Music (and Everything Else) on the Net

By Crispin Sartwell

All of a sudden a couple of months ago, my kids stopped bugging me to buy them cds. Hayes had downloaded a software package that he would prefer I didn't name, and suddenly it seemed that every song ever recorded was available to be downloaded and burned onto disk. They weren't buying songs from record companies; they were swapping them for free with other users.

Their tastes in music broadened immediately. I had been trying to tell these poor misguided tykes for ages that rap and punk weren't invented in 1999, that there were whole histories of wonderful stuff out there. But suddenly they were downloading early Snoop Dogg and even "Under the Boardwalk." They started to make their own mix cds and now they're just obsessed. Hayes has over fifty songs on his computer; his friend Mike over *five hundred.*

I too was obsessed with music when I was thirteen, but I couldn't listen to a lot of what I wanted to hear. We actually had to call radio stations and make requests, or save up our allowances for LPs. In fact, I'm *still* obssessed with music, and now I've got my kids downloading songs for me. Recently Hayes got me "Da Butt" by E.U.: classic piece of D.C. go-go from the eighties that I was afraid I'd never hear again..

Of course, some people, including the members of Metallica and various judges who have considered the Napster situation, have held that what my kiddies are doing is sheer theft. But I'm for it.

The concept of intellectual property is a fluid one; it necessarily responds to changes in technology. Before printing, there was no sense in the idea of copyright, and if people wrote books, they didn't do it for royalties.

When music had to be made by people at the same moment you heard it - that is, before the invention of recorded sound - it was not a physical object, and hence not a commodity. You could pay the musician, and the musician could buy an instrument. And you could buy performance instructions in the form of sheet music. But the performance itself was an amorphous set of vibrations in the air, something no one could own.

Edison's invention of recording changed all that, coagulated and fixed the amorphous vibrations into wires, cylinders, tapes, disks. You could go to the store and buy specific performances of specific songs. The performers themselves negotiated with manufacturers for the rights to reproduction, and the manufacturers came to think of these rights as essentially their own property, so that to reproduce performances without authorization was simple theft.

In the era of Napster and other software for sharing recorded music on the internet, we are returning at a much higher technological level to the era of the itinerant musician or wandering bard. Very very quickly music is changing from a a specific physical object to a set of infinitely reproducible digital signals that no one will be able to own or control or sell or buy.

As the vibrations used to fill the air, now the digital information flows through the net. In the famous words of the cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling, information wants to be free. Trying to stop music from flowing freely through the internet is going to be like trying to stop Niagara Falls with a sieve.

My own professional life is affected by a similar situation. A recent Supreme Court suit brought by freelance writers against major media outlets explored the question of whether newspapers and magazines should have to pay the writer again when the writer's work is reproduced electronically: in databases, on CD-ROMs, in internet anthologies.

The papers I write for pay me a flat fee and then (with my permission) issue my articles on the electronic wires: I don't even know where they're published. And anyone can copy and paste my stuff onto their web sites; I was a bit disconcerted but enthusiastic to find myself on "Yvonne's Place for Crossdressers," for example.

So a newspaper pays me a couple of hundred bucks, then people use the stuff for free. Would I like to get a bunch of money? Of course. But I also like to get read, and I recognize that now that print has been superseded, my writing consists of bits of information that are perfectly fluid, that can flow into and across and out of the internet in many different ways in infinitely many directions.

I read the "papers" every morning online. I can't imagine writing by simply dictating to a computer, but then I couldn't imagine switching from longhand to typing, nor typing to word-processing. And voice-recognition technology is quickly reaching the point at which the distinction between the written and the spoken word, fundamental for three millennia, is going to disappear.

Everyone knows that electronic books are already in the process of transforming publishing. But when you think about it, the idea of the book itself, which is fixed more or less by the physical dimensions of bound paper. As length becomes more fluid, literary forms such as the novel and the biography are likely to mutate. In a half-century, we may face an entirely different set of literary categories.

Also, the linear way in which we consume all these things is quickly disappearing into the indeterminate directionality of hypertext. When Hayes listens to songs he jumps around, samples, plays snatches, goes on, returns. Obviously, the way one reads or experiences a web site is far different than how one reads a book or newspaper, and that will be ever-more true of ever-more of our reading.

And we will potentially be able to make this stuff, receive it, and communicate it at almost any place and at almost any time. I'll simultaneously be doing research on punk rock in the world's periodicals, libraries, and sound archives while writing and editing a piece a piece on the Ramones and taking a bath. I for one am ready.

So I am not going to be able to control how people use my writing: we have quickly reached a point at which no one really owns what they write anymore, and no one owns the writings they buy from other people either. The same is in principle of true of movies, television shows, web sites, books, and so on.

Now there are various ways one might respond to this. But one thing that is not an option is just applying the old categories and procedures. The technology has taken us instantly beyond the point where that is possible. Digital information is infinitely malleable and infinitely reproducible with the click of a mouse. We are going to have navigate the new terrain, in which ownership of a text or a performance is not anything like the ownership of tangible goods.

One way to respond is by attempting ever-greater crackdowns on the flow of information, and various companies are working furiously on encryption and security technologies that will enable them to control and tax the flow of information. It may well be that when the technology gets sophisticated enough, people will be able to own digital information in exactly the same way that it is now possible to own a house or a car. And to some extent, it can seem that the survival of the "new economy" depends on such strategies, because in the long run that's the only way to wring the net for money.

That would be a terrible waste of the democratic and artistic possibilities of these technologies. What we need, rather, is some way to muddle through, some way to make it possible for some people to make a living while at the same time preserving the possibilities of creativity, access, even the illicit undermining of fossilized categories.

It may be, for example, that fewer acts are going to get their work put out by major record companies. And it may be that the production budgets that lead to the incredibly clean and sophisticated sound of the top pop acts are no longer going to be supportable, because they won't be underwritten by cd sales. On the other hand, it may be that new bands will find (in fact, they are already finding) interesting ways of marketing themselves over the internet and short-circuiting the incredibly narrow vision of the major labels. And the huge production budgets that lead to the sound of Britney Spears and Faith Hill are not self-evidently worthwhile; a few more rough edges would be welcome.

It may be that publishing companies could never recoup the multi-million dollar advances they pay to "authors" such as Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton. Maybe publishing will have to be decentralized; maybe it will no longer be profitable for multinational corporations. Ah well.

The days when the internet was an anarchist culture are over, but the anarchist possibilities have got to be preserved or we will lose not only the tremendously useful resources of research and expression that we have now, but possibilities of innovation, beauty, and pleasure that we can't now imagine.

Hayes is having fun exploring the world's music. To me, that's an education in beauty and truth, and the fact that it's costing him nothing is actually what makes it possible. And if we have to re-think the concept of ownership to make such experiences possible - and since we are going to have to re-think the concept of ownership anyway - then I think we and perhaps even Metallica will survive.

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