Years of Searching for a Community of Peers – A Few Previously Unpublished Thoughts

Revisiting a few of my unpublished articles, notes, and remarks from the last six years, I felt a compulsion to record them once and for all for whatever the act might be worth. I’d also dusted off my bookmarks folder of all my favorite socio-cultural blogs only to find that every one of them had since been retired and stripped from the Web. That realization reinforces my resolve to document these thoughts and questions which still remain on my mind years after penning them and my search for a community to share these ideas.

Here they are…

Copyleftism, Open Culture, and the Future of Mass Media: A Brief (Immediate) History of Media Culture

03-12-2016 (prev. unpublished)

In the last decade, we’ve seen the growth of niche markets and the rise of user-generated content as Youtube and Netflix quickly replaced television in millions of households.

Similarly, annual revenues of subscription-based music streaming services are on the rise while physical media purchases continue their rapid decline, (excepting the niche used and new vinyl markets with yet another year of monumental growth.)

Subscription-based media access is quickly replacing broadcast packages, where for a fixed monthly fee consumers can access any media under the provider’s network of licenses (Spotify and Netflix are this year’s most active examples.)

And media streaming hardware is gaining popularity, as Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV are each vying for the public dollar.

In the 3rd quarter of 2014, mobile use hit critical mass, rivaling television use in hours-per-day.  The smartphone and the tablet were proudly dubbed, “America’s First Screen.”  This is a direct reflection of the way users get their news and information and consume their media in the digital age.

The democratization of music-making and filmmaking technologies has made user-generated content a critical element of our global culture.  At present, 300 hours of new user content is uploaded to YouTube every minute.  And, paired with social media, user content can have instant exposure to millions of potential viewers with little to no distribution expense.

More important still is the continued-growth of the Open Culture movement.  Wikipedia has become a global primary source of information and has spawned innumerable spin-off wikis of their own.  Creative Commons makes content shareable and relevant as users are free to copy, transform, and combine ideas instead of creators scrambling to secure their works under digital lock-and-key.

The GNU Project, Copyleftism, and Open Culture are growing and having a greater impact on the world with each passing day.  Many major universities have opened their digital doors, offering online course material completely free to the public, and an ever-increasing number of texts, films, and music albums are finding free and legal accessibility on the web.

What does the future hold for these cultures?  By what system will creators be compensated for their work in the digital age?  Will media conglomerates succeed in locking down content, further-extending the reach of traditional copyright?  Will the public passively accept forms of DRM as simply part of the digital territory?  What lasting-impact will increased media accessibility have on the global audience?

And what’s next?

The following short piece was composed as a conversation with myself fleshing out the undeniable conflict surrounding the future publication of my book on mass surveillance, digital privacy, free culture, filesharing, and its impact on previously-reining media distribution models.

This write up, concluding with an intimate conversation with a scholarly peer, helped me arrive at a very difficult conclusion about my work.

Free

09-03-2016 (prev. unpublished)

I find myself faced with a terrible and heartbreaking conundrum. I’ve written passionately about the subjects of filesharing and of digital privacy for some time now. And to speak of one without acknowledging the other does a great disservice and misrepresents the very real circumstance that we face as a global culture. So both must be addressed.

Sadly, these subjects are strangely taboo in the economy of published works, as the acts are ostracized and demonized from the global conversation. It is inconsequential whether or not filesharing is a moral act, though there have been numerous examples in recent history demonstrating circumstances where they serve a far greater morality than the illegality of the act, itself.

It is understandable that anti-authoritarian reference texts by their very nature had to remain somewhat under-the-radar throughout history and in times of revolution. But in an age where subversive guides to filesharing and the protection of anonymity are a single Google query away, why does the world have to pretend that it is a secret anymore?

One might suppose that, if the establishment were to publicly acknowledge the actual frequency and simplicity of free media access, that the entire commercial market would crumble in a matter of days. Put simply, nothing can compete with “free.”

