We all remember it. Taping out favourite tunes from the radio on a clunky Sony cassette player. Compilations tapes: favourite songs pirated from different albums and re-recorded onto blank CDs, the track listing written out on lined inserts in blocky teenaged handwriting, handed out to friends and prospective girlfriends. Then there were the online options: illegal file sharing through platforms such as Napster and BitTorrent. Everyone did it. It didn’t even feel criminal. How many of us were really aware of the anxiety we caused to the music industry? I certainly wasn’t: sharing music was simply a part of youth culture, and with the self-centeredness of many youths I was blissfully unaware of the predicted collapse of the music industry as a result of rampant piracy.
If you had asked me, I would have scoffed. Collapse? How can the music industry collapse? Music is life. Music is everywhere. Music just is! So what if it gets shared around? That’s what music is FOR!
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Happily, this would be one of the few times when the uneducated assumptions of a teenager proved to be true. The music industry did not collapse, and far from curbing the production of the industry, the sharing capacity developed by internet-based technology has dramatically revolutionised the distribution and consumption of music in modern society. Just as the Walkman, Napster, and compilation tapes were an unmistakable feature of my youth, the youth of today would not recognise the music industry stripped of the influence of iTunes, MP3 players, and freely-available YouTube concert previews.
The effects of technology on the music industry have been overwhelmingly positive, for both artists and consumers. A number of recently conducted researches, for example, suggest that the arrival of the Internet stimulated the development of the music industry, providing musicians with affordable and powerful software and applications that have removed the need to pay for expensive studio time. The result? Artists can now create music through their own means. Gone is the monopoly of the recording studio and contract label: now young and unknown artists can easily find their audience. Mac Miller, a young Pittsburgh hip-hop sensation, vividly illustrates this trajectory. Miller first developed and distributed his hip-hop mixtapes on YouTube. The popularity of these videos quickly attracted the attention of music critics and the public alike, and created him a fan base producing over 400 million video views. Miller’s self-promotion resulted in him becoming a world-renowned artist and millionaire.
I cannot help but welcome this type of story: particularly when it comes in the face of what can sometimes feel like increasing restriction and regulation of my rights as an individual to experience music. Piracy or not, those compilation tapes represented a very real human need: to share music, to use music to express identity and feeling, and to experience music as a free and flexible element of life. However, the property rights protection in the majority of Western countries has become significantly more reinforced during the last decade, stimulating customers to purchase particular rights and to download fewer pirated songs. Sadly, this tendency has been frequently exploited by providers, resulting in irritations of the user: tracks bought through iTunes that only work on Apple products and cannot be copied to more than three devices, or tracks purchased through Amazon that will only play through the Amazon player. Stories like that of Mac Miller demonstrate that the internet brings not only new restrictions and exploitations, but also new freedoms and experiences.
So, what does the future of music production hold for us? Will the generations of the future look back with fond amusement at our downloads and opens-source videos, as a new and exciting medium of distribution and production emerges? I can’t wait to find out.
