Most everyone loves free entertainment, especially when it's easily available and in nearly unlimited supply. The Internet, which has established and continues to expand upon its role as facilitator of all things complementary, can easily serve up a sensory overload of sounds, videos and images, that are as accessible as they are fleeting. The question is, at the end of the day, does music procured or otherwise experienced on the World Wide Web leave a lasting impression?
In more than one positive way, the answer is, in fact, yes. There's no denying the Internet is an amazing outlet for learning about and experiencing music of all kinds. Collectively speaking, though, it seems ubiquity and vast availability also threaten to leave a rather unfortunate and overriding impression on some listeners: that music as a whole is plentiful, disposable and therefore valueless.
These days, it's quite difficult to place value on anything that constitutes intellectual property, because the Internet has made it all into such a vague notion. Recorded music is no longer necessarily tangible, so in a way it's no longer really a finite product either. Of course, the value of something doesn't have to be in monetary terms, but the bottom line is that in lacking cost, music risks becoming something that is perhaps worthless in more abstract ways.
On the forefront of the Internet trends that devalue music are premature album leaks, which suck the prestige and life out of new an artist's new material more than just about anything else. After all, what could be more anticlimactic than downloading a possibly unfinished version of an album via compressed song files before the artist even intends it to be available? The Raconteurs and Gnarls Barkley were recently victims of this, and they both had to respond by pushing up the release dates of their albums.
So on the one end you have overly-avid downloaders mucking things up, and on the other end are organizations like the R.I.A.A. who are endlessly myopic, passing down limitations that do little to help anyone at all, least of all the artists themselves. For example, according to the R.I.A.A., it's actually illegal to rip purchased CDs to a computer, which seems real smart considering that sales figures of CDs are already in an epic nosedive.
In other ways, the big business end of music is doing an admirable job in attempting to re-establish the faded notion of intellectual property. By providing incentives for listeners to fall in line and respect the boundary between possession of music and mere appreciation of it, perhaps they've finally hit upon a model that could prove successful.
Within the last couple months, the online radio service Last.fm has made huge strides into what could be an important part of the future of online music. The service now features millions of entire tracks from artists on all four major labels, available to listeners for free. The labels receive a payment every time one of their songs is streamed, which is possible since the songs are ad-supported, allowing Last.fm to recoup expenses. Each track is available to be listened to only three times before you have to purchase it, though, which seems fair enough, all things considered.
By agreeing to this, the record industry seems to have taken a smart cue from the television industry, which realized that putting TV shows online with commercials was a viable and intelligent way to offer people what they want (free online entertainment) at a different kind of price - essentially at the expense of time and purity of experience.
Listeners can now stream songs for free in the context of the incredible music exposure vehicle that is Last.fm, but they are forced to be at the mercy of ads while doing so. Perhaps the future of commercial music lies inevitably in one big expanse of desirable content mired in a minefield of ads, since this is the one way to make free content still economically viable.
I guess weighing the benefits boils down to how much you really want to be glued to a computer screen while listening to music, and how much you care about ads in your face. Personally, I'd rather keep Internet listening to a minimum. But that probably won't stop me from using the new features of Last.fm.
If you illegally"" transfer music from CDs to your computer and are also concerned about the R.I.A.A.'s policy, let Ben know at bpeterson1@wisc.edu.