But in the age of mass surveillance, there has nonetheless been a tremendous clandestine tidal shift in the public conversation about any information unpopular with the powers that be. Society stubbornly ignores information which is readily and publicly accessible from any of thousands of sources which eliminate the relevance of commercial markets and services.

And this is the very conundrum I alluded to at the outset. In all likelihood, a book published outlining the simplicity and ease of filesharing and highlighting some of the greatest achievements in large, decentralized media library metamapping would be instantly struck down as a corrupt and evil text, and its author(s) would be punished to the fullest extent of the law for inciting anti-authoritarian thought and promoting illegal activities. The RIAA, international media conglomerates, and copyright troll organizations like Righthaven and Rightscorp Inc spend millions of dollars to make a public example of their accused infringers and a guide to its subversion would surely be rapidly extinguished.

There is also the dichotomy of the effect of sharing this sort of information to the public, itself. Those who wish to participate in filesharing already have the common sense to search for and educate themselves as to the best acquisition methods and means of protecting their anonymity without the need for a printed guide. (The internet already EXISTS.) So in fact, exposing this widely-practiced and incredibly simple activity to the public discourse may actually result in a net harm to the filesharing community.

The final factor of this puzzle is the nature of the format. The printed word, as beautiful, elegant, and surely powerful a thing as it is, is static and fixed upon the pages. Whereas discussions of emerging and ever-changing web technology are far better-suited to the dynamic and fluid environment of the net. Post-scarcity replicability, revisioning as networks and technologies rise and fall, zero cost distribution… each of these critically important factors make the internet – the very home of filesharing communities – the ideal means of disseminating related information. But as I’ve said – a simple Google search will yield all one needs to know. Numerous guides already exist – just none of them are acknowledged by the establishment.

The act of widely-publicizing the simplicity and commonality of filesharing might be enough to disrupt the status quo and inspire a global revolution of media consumption… I just don’t know if I’m ready to die (or disappear) for that cause.

Until 1987, (particularly before the passing of the DMCA), the publication of a work of this nature would have been plausible as I’d be protected under The Fairness Doctrine. My work would be justified as in the interest of public welfare and not as a malicious guide written to directly harm the media industries. However, the Doctrine was eliminated by the FCC in 1987. And the DMCA, (written by the RIAA and fellow industry giants), effectively eliminated any trace of that former protection, silencing this conversation and others like it from the public discourse. If the text were published today I would instantly become the target of countless litigations and would be sued in perpetuity. Most likely, my credit would be eliminated and my wages garnished by as much as 60%, destroying my livelihood in the US. My only course of action would be to flee the States and to seek asylum under a foreign government (or lack thereof), and to live out the remainder of my life in exile.

This isn’t just a statistical likelihood. Based on the legal actions of the media industries in their war on piracy, these lawsuits are a guaranteed and inevitable eventuality – precisely the reason that books of this nature do not exist in print, but are instead bound to quiet circulation in less-conspicuous digital environments.

And after constructing a spreadsheet and a library of over 130 books on related subject matter, I penned this note.

Untitled Note

08-27-2019 (prev. unpublished)

I’ve compiled 100+ books on the subjects of Free Culture, Open Culture, Copyleft, Creative Commons, The Post-Scarcity Digital Economy, Linux, and Pirate Culture from The Cathedral & The Bazaar to Galloway’s The Four. 

But the majority of these texts were published before 2010. I’ve pored over metadata on several sites and the only recent publication I’ve found is The Essential Guide To Intellectual Property by Aram Sinnreich; (I LOVED his book, The Piracy Crusade).

Surely the subject isn’t dead? Doesn’t the streaming service revolution, the struggle for artist compensation, and the ever-increasing consolidation of content distributors warrant further discussion of the matter?

Am I missing out on a wealth of analytical and philosophical texts about the digital economy?

As we enter the closing months of 2022, I’ll continue my search for a community where these ideas are actively discussed and debated. Perhaps one day I’ll find peers with whom to engage and further this discussion.

I welcome my readers’ ideas.

