You know what? I’m fairly left wing, I think quite gung ho with my attitude toward social freedom and anti establishment and all that. Or at least I know what I’m not. And yet, I struggle to care about illegal downloading and internet distribution etc. I don’t give a monkeys. I don’t when it comes to the population, anyway. Do what you want! I don’t really write music anymore. If I do I do it for the sheer joy of creating something. Have it for free for all I care, it’s probably not very good anyway. And if you like it, great! I don’t want to struggle to make money from it. It was hard enough before mp3 downloading. I download all the time, legally. I use spotify, primarily on mobile because I can bung my phone into the kitchen speakers and listen when cooking, or make playlists for long car journeys. I also also have an iPod for this purpose using my main digital music library via iTunes. Spotify doesn’t replace iTunes for me, mainly because you can’t sort playlists alphabetically.
I’m going to take a brief aside here. WHY, SPOTIFY?!. I can share my music with people on facebook, I can find any CD I want on there, with a few exceptions. But can I sort my left hand list of albums, and subsequently the one that shows up on my phone, alphabetically? Automatically? NO. I can’t. What a massive, huge ballache. Like I have the time to do it manually. I did once, and it sucked and soon more additions broke it all up again. I hate this non-feature. Less facebook integration more user friendliness please, Spotify Inc. I pay you my money I want my feature.
Phew. Rant over. No, the reason I download legally is because for many years I suffered massive panic attacks at the thought of being arrested for mp3 downloads. It sounds as crazy to me as it does to you but I still get edgy at the thought of this, even though I know in reality it is extremely unlikely. I don’t like doing anything untoward on the internet for this reason. The massive paranoia many people seem to have about getting caught is particular to the internet in my case. I guess given my self professed deep integration with the internet is pretty much why. I don’t even like receiving illegal files on a physical storage medium. It just messes me up inside. So yes, I used to get panic attacks over it and probably still would if I gave myself the chance. But I don’t. I’m nice and legal. The trouble is this extends to remixing etc. for me. There’s no way I would ever attempt something madeon did because I would fear I’d get caught. I might try this for myself in my own home without publicising it but I doubt i’d ever put it out there. Stupid? Yes. Perhaps when I’m feeling brave I’ll try something. The closest I have come is DJ’ing in ableton live, with records I own. Great, except I don’t own many dance records and I’m certainly not going to record them from Spotify (ah! another spotify weakness!) So you can all do what you want. I’m sticking to my legal status. And you can try and convince me otherwise but it’s unlikely I’ll do it. It’s a mental health defence not a political stance.
However. There is an alternative for me, it seems. Up until recently, I knew little about Creative Commons [CC]. However, their mission statement sounds right up my street. The particular part that appeals most to me is ‘legal…infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation’. For me, for aforementioned mental health reasons, this is like opening a door to freedom. I am so constrained by my own wish to abide by rules set out that suddenly the internet is providing me with rules that I can abide AND be creative with. It allows me to do this:
CC-BY 2.0 Jon Mountjoy
completely guilt free. ’But it’s just a picture on the internet!’ I hear you cry. At my worst I was particularly paranoid about even getting a picture from image search and putting it in a forum or whatever. It wouldn’t last long as I pulled myself together but that pinch of doubt isn’t a very nice feeling. Those days are long behind me but there’s still that twinge of guilt every time I ‘steal’ something.
Bizarrely, as if by some sort of intervention, yesterday (Sunday 9th October) I happened to be going to a gig of a band I used to be in, and doing the sound. Tokyo Rosenthal, was over from america and the band teamed up with him to play a gig, previously having done so a couple of years back. But Tokyo Rosenthal was not of interest to me on this occasion. In fact his mandolin and guitar player was, one Mr Charlie Chamberlain, and even then it was more the big CC logo stamped on his poster for his new album. So imagine my fever that this rather talented musician had brought the subject of my next blog right into my hands! He has made his album a free download under CC, as he has ‘reimagined’ music underneath some acappela bluegrass singers.
When I asked Mr Chamberlain about his album, he said that he had attended a talk by Lawrence Lessig and how remix culture is a particularly hot topic in the states. I’d never actually thought about it much since the lecture on friday, if I’m honest, but I’m glad I now have. Over the past few days it’s germinating some seeds in my brain about various things. Since talking to Charlie I’ve been on his website and downloaded his album. In fact I’m listening to it now, it’s pretty good, if you like Americana. I have a two reservations though. Not about his music, more about this creative commons business and his distribution. The first relates directly. There’s no mention of CC on his website that I can see. In fact the first mention I have found of it, other than his poster at the gig is in the booklet for the CD. I think this is a bit of a shame really! I was a little concerned at first as at the gig Charlie had said to me (and I paraphrase) ‘It uses acapella’s so I can’t sell it without licensing so I released it under CC’. When I didn’t see anything on the website alarm bells started to ring. Can people use CC as an excuse just to do anything and then throwaway any guilt? Obviously CC has a decent legal foundation and if it came to it then working like this wouldn’t really hold in any court should it come to it, but if this did become the case, surely it weakens the message behind CC? or does CC not care? To be honest, I have not read enough or explored the actual nuts-and-bolts of it all to make an informed opinion. However, as Charlie’s CD booklet does mention all the information necessary, that it is a ‘Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Unported Licence‘ I can go ahead and do this:
Download Track 4 ‘Charlie Chamberlain – John Hartford: Long Hot Summer Days’
CC BY-NC 3.0 Charlie Chamberlain www.charliechamberlain.com
I would have put the above file straight into wordpress but I’m loathe to pay $20 to allow myself to do this this so early into my blogging life.
