An open letter to the collective recording industry of the world
Dear record companies,
Here’s why we’ve put up with your shit for so long.
We like music. I know that sounds corny and hackney, but really, why would we put so much energy into subjecting you to this much misery if we didn’t have a vested interest in it? We are not your average buying public. We don’t view music as a simple alternative to silence.
The reason why we put up with you in the 50’s up through the 80’s was because you were the only way to get access to music. No longer having to bank on orchestras swinging by your town to play your favorite tunes was an immediate incentive to boost your profits; for no other reason than that it was convenient. We wanted music around us — in our homes, at all times, whenever the mood struck us.
As you can see, we were willing to take a fair bit of abuse from you.
The Walkman came about in the early 80’s and gave you the first hint that music was more than a product of commerce to us. We did mix tapes in our scrawny bedrooms and wore our magnetic strips to their plastic cores. We wore those things in public even though they made us look like we were hooked up to some nefarious auditory science experiment.
Then the Compact Disc came about, and the only reason we put up with that fucking thing was because we didn’t have to rewind it. I will never forget one late night at 4 am, sometime in the late 90’s, walking home, drunken and ripe with teenage indifference, and finally reaching my tolerance limit of how much my discman was skipping. I chucked that little fucker into a nearby tree, sending shards of plastic shooting everywhere, each piece a little shrapnel of futile Taiwanese effort. Fuck the CD and fuck you for still trying to push that ridiculous media down our throats.
And good riddance.
That’s why the MP3 player was such a glorious invention. It is the culminaton of everything a music lover could ever hope for. No rewinding; no skipping; storage space limited only by imagination, advances of micro-technology and the size of your pocketbook. Finally, music was within our grasp, at our fingertips, whenever we wanted it, in whatever quality we felt was adequate.
Your reaction? Crack down hard on this newfound freedom. Let no joy come of this new technology. Let the liberated taste the cold, unfeeling stab of the litigation sword, wielded by a faceless, masked giant with a heart of stone and corruption. Yeah, that’s how we view you. If this comes as a surprise to you, you really should look into this thing we call “talking to people.” You wouldn’t believe what you might learn from it.
The thing is, you’ve always been in the way. We really don’t need you at all; you were just a gateway to the thing we really wanted all along.
I know you add more than just distribution to the equation: you’re the promotional engine that makes us pay attention in the first place; put new faces in line of sight with our ever dwindling attention span. Yeah, the problem there is, you abused that privilege. You didn’t pay attention to what we wanted; you paid attention to whereever the profit margin was spiking at that current moment without looking at the bigger picture.
Seriously. Fuck you people.
You’re stuck in a dichotomy of wanting longevity and instant gratification. Guess what, you had your chance. You gave us the greats, but you gave them to us for the wrong reasons. Now that the shoe’s on the other foot and we’re in control of what we want to listen to, you’re scrambling to find the next quick cash cow instead of getting with the times. It’s as simple as that.
While you’re still running around in circles like headless chickens, smiting anyone who freely trades art without concern for commerce with life-destroying litigation, the rest of us are slowly learning how to build an audience and make a career for ourselves without your help. I know I won’t make it, and many of us never will. But those that do deserve our admiration, for nothing more than the fact that they beat the system.
I can’t wait for you to die.
Sincerely,
Me