Cory Doctorow: Essential Readings on Content and Copyright

Every now and again I like to publish book reviews on titles relating to music, the content industries, copyright reform, and the future of media. Recently a Joycean scholar recommended that I explore the writings of Cory Doctorow on these very subjects. I quickly realized I’d had a few of his titles on my reading list already, so I wasted no time and read two of his books this week. The first was CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future from 2008, and the second was the more recent Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age from 2014.

Doctorow is no stranger to the legal world surrounding digital content. A Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author, Doctrow serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of Creative Commons, publishing many of his books under CC licensing. His writings and lectures focus on digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

Doctorow worked in London as the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and helped establish the Open Rights Group. He was named a Fellow of the EFF and the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He’s served as a professor at the University of Southern California and was the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and is also a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the UK. In 2012 Doctorow was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.

CONTENT features many of Doctorow’s essays and keynote speeches on digital media and copyright. It opens with a talk he delivered to Microsoft’s Research Group on the developing technologies of DRM outlining five key points:

1. that DRM systems don’t work
2. that DRM systems are bad for society
3. that DRM systems are bad for business
4. that DRM systems are bad for artists
5. that DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

The subsequent essays in CONTENT and the chapters of Information… expand upon and contextualize these ideas with discussions of copyright control at critical moments in digital content’s history, and outline the true costs and inherent ineffectiveness of anticircumvention. Doctorow offers a brief history of copying technology, from the piano roll to the Luther Bible, to the Betamax Ruling, the proto-DRM of Discovision, RealAudio, OpenMG, Blu-ray, TIVO, the 3DS, and on through the present day. He calls attention to each of the industry’s attempts to suppress the usability of a technology, from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to the Copy Protection Technical Working Group to closed-door meetings of the RIAA and MPAA, noting that each attempt at anticircumvention imposes critical security flaws into the affected components and greatly hinders further development of that technology.

But Doctorow is clear to differentiate the impact of DRM on technological revolutions of the past from its catastrophic effect on the current climate of the Web. In a chapter titled, “It’s Different This Time” he states:

We are remaking the world and everything we do in it. In the past, a regulation applied to VCRs would impact a few other industries or activities (making it hard, say, to record a home movie), but it wouldn’t have changed everything. You could regulate the VCR or the radio or the record player without regulating the automobile, the hearing aid, and voting machines along with them. That’s not true anymore. The stakes for getting copyright right have never been higher. There has never been a fight over entertainment-related technology where the consequences for everyone outside the entertainment industry were potentially more disastrous than they are now.

Later essays in CONTENT discuss the practicality and curious marketplace of ebooks, the grand potential but admitted caveats of metadata, and the world of fanfiction in an age of rampant copyright litigation. While earlier chapters establish a contextual history of content sharing innovations, the book closes with advice for content creators and artists and speaks for the viability of Creative Commons. The essays are brief and written in simple plainspeak, making the text a breeze of a read.

Information… picks up where CONTENT closes diving deeper into the impact of ever-restricting copyright laws. Doctorow examines the draconian consequences of unfettered censorship brought about by the engineered renewability of DRM technologies, citing the example of Amazon removing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four from all its Kindle users’ digital libraries in 2009 as just one case of potential abuse.

These texts also explore the consequences of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ruling surrounding The Pirate Bay, the Grokster decision, and other anti-piracy acts. He calls attention to the ramifications of these actions, adding some important context to the events:

In 2006, the Swedish police raided the data center that housed the Pirate Bay, an infamous BitTorrent tracker that had made a sport of taunting the entertainment industry. The circumstances surrounding the raid were contentious: it seemed the action had been improperly ordered by a government minister who was supposed to have an arm’s-length relationship with the police, at the behest of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

But what was more controversial in wider Swedish society was the collateral damage of the seizure: hundreds of websites went down at the same time as the Pirate Bay, as the police enthusiastically seized a data center’s worth of servers. These other servers—which hosted sites for businesses, nonprofits, and individuals—had nothing infringing on them, but the police couldn’t be certain of this at the time, so they took the lot. It’s like they decided that, since one store in the middle of town was carrying unlicensed products, they were going to shut down the entire shopping district while they figured things out.

