So I’ve been thinking about music today and worrying about all the compromises I am willing to make for it . We just got so much access now, music blogs (which I love), online record shops (which I both love and hate), downloadable mixes, myspace players etc etc. It’s all too much.
And some of this music (alot of this music) we can get for free, or we can hunt on google, or we can bitorrent it or buy some russian website, or get from a friend on cdr, or bluetoothed from a phone. It’s the same feeling I had when I was in thailand and there was just about every film, every album, all there so little money. I remember feeling this weird combination of greed and guilt. All this pent up consumer lust when confronted with this incredible all-you-could-eat super cheap media buffet. At the time I was just a bit overwhelmed and didn’t buy anything cause my frames of reference and all sense of the value of things was suddenly in freefall.
The same thing is happening, less dramatically, each day. More and more music I listen too (and dj with) I’m getting for free. All these amazing music blogs (see below) fill up my hard drive and my listening time. I still by 12″ and albums of course, cause I love it-but somewhere along the way the link between music as a commodity and the importance of paying an artist properly has gone astray.
Alot of the stuff I buy is second hand or some dirty re-edit, either way the artist doesn’t get paid and I get music online from a million different places all of varying degrees of legitimacy, all with varying degrees of self justification and the associated guilt attached.
Poor me.
Well not really poor me, more conflicted me-cause the more I think about it the more it does my head-so I don’t-I just keep ‘doing it cause it feels good’.
So here’s my solution.
Get some clever computer dude to write a plugin for itunes which will make a note of every track I play. I pay £50(or something) a year to have a ‘pirates license’ and the money gets divided fairly between the musicians/record labels/rights holders of the music I’ve been enjoying.
I sleep easy -everyone get’s their piece and if there are enough honest music heads out there (which I reckon there are) it starts to add value to music again.
Anyway here’s a track I bought (second hand mind you) cause Ithe cover was so freakin cool and it became one of my alltime favourite jazz albums. From the amazing The Awakening;
ahmad jamal-stolen moments