File Swappers Buy More Music
Jul 10, 2003
CRLFCRLFNow Malik argues that "songs are available for download or peer to peer transfer well in advance of being available for sale at a local retailer, so by the time the track is commercially released - again the listener has tired of the track and lost interest in the product. As a result, another sale is lost." Well, yeah, maybe. But maybe not.
CRLFCRLFIf you believe that music publishers sell music, then you will not believe the survey results cited in CRLFthis BBC article. You will think people want free music. "That's just human nature." But if you believe, as I do, that the music industry actually sells storage media - the CDs on which music is prerecorded - then the pattern of listening online and buying offline makes sense. People are buying storage for the music they like. The recording of the music on the CD isn't the product, it's the inducement for people to buy the product, the CD itself.CRLFCRLFIt's not simply that, as Powel observes, "The music industry has failed to change with the times." No, it runs deeper than that. The music industry forget what it is that they were selling. Or maybe, they deliberately changed it.
CRLFCRLFLike many people, I have LPs (vinyl analog recordings) and CDs purchased in my youth. I remember rushing home from the record store (the place that sold LPs), unwrapping the cellophane, reading the liner notes, following the lyrics as it played on the turntable (a device for playing back vinyl LPs). These albums (another name for LPs) were artifacts: I would listen to this one when Luc and I filled the room with smoke, I listened to that one in the basement in Calgary, I saw that band three times in 1973. The music I could get anywhere - it was, after all, free for the taping from the radio. But the album is what carried the memory.
CRLFCRLFSomewhere along the line, the music industry tired of selling artifacts - they cost too much to produce, I suppose - and decided to start selling ideas. Ideas are not durable - at least, not these ideas - they churn, so you pump them out, you make them disposable. Sell something without lasting value, and so sell more. In so doing, the industry gutted music, removing from the sale anything that I would actually want to buy. It is the music itself that turned music from something concrete to something aetherial, and idea. And now they want to sell the idea, not the artifact. But to do that, you have to control the ideas. And that's what the copyright debate is about.CRLFCRLFDictatorships through history have tried to control ideas, and from the Roman repression of Christianity (everybody should read Gibbon at least once in their lives) to the Ayatollah's repression of rock music they have failed, every one of them. An idea is stored as a pattern of neural activity in a brain, and encoded and transmitted as a series of sound waves or digital transmissions. It slips across borders, it eludes radar, it flits from mind to mind. It cannot be controlled, except through control of the mind.
CRLFCRLFOh, they have tried. But as their failure becomes more apparent, the remedies sought become harsher and harsher - jail for decoding DVDs, billion dollar fines for indexing a file system - and the appearance of repression becomes more evident (with tens, maybe hundreds of millions of file sharers - 48 percent of all music, according to Malik - this is surely no outgrowth of a democratic movement).
CRLFCRLFWhen you devalue what you sell, when you take away from it anything that would actually induce someone to buy it, when you substitute something of no value in place of something of intrinsic value and expect to charge the same money, you have sown the seeds of your own demise as an industry. This is as true for publishing, for learning, as it is for music. Lambe (remember? from four hours ago) suggests that what we need is the disposable learning object. That would be, I guess, the Brittany Spears of learning. Bubblegum. Disposable. Valueless.
CRLFCRLFLearning should endure. It should endure, not by trying to capture and sell ideas, not by transforming the artifacts of learning into a wisp of nothingness, but by creating artifacts toward which the learner will be attracted by the ideas. Let the ideas, as they always have, flow free! Let them stir a child's mind the way Abbey Road (LP by a musical group called the Beatles) once stirred mine. You want to sell, you want to make money? Sell something real.CRLF
CRLFA learning object is an abstract. It is not a thing. It is virtual, not concrete. When you think of it as though it were a document, a page in a book, an artifact, you are not only headed down the wrong road economically (and even politically), you are misrepresenting just what it is that a learning object is. And you get, not just the economics, but the system as a whole, wrong. You start to think you can define learning objects, when they are undefinable. You start to think you can line learning objects into leat courses, when they are unorderable. You start to think that you can contextualize learning objects, when learning objects are things that fit into contexts.
CRLFCRLFThe university, historically, sold time, sold place, and service. It cannot remove all of these from what it sells, and expect the business to remain the same. Education, as we know it, now flows into the aether, where it has - really - always belonged. The university, the school, after an airy ride, must now look back and ask, what, really, do people value? And sell that. Or die.
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