Home Taping Is Saving Music (And Always Has Been)
Back in the old vinyl days, every other album inner-sleeve was printed with dire warnings that "Home Taping Is Killing Music". I spent many an idle moment trying to envisage this: a big, jolly Treble Clef being battered to death by hordes of screaming Phillips Cassette-players, swinging microphones like morningstars around their (tape)heads, perhaps? Of course, what they REALLY meant was "Home Taping Is Cruelly Reducing Our Multi-Million-Pound Profit Margin By A Few Percent, Thereby Mildly Limiting Our Crack-Cocaine Budget". Or something like that.
But reducing the share value of an entertainments corporation wouldn't have the emotional impact of thinking you werre somehow "killing music", would it?
So we ignored their piffle and merrily continued trading tapes, didn't we? And the real truth was this: not only was our tape-trading not particularly hurting the megacorps' profit margins; in fact it probably, on balance, INCREASED record sales. I don't think I, or my various friends over the years, are particularly atypical, so here's a quick anecdotal list of f'rinstances:
A friend hears a Billy Connolly album at another friend's house. Second friend later gives first friend a tape of the album. First friend plays this to death, and goes on to buy the Big Yin's entire back-catalogue - first on vinyl and VHS, later on CD and DVD.
In the early 80s I join an informal club called Frank's Tape Loop. We each make a compilation tape of our favourite music, and then mail the cassettes to each other on a round-robin basis. The upshot of this criminally-irresposible disregard for the copyright laws is that - without exception - every member of the Loop ends up buying whole heaps of albums by bands they'd never have heard without the wonder of Home Taping.
I was just about to continue this list, but then realised how monotonous such a list would be - the message is so simple and so obvious: the wider the range of music someone hears, the more music they will buy. The more someone is able to hear an album before buying it, the more confident they will feel that their investment will not disappoint.
So why does the record industry's paranoia continue to this day? We're now being told that music downloading is the big bad boogeyman of the moment. Yes, file-sharing is enabling people to obtain tracks (illegally) without paying for them, but what happens then? Does the music industry really believe that, if this was made impossible, people would always buy the tracks instead? I very much doubt it. In the days when tapes, not MP3s, circulated, I must have listened to a hundred average-to-crappy tracks for every one that led to a purchase. But without being able to hear all that stuff for free, there's no way I'd have randomly gone out and bought albums by Husker Du, Foetus, Nick Cave and so endlessly on.
The point is that home taping, and now file-sharing, is the ultimate "try before you buy" scheme. In effect it enables music fans to do the music industry's marketing for them - for free.
And if the industry really wants to know why sales decline, they should look instead to the cookie-cutter, follow-the-leader mentality that leads to endless identikit releases from the major labels. And the pop, rock and classical divisions of the majors are all equally guilty in this regard. But that's a whole 'nother High Horse which will have to wait its turn.
But reducing the share value of an entertainments corporation wouldn't have the emotional impact of thinking you werre somehow "killing music", would it?
So we ignored their piffle and merrily continued trading tapes, didn't we? And the real truth was this: not only was our tape-trading not particularly hurting the megacorps' profit margins; in fact it probably, on balance, INCREASED record sales. I don't think I, or my various friends over the years, are particularly atypical, so here's a quick anecdotal list of f'rinstances:
A friend hears a Billy Connolly album at another friend's house. Second friend later gives first friend a tape of the album. First friend plays this to death, and goes on to buy the Big Yin's entire back-catalogue - first on vinyl and VHS, later on CD and DVD.
In the early 80s I join an informal club called Frank's Tape Loop. We each make a compilation tape of our favourite music, and then mail the cassettes to each other on a round-robin basis. The upshot of this criminally-irresposible disregard for the copyright laws is that - without exception - every member of the Loop ends up buying whole heaps of albums by bands they'd never have heard without the wonder of Home Taping.
I was just about to continue this list, but then realised how monotonous such a list would be - the message is so simple and so obvious: the wider the range of music someone hears, the more music they will buy. The more someone is able to hear an album before buying it, the more confident they will feel that their investment will not disappoint.
So why does the record industry's paranoia continue to this day? We're now being told that music downloading is the big bad boogeyman of the moment. Yes, file-sharing is enabling people to obtain tracks (illegally) without paying for them, but what happens then? Does the music industry really believe that, if this was made impossible, people would always buy the tracks instead? I very much doubt it. In the days when tapes, not MP3s, circulated, I must have listened to a hundred average-to-crappy tracks for every one that led to a purchase. But without being able to hear all that stuff for free, there's no way I'd have randomly gone out and bought albums by Husker Du, Foetus, Nick Cave and so endlessly on.
The point is that home taping, and now file-sharing, is the ultimate "try before you buy" scheme. In effect it enables music fans to do the music industry's marketing for them - for free.
And if the industry really wants to know why sales decline, they should look instead to the cookie-cutter, follow-the-leader mentality that leads to endless identikit releases from the major labels. And the pop, rock and classical divisions of the majors are all equally guilty in this regard. But that's a whole 'nother High Horse which will have to wait its turn.
posted by PaulV at 20.2.05
2 Comments:
Dead right PRV: There are several bands I only discovered becasue someone gave me a bootleg tape: If you like it that much you buy the official album of what you've already bootlegged, and the rest of their stuff too.
Which is only repeating what you said, but I agree nonetheless!
Top Bloggage.
The counter argument (and I have to play devil's advocate here) is that P2P sharing gives easy access for someone to download the whole of Big Yin's back catalogue for free should they desire it, without having to wander down to the nearest music store. This ready access to music can cut out the record company altogether.
Not that I'm complaining, mind. Artists really should get the lions share of the profits.
An interesting alternative I like is Audioscrobbler - it records your listening habits, and puts you with musical "neighbours" who share similar tastes. You can then listen to streaming station of music built from this database, tailored to your tastes (or if you want to be really experimental, someone elses). The songs aren't permanently downloaded, but it lets you listen to tracks you wouldn't normally try.
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