Doctorow’s specific contextualizations always return to the broader global impact. In a chapter on the effects of copyright misuse on human rights, he describes the implications of the suit Viacom brought against Google and YouTube for not doing enough to keep their copyrighted works off their service. Viacom argued that YouTube was complicit in acts of infringement because it allowed users to mark videos as “private,” rendering them inaccessible to Viacom’s copyright-enforcement bots. He states clearly that:

Under Viacom’s legal theory—which was supported in amicus briefs filed by organizations representing all the major studios, broadcasters, publishers, and record labels—companies should allow the giant entertainment corporations to access all of our private files to make sure we’re not storing something copyrighted under cover.

Later chapters of Information… such as A World of Control and Surveillance, and What Copyright Means in the Information Age explore the present and future of copyright and cautions us of the consequences of unrestrained access in the hands of a few content distribution conglomerates. By this point, my notetaking consisted of highlighting entire chapters as every paragraph made a concisely-phrased critical remark about the state of technology and copyright. Snowden is mentioned, of course, as is the state of the music industry – both for the limitations brought about by licensing restrictions crippling the art of sampling as well as the transformation of the industry in an era of filesharing.

Doctorow points out that pivotal recordings like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique could never have been made in today’s copyright climate. He notes that “extending the scope and the duration of copyright doesn’t just criminalize a whole genre of music—it also puts the labels in charge of the only legal route open to musicians, effecting a massive wealth transfer from artists to labels.”

Doctorow’s writing isn’t all doom-and-gloom. He does propose that concepts such as blanket licensing have an incredible potential to benefit content creators, distributors, and consumers alike. And he is a tireless advocate for Creative Commons. He summarizes his position quite effectively when he states:

Content-blocking and surveillance are the province of book burners and censors, not creators and publishers. We have fought for generations for the freedom of conscience necessary to have a robust intellectual and creative sphere… …And since the Internet is likely to be a fixture in our lives and the lives of our children, we all have a duty to stop arguing about whether the Internet is good or bad for us and our particular corner of the world—a duty to figure out how to make the Internet into a force for helping people work and live together, with the privacy, self-determination, and freedom from interference and control that are the hallmarks of a just society. It’s not enough for creators and their industry to love free speech. We have to learn to share it, too.

The final chapter is a statement of great hope for the future. The internet provides the world with a potential for connectivity and collaboration and a richly diverse domain of access for the history of creative works. Artists are empowered to distribute their content directly to their fans, and the relevance of the old world distributive intermediary is shrinking. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a citizen of global culture. Doctorow’s books inspire both an appreciation for that fact and a participatory role in the shaping of our world to come.

Cory Doctorow offers his books for free at http://craphound.com/. If you enjoy his writings, please consider purchasing a copy for your library.

Are the Floodgates of Public’s Access to Information and of Global Communication Irreversibly Open?

Siva Vaidhyanathan’s writings on piracy culture, particularly The Anarchist in the Library, references numerous examples of the church and crown’s efforts to maintain a stranglehold on the flow of information to protect their power.  In a chapter discussing the history of control, there are clear parallels between the Catholic Church and those of the United States with the implementation of The Patriot Act.

In the 14th century, John Wycliffe was the first to produce a handwritten English manuscript of the 80 books of the Bible.  44 years after Wycliffe had died, the Pope declared him a heretic, banned his writings, and ordered a posthumous execution.  His bones were dug-up, crushed, burned, and scattered in a river.  Similarly in the 16th century, William Tyndale was the first to translate and print the New Testament into English.  As a result he was imprisoned for 500 days, strangled and burned at the stake.

William Tyndale, before being strangled and burned at the stake, cries out, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”. woodcut from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563).

