larryni.me.uk

I’m just after reading Om Malik’s excellent article Microsoft, Zune & The Music Mafia. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s about MS making a deal with Universal Music Group which will give them a percentage of the sales of Microsoft’s new digital music player Zune. The device will sell for $250 and UMG gets $1 per unit sold. Why? According to UMG people aren’t buying enough digital downloads and are ripping their CDs to put onto their music players instead. How dare they! And the poor music industry is suffering because of it and need to cover their losses. Not to mention the ‘damage’ done to their finances due to file sharing.

Bullshit.

I have been buying and sharing music my whole life. At the beginning my cousin, who worked as a part-time DJ, passed on her old records to me after she finished with them. When I was about 10 or 11 I started buying vinyl from money I got for birthdays, christmas, etc… I swapped LPs with friends to make copies on tape when I couldn’t afford to buy them myself. I remember going to school with records in my school bag to lend to friends. On Saturday afternoons we all headed into town and spent most of our time in our favourite record store flicking through and listening to albums, spending money whenever we could afford to. I always felt it worth spending money on good music. I still do today.

During the 80’s CDs came on the market and I ended up paying for the same music again. At the same time the big labels started producing what I call disposable music. Crap bands that were all about looks and little about quality. And over the past 20+ years this has only become worse. I refuse to pay for music I know I won’t be listening to again in a few months’ time.

Yes, my buying habits have changed. So has my taste in music. I guess in a way I have to thank Apple for that About 4 years ago I bought an iPod and that’s when I started ripping most of my music to mp3 format. Shortly after I got broadband and filesharing suddenly became very attractive. It opened up a whole new world to me and introduced me to lots of music I never heard of before. Along with the popularity of broadband came good and legal social music services like Epitonic, last.fm, and GarageBand which easily let you discover new music. And let’s not forget great independent Internet radio stations like Soma FM, Whole Wheat Radio, and great net labels like Magnatune who care about their artists as well as their customers. Somewhere along the way I stopped listening to most terrestrial radio, it just wasn’t worth listening to any more. It was like cheap bubble gum that you chew a few times, spit it out and it leaves you with a bad aftertaste. Bubble gum music. Yuck.

I still buy music. The difference now is that I order directly from labels like Sazanami, Motor Sounds Records, Magnatune, or online shops like CD Baby. I buy music directly from artists’ websites who I find whilst browsing the net and MySpace. I know where my money goes and that the artists are benefiting from it. I participate at sites like Musicbrainz and Discogs by adding meta data. I contact artists/bands/labels to get them to sign up with last.fm so other people can discover the same music as myself, enjoy it, and hopefully buy it.

The big labels have only themselves to blame. Fuck them. They are old and greedy bastards who are completely out of touch with what’s happening. They simply can’t, and don’t want to see that DRM’ed music hurts not just the customers but also their artists. They force artists to conform and destroy them and originality in the process. They are lying to us by pulling stats out of their asses about the damage apparently caused by filesharing, and their frivolous lawsuits are ruining low-income families. What for? A few dollars? Scumbags. Let them die a slow and agonising death, they deserve it. And their $1 levy won’t rescue them.