Home Taping
blog
Home taping didn’t kill music, it is the death of home taping that has killed music. When you had to listen to the full song when making a compilation you really cared about the sequence and the quality of the song. When you listened to the radio with a finger poised on the record button, music had an intensity that has now been much diluted.
Momus talked recently about how the heavyhanded tactics of RIAA are good because they make music dangerous again. What bothers me about downloading is that it gives you such terrible karma: you can’t be a member of society without having empathy. We know that it is wrong to steal because we would hate it if someone stole something from us. Most law-breaking occurs because people lack empathy, they have become dissociated from the members of society they will affect by their actions. The more that music and software become corporatised, the easier it is to dissociate from the people affected.
The film industry recently attempted to evoke empathy by showing a few of the thousands of people who aren’t stars yet who rely on people paying to go to the cinema for their wages. Unfortunately, they did this before Quantum of Solace, a film that could have done with a lot less money thrown at the interminable action sequences and more on the threadbare script.
One solution would be to allow people to download files for free and then charge them if they listen to a song more than, say, ten times but it is difficult to see how this could be enforced and it might encourage people to listen to more music and make the attention they pay more diluted. In the past, when there was less music (and other distractions), an album was something that a listener invested a great deal of time into dissecting. Nowadays it is just something you use to stop yourself from thinking whilst commuting. It is a terrible fall.