I mentioned a second bugbear with how Charlie has gone about this. If you go to his website, the only way to download this album is by liking him on facebook. Those who were bored by my previous facebook rants may want to look away now. PLEASE if you’re going to put something free on the internet give me an option to download it without having to log into facebook of all effing things. What if I don’t have a facebook account, as I am now pretending I don’t have? It seems silly to only allow access to something for free by hitting a facebook button. A facebook button appears to be a new form of commerce, in a sort of pay not in money but in approval. But I don’t want to approve just yet as I’ve not downloaded the album to see if I like it. In the truest sense of the word ‘like’. Seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. I think my favourite form of this is ‘buy me a beer’ buttons. So just give me £2 (i’m northern, it’s that cheap, or near enough) if you like what I do, or not, your choice. Plus buying a beer is a traditional gesture of thanks. Anyway, I digress. If you too want to check out the album (and it is very pleasant I tell you), without telling facebook what you are doing, then you can get it here from an additional part of his website. I hope Charlie doesn’t mind me doing this and if he does, and he’s reading this, just let me know!
So why is all this now important to me? Well I am going to link it back to something from the top of the blog – downloading music. I think it all comes down to a question of value, and the person who has made this the clearest most recently was Rory Sutherland, an advertising man. I heard him on Radio 4′s ‘Museum of Curiosity’ this Monday night, the 11th October, 2011. It can be listened to on the iPlayer, if it is still this week. Below is a transcription of his statement. It is very much worth listening to this episode in general:
“If you actually look at the human value system, it’s so messed up to begin with I don’t feel particularly guilty for tampering with it. We don’t actually have an internal scale of value that makes any sense. What we’re prepared to pay for things is extraodinarily subjective and incredibly contextually determined. Try this simple experiment: If you go to Tesco or Waitrose, there’s a type of tea and it’s about £6.50 for 25 teabags, and you will experience actual physical pain paying for this. Now, first of all, all of you have paid £3 for a pretty average coffee on the street; you’ve all paid £3 for appalling wine in a pub, so actually 24p for a really really good cup of tea in terms of the human pleasure it may deliver isn’t all that bad. If you look at music, I would argue that a digital file of music is probably more valuable than a track on a CD – it’s certainly more useable, you can listen to it in more places, you can find it more easily and yet weirdly, because it’s intangible, our willingness to pay for it actually declines. Things that are just inexpensive and reliable sources of pleasure like television and music we tend to undervalue. On the other hand if you look at property, which has scarcity value, tangible value and status value, we bid it up to an absolutely absurd level. So, most of the benefits of consumer capitalism has brought to the west in terms of better goods at lower prices have been completely mopped up by property price inflation. Bizarrely although we consider consumerism as growing, in fact the percentage that the median household spends on consumer goods is about 33% down on the 1970′s.’
I find that’s a pretty sobering statement from a man who is more than qualified to explain human nature when it comes to buying and not buying things. Having thought about CC etc. for a few days now I’ve decided that it is probably the future of copyright and music downloading in the digital and online age. CC places a value on digital files by making it free. it’s not a value in the traditional sense, more like that of a facebook ‘like’ button but it is honest. It stares the internet in the face and turns the ease of use of distribution into an advantage. It is almost like an advanced honesty box and I think that if you are the sort of person who will seek out CC content you are the sort of person who will donate to the artist.
The internet is an ‘other place’ to our earth. It’s practically it’s own world, or at least has no international boundaries, so it seems odd that each country should have it’s own laws for such things when we find ourselves at a time when collaboration over the seas with fellow ‘creativists’, as I shall call them, is so easy. Why should Mr Cameron and co restrict me in how I can work and what I can share with the citizens of Mr. Obama or Dr. Papoulias, to pick two random examples? Obviously there are some ethics involved here but in terms of art and creative content, it should be allowed to be set free. Until of course we want to start making some money, and that’s where it gets a bit eggy. But I’m not going to get into that debate as it bores me to tears, and I’m at 2000 words already so I suspect your tear ducts are starting to well up with that same emotion.
I intend to post up a brief interview with Charlie Chamberlain about his CC journey in the near future. It’s also given me a fresh outlook on things that I have been a touch cynical toward recently, so if my creative juices ever return I may try and put something out there under CC. In fact, there’s some recordings I’m working on which the artist may very well allow to be put out under CC. Watch this space!
So there you go. 2327 words. Not bad for someone who ‘doesn’t give a monkeys’. I sometimes wonder just who I am trying to kid.
