Jammin’ with Ginger | Music lovers versus music criminals
This is Kristi Alexandra. She’s the Runner’s music columnist. She’s also a ginger. And she does have a soul. And she likes music with soul, too.
By Kristi Alexandra [culture editor]
Remember growing up in the ‘90s? When you’d wait for your favourite songs to come up on the radio and you’d have your finger on the “record” button on your chunky radio/cassette boombox? The cassette tape opened up reproducability for music, which, according to industry honchos was “killing music.”
This launched the slogan for anti-cassette taping as “Home taping is killing music… and it’s illegal.”
What those of you perhaps born in the ‘90s remembers better than cassette taping is burning blank CDs. These were effective because you could load a lengthy playlist and jam over 20 songs onto a single disk (you can thank compression for that), when only a few years previous, about seven songs could fit onto each side of a “mixtape”. If you don’t remember, this was (and in ways, still remains) a huge controversy because of the file-sharing nature of MP3s. And where did we get these MP3s? Well, none other than Napster.
Napster was essentially the OG of peer-to-peer file-sharing, and has the lawsuit history to prove it. Because of its obvious copyright infringement, Napster underwent several lawsuits. Napster users who boasted large libraries full of illegal MP3s were sued for tens of thousands of dollars, making an example of music “pirates.”
Following the company’s bankruptcy in 2001, alternative file-sharing software giants began to spring up, like Morpheus, Kazaa and most recently, Limewire.
The savvy music pirate knows that torrent files are the way to go to get that album that you wanted to check out as Napster-style software is a thing of the past. And with a quick transfer into your iTunes library, creating a digital mixtape has never been easier.
My favourite endeavour put out by music lovers these days, though, is the ability to set up a zip folder with a collection of songs. Indie musician Atlas Sound has taken to his blog to create mixes that include his own songs and songs that he’s listening to and packaging them in a zip file for his blog readers to download. Popular music site Stereogum recently did the same thing with a mix that included this year’s best music (according to them, and hey, it ain’t bad). It’s a quick and effective way to find out about new artists and music you might not otherwise have the chance to sample, and a good way to fly under the radar of music “stealing” as you don’t need to download any software or sign up for a membership to access it.
And hey, to all those record company honchos who think that just because we’re downloading/home-taping/burning CDs for free means I’m ripping off the band, think again. If we’re exposed to something really great, we’re more likely to show up to the concert when they hit our town and buy the vinyl from the merch table. That doesn’t sound like it’s “ruining music” to me.
