Pop music
Just ask George
Marcus Berkmann
Downloading music from the Internet: now there's a subject to get the heart rac- ing. Have you ever tried it? Once you've realised you have the wrong software, and you've bought the right software, and you've spent ages searching the web for anything (anything) worth listening to, and you've found out just how long it takes to download the measliest tunes, and you've bought your MP3 player to hear these tunes, and — biggest shock of all — you've received the previous quarter's telephone bill, the whole notion of 'free' music is revealed as a sham and a fraud. Whereas if I go round to my friend George and bor- row some CDs, that takes about five min- utes and costs me nothing.
Time and money: these are the variables concerned. If you have lots of time and no money (i.e., you are a student) than it makes sense to blag as much free music as you can, however much effort it takes. When I was a nipper it was customary to tape tunes you liked off Radio One (you could also buy four Trebor Fruit Salads for an old penny, but let's not venture too far down that particular path). In the early 1980s the British music industry launched its much loved Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign, and demanded huge levies on blank tapes to stop people buying them. It was a hopeless argument. Most people I knew who taped other people's records were taping stuff they wouldn't otherwise have bought. Or they were tap- ing stuff to see if they wanted to buy it. Or they were taping their own records for their own use and convenience. The point is that only a tiny minority of tapers built up huge tape collections, which usually melted as soon as you put them in a car stereo anyway. In short, Home Taping Wasn't Killing Music At All. It was barely even a flesh wound.
The current hoohah over Internet down- loads is essentially the same debate, with added technology. The great multinational record companies remain fanatical about protection of copyright, and their recent legal assault on Napster, an Internet site that acted as a sort of clearing house for people looking for musical downloads, was as predictable as it was ruthless. If you are an American student — a fate we obviously wouldn't wish on anyone — Napster must have seemed like a valuable public service. The music obsessive can never hear too much, can never have too many records, will go on buying and listening to music until death. So a relatively inexpensive way of listening to new tunes — once you have overcome the technical hurdles — can only be highly attractive. A few people might have built up vast libraries of downloaded tunes, because a few people always do. But most of us, I suspect, would have used a facility like Napster as a sort of self-service radio station. You hear something new, you like it, you go and buy the CD. Nap- ster's defence claimed that the site actually generated more CD sales, which I can believe. Unfortunately the judge didn't. Bye bye, Napster.
And yet the Internet and its more fevered fans have probably brought all this on themselves. The endless crazed propa- ganda, telling us that shopping as we know it will end and we'll all be buying every- thing off a screen by 2006, has talked up the threat of Internet companies as well as their market value. The music business, in particular, has had to endure thousands of doomy articles predicting the end of CDs, record companies and high street retailers, purely because of the opportunities MP3 technology offers. Most of it sounds like wishful thinking: record companies are far too clever and nasty to surrender that easi- ly. Besides, as everyone has now realised, people like going shopping. They like look- ing at things before they buy them, and they like going for a coffee afterwards. Shopping is at heart a social activity. The Internet, of course, is a solitary activity. Apparently, sitting in front of a screen for hours can eventually affect your eyesight.
I have to admit, I'm torn. On one side, the grasping charlatans of the music busi- ness. On the other, the Internet nerds, all humming their theme tune 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me'. In the end, though, the lawyers will win and the consumers will lose. Nothing changes. Heard the new XTC album yet?
'I'm on century duty.'
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