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Chris at ANOE has sparked an interesting debate amongst the collected beards at DJ History (who’s name might prove a bit too apt for some) by linking to this article on little white earbuds which takes a look at the arguments surrounding the rights and wrongs of mp3 blogs.
Obviously, as people who write for a blog or two, it’s a subject which we have given a lot of thought and hopefully what follows won’t just read like somekind of lazy justification.
The vinyl age is over. It’s not that it wasn’t fun or that for two or three generations we were so sold on the idea of music packaged as a 12″ cardboard and plastic artifact that we forgot that this wasn’t music’s natural state. And cd’s, which were a nice postscript to the vinyl age, had there moments too-but in being less of ‘a product’ they were far less able to disguise the fact that what we were buying wasn’t ‘the music’-it was just a means to make ‘the music’ into something that could be mass produced and sold.
I’ve got nothing against that-I love a dusty record shop, the feel of a think cut cardboard sleeve and heavy cut vinyl. But let’s not confuse this object (beautiful as it is) with the thing itself. Music was only a ‘business’ for the time it could be commoditized and that commodity could be effectively controlled (via distribution). That day has passed and music is evolving to new state, the economics of which are yet to be defined-but certainly won’t serve controlling interests of the ‘music business’, rather will return the age old dictum of supply and demand.(with supply increasing based on things like performance and controlled access to the artist rather than on ‘product’)
Within that context the discussions on mp3blogs are sort of missing the point. The question is more about managing change, finding things you love and telling other people about them, trying to build a community that will one day help support artists you admire however things pan out. If you want to be part of that then you can, if not there are plenty of other ways to express a love of music.