To download or not to download

PRO

It’s hard to believe it has been 15 years since music piracy became a national concern. It all began with a couple of file-sharing programs that grew into massive networks with names like Napster, LimeWire and Kazaa. Suddenly, people were able to download and obtain music without paying for it. This shook up the music industry quite a bit  — remember when Metallica freaked out about it and essentially shut Napster down?

Music piracy has not gone away. Napster and Kazaa might be obsolete, but people are still able to get music through torrents as well as sites such as MediaFire and RapidShare. There have been efforts to shut down these sites or make it harder to download music from them, but it’s still impossible to entirely prevent music piracy. I grew up during the age of music piracy, and there are some lessons I have learned that I’m sure many of my peers also share and could be useful to bigwigs who like to cry out about how music piracy is hurting the industry.

At this point, I will probably never stop trying to find music for free. This is coming from someone who is primarily interested in music created by independent artists who already aren’t making much from their craft. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try to support the artists whose music I “steal.” If a band I like is coming through Washington or Baltimore, I will most definitely shell out some cash to go see it live. If I like a band’s record enough, I’ll even buy it on vinyl. I will always try to find a way to support an artist I care about even if it doesn’t necessarily entail purchasing the music digitally.

It’s not only the fans who seem to have this mindset nowadays. Many of the new bands I find on the Internet share their music for free on websites such as Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Even artists that are more established have been turning toward websites to stream their albums before they’re officially released. You’re able to hear all of their music and decide for yourself if you want to purchase it or not. For example, the California-based group Bleached just released its debut album yesterday. But for the last few days, listeners were able to stream the album on the music publication website The Fader. I was able to listen to the album in full without purchasing it, and I still want to spend the cash on a physical copy of the release.

So when people are whining about the negative effects of music piracy, I can’t help but think they’re outdated in their views. Sure, maybe Justin Bieber isn’t making quite as many millions as he once could have. But as we move further into the 21st century, it seems like fans and musicians alike are figuring out new and innovative ways to keep music alive and funded.

—Emily Thompson

CON

Music is an inherently ephemeral form of expression, which is why it’s easy to think rampant and flippant Internet piracy isn’t affecting how we hear and process our music. Like any other form of art, though, music takes time and effort to be fully understood, however briefly a song may exist between headphones and ears.

And yet, with the proliferation of music piracy, we spend less time and energy on our music because there is simply so much available for no price. For the moment, forget about whether artists should be getting paid for the music they create and just think about how piracy is ruining music for you as well.

It’s been said a thousand times before, but too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Alas, this is true of our culture today: A constant barrage of blogosphere non sequiturs, viral video outbreaks and entertainment overloads.

Music is one of the most quickly created, consumed and traded genres of information flitting around the omnipresent cloud, an ever-expanding archive spilling over with every aural texture and melodic idea that any amateur bedroom programmer or top-shelf pop star has ever tested out in GarageBand.

With so much noise pollution, it’s easy to forget that the music “album” — a purposeful collection of songs slowly going the way of the dodo — used to represent one of the pinnacles of artistic achievement, alongside a painter’s portfolio or a writer’s novel or an architect’s stunning cathedral.

Now, albums come out by the hundreds, and with our culture stumbling along at warp speed, no one wants to miss a beat. In one week, how much attention can you possibly give to Tyler, The Creator’s Wolf, The Black Angels’ Indigo Meadow and Rilo Kiley’s Rkives B-sides compendium, when the next week’s leaks of James Blake’s sophomore record Overgrown and Kurt Vile’s Walking on a Pretty Daze and The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual are already on their way?

The cycle goes on and on, but whether a listener truly loves all these artists or is just following a trend, the amount of music pirated does not reflect the quality of that person’s listening experience.

For instance, people who love dogs do not immediately take home every dog they think is cute, because those people would be unable to extol the right kind of attention to each pup.

Expand that idea to a larger scale and the problem is staring us in the face. As we continue to pirate we are simply rounding up every dog in the neighborhood, hoarding them while ignoring the enlightening experience of enjoying the company of one little friend.

Of course, it’s unfair to expect music fans to limit themselves permanently to smaller quantities of music, because curious people should be experiencing as much as they can.

Still, what listeners get out of music is equivalent to what they put into it. Piracy is the easy way out — once you have the record on your hard drive it’s easy to say you’ve heard it, give a split-second critique and move on to the next set of tracks.

With each successive Web rip, we step further away from the kind of critical recognition a lot of that music deserves. Slowly but surely, we are losing the understanding that music, despite sudden seismic shifts in cultural consciousness, will always exist as an emotional entity outside of society’s artistic trajectory.

We once had to hand over some money — a trade of value — to get a record back in return, something to dive into and experience as a work of art. Unrestricted piracy has taken away our ability to make music a part of ourselves, and over time, will subvert our ability to appreciate those sounds.

—Zachary Berman

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