By the dawn of the 21st century, the freedom of information that came with the printing press experienced its most-recent incarnation with the world wide web and social media.  The Patriot Act was the government’s struggle for control over the anarchic freedom that was the internet and came in the form of mass-surveillance.

Edward Snowden became the latest in the line of dissidents who worked to empower the public by exposing the corruption of the government, just as Tyndale and Wycliffe before him.  And a curious web search for the terms “Spanish Inquisition” + “Patriot Act” instantly returns a piece by Walter Cronkite comparing and contrasting the two systems from 2003.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger states in his article, Who Says We Know that “Professionals are no longer needed for the bare purpose of the mass distribution of information and the shaping of opinion.”  This same dissemination of distribution is what resulted in the music industry’s panic and frenzied struggle for control with crippling technologies like DRM and its continued anti-piracy campaign.  There is simply no longer a need for the monopolistic record labels that once commanded the industry.  Artists are empowered to distribute their content directly and can communicate with their fanbase without a commercial intermediary.  This artist-empowerment is expertly discussed by Amanda Palmer in her book, The Art of Asking (and in her TED Talk of the same name.)

Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking

In each of these milestones in the history of information freedom, the acts have been irreversible.  Gutenberg’s printing press empowered the public good through democratization of information – making it inexpensive and readily-accessible.  The web has been much the same, only exponentially more potent.

Still, small but persistent communities continue to prepare for a dystopian world war over information.  They archive the Wikipedia daily and hypothesize alternate methods of mass-communication should the Web as we know it come under fire.  Is their fear valid?

An eBook export of the Wikipedia

It is difficult to envision a scenario in which first-world governments could close the floodgates of the world-wide web without immediate and drastic reprisal from the public at large who have come to view the internet as a right and a public utility.  Furthermore, global commerce, banking, and the mechanics of industry could not likely stand to make such a sacrifice in the name of control.  Shutting down the web would thrust the global economy into an instantaneous dark age and entire systems of utility, government and finance would collapse.

What are your thoughts?  Is our access to information irreversibly free?  Need we take measures to stockpile and protect the information we have today in preparation for a darker tomorrow?

How Music Got Free – Cover to Cover

Thrilled to have received my copy of Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free in the post on its date of official publication, I made myself comfortable, put on a full pot of coffee, and eagerly dove into what I anticipated would be a fast-favorite addition to my library.

The book quickly settles into an exciting rhythm – its chapters circling around the activities of key figures in the story of the music industry and of music piracy in the last thirty years. It begins with the struggle of Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop his MP3 audio compression format over twelve years of fine-tuning and a constant battle for acknowledgment by a fiercely competitive industry.

The action then jumps to a few seemingly inconsequential men working at the PolyGram compact disc manufacturing plant in North Carolina – an unsuspecting locale for the most pivotal characters in the end of an industry.

A chapter later, we are privy to private exchanges between the newly-appointed CEO of Warner Music and his fellow overseers of the empire. As the story unfolds, we follow these figures through label acquisitions and purges, through major shifts in industrial policy, through aimless crackdowns on “pirates” including the elderly, the deceased, and a 12-year-old girl who’d downloaded the theme song to Family Matters.

As these individual stories progress, the reader develops an in-depth perspective of the tumultuous end of an era for recorded music. The author offers an astoundingly detailed account of the lives and conversations of core members of the Rabid Neurosis warez group and their suppliers. The storytelling is exciting, calculated, and fast-paced. In elegant Hollywood style, each chapter leaves one scene at a critical cliffhanger to pick up at a similar point of action from another of the sub-plots in the puzzle that was turn-of-the-century music.

I read How Music Got Free eyes wide from cover to cover, captured by every thrilling twist in the tale. What could have been a dry and drab account of compression algorithms and legalities is instead an action-packed saga of a dangerous underground organization where anonymity is critical and risk is always high.

The book also explores the advent of the iPod and the birth and death of numerous filesharing services like Kazaa, Grokster, Limewire, Bearshare, the rise and fall of TPB, and Oink, as well as a few contemporary players I’d never expected to see named in print.

