14 year old girls and music ethics
November 6th, 2007
Download, listen and delete.
For all my conjecture about an emerging ethics of downloading and filesharing, that’s really just about music fans, obsessive music fans. The broader audience - who really make or break those artists’ careers - aren’t worried about that kind of thing. In fact, as Andrew Dubber’s report demonstrates, to many of these listeners, the music recording has no value.
(He’s reporting on a music conference at Gigbeth music festival - billed as the world’s most diverse music fest, which seems to mean a fest with some good acts and a bunch of randoms.)
Dubber chaired a panel with six teenage girls (mostly 14) talking about how they use music. Basically, they download, listen and then delete. No money changes hands.
What really threw the music industry people was not that these girls were downloading music ‘illegally’ — but that it was of so little value to them, that once they tired of a song, it was entirely removed from their digital media and their lives.
interestingly, when asked what they might be prepared to spend on regular live performances that they could attend where they’d feel safe and their friends would also attend, they had no problem imagining a £10 spend every couple of weeks.
Their reasoning:
- Yeah, but that’s different isn’t it? What we download — that’s not really ‘music’, is it? I mean, it’s not worth anything. But going and seeing live bands with your mates — that’s an experience…that they seemed to believe that fame was the endgame of the music industry. By listening to music, they reasoned, they were helping someone get famous. Famous is better than money — and besides, you can get money easily if you’re famous anyway. Downloading music was an analagous activity to voting for Big Brother contestants.
Back to the cottage industry model - touring, shows, merch, tie-ins - and music as advance publicity?
November 6th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Then music is fully commoditised . . . like the provision of water, electricity, gas, sewerage. Problem is, the financial models haven’t caught up with this.
Sewerage workers still get paid and electricity plants are profitable - it just requires a different set of economics and an understanding that consumers may freely move between suppliers.
But who are the suppliers in a commoditised digital music world?
Probably the ISPs - which again seems to mean that the way forward is a blanket music tax on internet connections.
November 6th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
I like that they put different values on things consumed consciously and things experienced consciously. I suspect though that this is less to do with their being savvy consumer-critics than their perceiving life experiences as cultural capital to be accumulated.
In the contemporary context of popism, I’m surprised that that a separate idea of musical authenticity (between live work and recordings) persists in music consumers. But maybe that’s because popists are old.
I’m with them on chucking downloads away. I never keep podcasts and rarely keep tracks I’ve downloaded, unless I’ve listened to them so much that they’ve become a part of my world.
November 22nd, 2007 at 8:30 am
“…it was of so little value to them, that once they tired of a song, it was entirely removed from their digital media and their lives.”
isn’t that what ‘14 year old girls’ (to use a horrible generalisation, but i’m sure you understand my meaning) have always done? for decades it was cheap 7″ singles. when cds kicked in in earnest in the early 90s, record companies really struggled to establish cd singles, mostly because all the ‘14 year old girls’ were buying cassettes for their walkmen - simply because cassettes were cheaper - there was never any argument that the cassettes had better sound - and then they’d chuck them once the cheap cassettes got chewed up by their cheap walkmen 3 months later. what do downloads have to do with this phenomenon? they just happen to be the media of choice at the moment. but the way the actual music is treated is exactly the same. if record companies wish to mass promote top 40 product, they can’t eat their cake as well. did they really think for the last 5 or 6 decades that the music they were plugging wasn’t “of so little value to them”. if you make product rather than music, that’s how it will be treated, no matter what the format. the only difference now is that the record companies don’t get money for it. people now give them exactly what they’ve always thought their ‘music’ was worth.
November 27th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Seb, *no* to a blanket music tax on ISPs. It would be regressive, favouring the already wealthy (eg RIAA). The only way it could be distributed fairly would be through the most invasive surveillance of all online behaviour. Not to mention that much file sharing now happens via LANs and portable hard drives.
I’m not a capitalist, but when it comes to these issues I’m sympathetic with the capitalist notions that the customer and the free market are right. And they are currently speaking loudly and clearly about how they want to engage with music.