying to track down missing songs. I suspect some (probably those I had paid for twice – once on tape and a second time on CD) were lost forever. More years passed, I continued to buy music and grow my library, and eventually got rid of the CDs entirely (first the jewel cases and then the CDs). This last spring, my computer started to die and I bought a new one. Once again, I exported the library, and started fresh on a new PC. It wasn’t until I hooked my phone up to sync up some recent purchases that I noticed the discrepancy. My phone had a few hundred more songs than my library did. iTunes uses the library on the PC as the definitive source and still rewrites your device when you sync.
I don’t want to lose 300 or 500 songs and all of my playlists. Now, with a new phone, an unlimited data plan, and a screw you attitude towards iTunes, I’m finally considering a streaming service. The problem with this is that I don’t need a streaming service. I have intentionally bought most of the songs I listen to. I don’t think I should have to pay a monthly fee to access them. And while having unlimited access to a catalog of millions of songs is attractive, and for $10 a month is cheaper than buying songs outright, I buy music as a way of supporting the artists. Sadly, only a fraction of the dollars being generated through streaming services make it to the musicians.
My dad still listens to CDs. I laugh at how stuck in his ways he is… Is this the point where I get stuck in time and technology? How long before I have to call up my daughter to set the clock on the VCR (or whatever the modern day equivalent of that is). I suppose if I had faith in the technology (to make a seamless switch without losing data) and faith in the tech companies (not to jack up their prices once they’ve eliminated all the other options), I’d be less hesitant about making a switch. With Comcast announcing that they’ll start capping data for cable internet subscribers and charging people for exceeding the cap, signs already point to unlimited data services as we know them disappearing. Which, in the end, between the streaming service, the extra data fees, and the cost of newer phones, modems, and whatever technologies are yet to be developed, I can probably count on paying 5, 10, or 15 times for that Blondie song that I had on a tape (Super Gold or Electric Hits) back in 1980. This will do little to support Blondie or the other musicians who need these services to make a living. Feeling a little defeated and maybe like I have a “Heart of Glass” and entirely like an anachronism stuck in a bygone era or actually buying music, perhaps it’s appropriate to end with “Call Me” – because while I use my phone for music and video and text, it’s almost never used as a phone.