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Digital Slob Curt Brandao |
Sleep soundly
file swappers, as
music flowsMost Digital Slobs can sleep through the night with a clear conscience. That's a bit surprising when you consider how much shuteye music industry execs have lost worrying about all the unauthorized music many of our computers download as we snore away.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who in effect gave us the key to the music candy store with the iPod MP3 player, may have dulled our sugar buzz just a tad with the new iTunes Web site that sells pop music for 99 cents a hit (actually, bad songs cost just as much as the hits). In its first two weeks, the store sold about 2 million songs. That sounds impressive, but less so when you consider that all those downloads could fit into fewer than 270 new top-of-the-line iPods.
To give the uninitiated some perspective, imagine renting an airplane hanger to house your current CD collection, and you'll have an idea about the digital storage capacity of an iPod.
Music piracy is wrong ... kinda. It's not as wrong as taking half the boiled shrimp off a buffet table at a wedding reception, or treating one movie ticket like an all-day pass at Disneyworld, or telling a girl you'll call her after a date and then leaving the country. We've seen people do all these things, and no one gets arrested (or extradited).
True, 99 cents a song sounds fair. But I don't know many people who bought a computer for $1,000, a 7,500-song MP3 player for $400 and high-speed Internet access for $50 a month who are now ga-ga about the prospects of shelling out another $7,500 to amass a music collection, even if it is only 99 cents at a time.
Record labels are trying to shame file-swappers into cutting it out, and file-swappers are trying to reach a critical mass and get the suits to throw up their hands and admit the truth: The music industry got out of the music business years ago. Image used to sell sound; now sound is selling image.
Watching MTV, it's hard to summon up even crocodile tears about file-swapping's "erosion of artistic integrity." Let me ask you. What has more musical merit: Beyonce Knowles' bare midriff, J.Lo's bare midriff or Christina Aguilera's bare midriff?
Record labels know image is everything, but they won't admit the flipside is now also true, that the music has become little or nothing. It's hard to pinpoint when the tide turned, but I believe Ethel Merman was the last songstress to have a hit single without a pierced navel.
Icons like J.Lo and Justin Timberlake don't just sell CDs. They sell Powerade, Pantene Pro-V conditioner, thongs, casual sex and lip gloss (though I think both J.Lo and Justin use more lip gloss than they actually sell).
So, the engine of commerce is not grinding to a halt. We're not stuck watching an Amish trio sing homilies with a washboard base on cable access TV because no one else can make a buck.
Therefore, they should just give music away on the 'Net, or on CDs stacked outside Barnes & Noble. Bulk mail them. Drop them from planes. Use CDs to advertise a pop star's next strip tease/pay-per-view concert. Keep the singers out of the limelight (mercifully) until the big day. How much would teen girls pay to be the first to see Timberlake's new meticulously styled goatee? The answer would make music execs smile as surely as it would make my stomach churn.
But until the suits admit their bread and butter is milking eyeballs, not eardrums, I doubt the consciences of Digital Slobs will ever rouse us from our peaceful slumber as our computers download through the night.
Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's
production editor. Reach him at
at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com