The ending is incredibly satisfying, and even evokes a strong sense of emotion and empathy in the reader – yet another surprise I hadn’t anticipated from a text on piracy. Witt’s book is a fascinating read and adds a much-needed perspective to a story which is still being played out before our eyes. This is easily my favorite title of the year.

Steve Albini’s Keynote Address at Face The Music – The State of the Music Industry

Steve Albini may not be an expert at public speaking. But he IS a 40-year veteran of the music industry – working as a singer, songwriter, guitarist, record producer, audio engineer and music journalist for most of his life. He lived and worked through the age of commercial rock radio and payola, through the birth of MTV, and through the most formative years of filesharing and torrenting right up to the present day.

Albini has worked on an estimated 1500 albums, which certainly qualifies him to speak on the state of the changing music industry.

He delivered a Keynote Address at Face The Music in 2014. The first 30 minutes comprise his essential arguments – exposing the self-perpetuating system of major labels, commercial radio, and the convoluted laundry list of associated professionals who were all guaranteed to profit from a band’s record, usually leaving the band with nothing.

He demonstrates that the old system was in place to serve everyone EXCEPT the band and its fans – the two inconsequential and often ignored parties of the music industry.

Albini then outlines how the internet and improved recording technologies rendered the old system obsolete and empowered artists. The web and filesharing gave bands, for the first time, a direct and personal relationship with their listeners and exponentially increased the reach of their music.

In closing, Albini describes the resulting listening culture as discerning and passionate, with the ability to pursue their own niche musical fetishism, and that these listeners find a way to reward the artists they love in return.

The old industry giants loudly proclaim that the new system is “broken” and a “crisis” that must be remedied. But in reality, the bands and their listeners are better off now than ever before.

This address shattered my shame about filesharing, and restored my faith in music.

Pirates to the Rescue: Giving the Listening Public What Commercial Services Will Not

Ladies and Gentleman – I’m proud to share my first published article as a music journalist for Queens Free Press in NYC! The article is live on their website and there are plans to feature it when the time comes for their first print edition.

The piece is titled, Pirates to the Rescue: Giving the Listening Public What Commercial Services Will Not.

Visit Queens Free Press and CHECK IT OUT!

By Jon Åslund [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Rally in Stockholm, Sweden, in support of file sharing and software piracy.

And in the end…

After a brief discussion with a friend today comparing and contrasting the merits of print vs eBooks, I began to re-examine my obsession with record collecting (and with materialism of any form).  I’ve been grappling with both sides of the collectibility coin for years, but the end of a calendar year seems a fitting time to look back and reflect on exactly what I’m doing and at what cost.

My purchasing of printed books has become more selective and refined in the past year (as it has for much of the public with eBook sales still on the rise.)  Statistia.com forcasts that ePub sales will exceed those of printed books by 2017.  This has been my most active year ever for book purchases – the same year I built myself a virtually-departmentalized library of eBooks.

Similarly, my vinyl purchasing has become specialized as well.  2014 has been Innerspace’s most-active for both digital and vinyl acquisitions, with each directly inspiring activity in the other.

107 LPs (accounting for each of the discs in multi-disc box sets) were purchased in the last 5 months alone, making the second half of 2014 our busiest purchasing period in the history of the Innerspace Library.  Actual spending for album acquisition in 2014 (purchases between Jan 13 and Nov 26) totaled $1,140.30, including all spending for overseas shipping and other courier services, with a mean monthly expenditure of $103 for the 11 months of activity.  The vast majority of these purchases were special-edition, limited releases, and original-pressings of milestones from my favorite genres.

Comparatively, 4,138 of my digital album folders were added or modified in 2014, (though this number includes folders in which tag maintenance or restructuring occurred during the last calendar year.)  The increase in digital album “consumption” had a direct impact on my vinyl-ordering activity.

But increasingly, the reasons I’ve used to justify my LP purchases are being eroded by the changing landscape of the FLAC community.

And so I thought I’d take each head-on.

CLAIM 1: Vinyl often features better mastering and production quality than their digital counterparts

The genres I collect, particularly avant-garde, modern classical, ambient, and experimental electronic music have an audiophile fan base dedicated to the digital preservation of these recordings.  Where once fans had to rely on pirate remastering work by Purple Chick and Dr. Ebbetts (among other legendary engineers), the democratization of recording technology has made home-archiving inexpensive and easy without having to chase down shiny black discs.

And for albums previously only available on wax, we have claim #2.

CLAIM 2: You can’t find these recordings anywhere else

Thanks to archival technology, there has developed a large and well-networked community of collectors eager to share their rare vinyl recordings with the rest of the world.  The community has evolved to the point where vinyl-only issued and limited-press recordings are now readily available in the form of community-generated digital lossless archives.  While commercial networks like Spotify offer only a tiny fraction of these recordings (I think there are six) due to their limited commercial interest and costly rights negotiation, actual fans of the music have stepped up to the plate and made the albums available where a commercial market has not.

CLAIM 3: Supporting the artist

This is a moot argument in my specialized case and in the case of those like me.  99% of the albums I buy are used records pressed forty years ago.  The used market has little to no impact on composers and artists, (with a few special exceptions like that of Rodriguez).  One exempt title which comes to mind is Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes LP.  Yorke made headlines when …Boxes became the first album ever to be sold through a commercial torrent channel, demonstrating the viability of the sharing medium.  I saw my purchase of the deluxe LP as a contribution to a cause I supported.  But those two exceptions aside, I don’t think Ludwig or Karlheinz need my money that badly.

CLAIM 4: It’s all about the experience

The experience is one of the outstanding merits of vinyl albums with which digital music cannot compete.  Selecting the album, removing it from its artful gatefold cover, dropping the needle, and so many other elements of the vinyl experience remind us of the value of music in an age of digital gluttony.  The experience is what still motivates me to purchase records, but with greater selectivity than before.

REAL FRIENDS HELP YOU MOVE RECORDS

With the erosion of the above arguments in vinyl’s favor, the reasons against collecting grow larger than ever.

REASON 1: They weigh a ton.

Ask anyone who’s been generous enough to help me move.  Collecting records requires the dedication of space and the enlistment of an army should you ever need to relocate them.  I know it’s part of vinyl’s charm – they are Objets d’art, but they’re admittedly a burden at the same time.

REASON 2: The stuff I’m after costs a fortune.

That $100 a month is over a grand at the end of the year that I could put toward living more comfortably and taking care of my beautiful partner.  I’m grateful that I am able to accommodate the limited disposable income I have for a fulfilling hobby and as a means of social interaction, but greater selectivity may yield a greater reward in the end.  Contrariwise, the only available digital resource for these vinyl-ripped and rare recordings is the file sharing community, which is 100% free.  And there isn’t much that can compare with free.

REASON 3: Accessibility and Organization

What I love most about our Digital Library is that it is meticulously organized and instantly indexable by multiple points of metadata.  With just a few clicks I can export charts and visualizations of library data for my annual reports.  And with 100% of the content on my home server, I can access any track wherever I go.  My unlimited data plan grants me uninhibited access to my content in FLAC without needing to transcode to stay below a corporate-determined threshold of data.  I take several TB of content to work each day, enjoy it on the walk there and back, and DJ my office for the 8 hours in between.

(Oh yes… and 13,000+ albums don’t take up any real estate on the shelf.)

And so…

Moving forward into the new year, I’m going to significantly pull the reins on my vinyl-buying impulses.  I might attempt to quantify my purchasing decisions with a 3-question qualifier before buying (as I’ve a fondness for doing things mathematically.)  There will still be incredible albums here, and there is no reason I can’t talk about a FLAC vinyl-rip and throw up a shot of the LP… (it’ll be our little secret.)

I welcome your thoughts.  Please feel free to share your support for or against this notion.  And I’ll see you in the new year.