the ethics of file-sharing in experimental music

[jon abbey]

Something that might be important, however, with regards to labels' health and effective functioning is the fact that you can't really search by label in any of the common digital distributers and streaming services. There are going to be a lot of people who find music without developing much in terms of label loyalty.

does this really relate to our world of experimental music, though? Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, whatever else, these aren't even on my personal radar. isn't this mostly a parallel universe, at least for now? I can't say I've investigated that area too thoroughly, but I don't see why any small label would go through those services anyway, as opposed to selling their own DLs directly.

[rainey]

Oh, I agree that it's currently a parallel universe — and even that universe is not as clear cut as it seems. I'm just thinking of people in that universe developing different skills / techniques for finding music than we did. I mean, I didn't listen to Derek Bailey when I was a teenager, but the way I looked for music led me to all sorts of things, later.

[normalioifyp]

As someone who's first encounters with obscure music was through napster, and as a teacher to a lot of digitally native youngsters, I can confirm what's been said here. Label loyalty is not very important to most people my age and younger, and finding music through a label is increasingly rare. But that doesn't mean the music is harder to find. You just need different skills to find it. I notice most people find music through youtube nowadays. The more obsessed music-dork set prefer last.fm, blogs, etc.

Filesharing used to be a big way to discover music, since search engines used to be built into clients. Now that decentralized networks like bittorrent have replaced napster and gnutella, I imagine it's less popular to find music that way. But the torrent sites themselves host communities where like minded fans can give each other recommendations. There are private trackers dedicated to just one or two genres, complete with forums where fans of the genre discuss their favorite releases. I can't tell you how much good music I found this way that I'd never find any other way.

Some good blogs to find music:

http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.com/
http://musicformaniacs.blogspot.com/

I've also discovered lots of new free (as in freedom) music on these sites:

http://freemusicarchive.org/
http://www.archive.org/index.php

[Charon]

personally, I'm much more interested in this view:

I'm personally more interested in how changes in recording technology and distribution affect the idea of an "album", "song", or, more generally "release". I like this especially in the realm of improvisation, which, I believe, benefits from sharing imperfect but inspired performances and which has never sat too well in the realm of "great albums". Sometimes, skirting below the radar with non-standard, non-label releases prevents the rampant judgement and cataloging that forums like these encourage, allowing the music (and the discourse that surrounds it) to develop in a different way.

than this:

Down with labels because the less people that know who you are the better because you probably don't warrant the attention anyway, only record things with your phone, manufacture on shit cd-r and for fucks sake keep that box of disks at the bottom of your closet.

(what's wrong with recording things on your phone if you have a reason to?)

I think if there is a reduction or at least a change in the role of labels in this area of music as a result of these changes in technology and distribution, then it could be very positive in the way that Bhob suggests. It could also miss those potential avenues of growth altogether, of course, but I suspect that so long as there continues to be a community of creative thinkers interested in using whatever frameworks are available to ask the interesting questions about what it is that we're actually doing here, and pushing it further, then we will keep going forward, no matter what kind of a landscape we find ourselves in. I highly doubt that the interesting work being done in this field going forward is going to be choked off by these changes, and indeed, the new environment would seem to be more suitable for improvisation. Down with "great albums", indeed.

[leroysghost]

Down with labels because the less people that know who you are the better because you probably don't warrant the attention anyway, only record things with your phone, manufacture on shit cd-r and for fucks sake keep that box of disks at the bottom of your closet.

(what's wrong with recording things on your phone if you have a reason to?)

nothing wrong with it. it's what i do. not sure why you would need to "have a reason to".

things like "having a reason" and "great album" are phrases that only make sense within the the record label model of production. everyone self releasing doesn't get rid of labels, it creates a saturated culture made up of millions of tiny labels where "great albums" have no impact anymore. when there is a multitude of "great albums" in all genre's coexisting at one time they drain each other of their greatness and become nothing more then individualized "stuff i like to listen to". EAI fans should know this better than anyone.

if that's a system you object to, you're lying to yourself if you think turning to self releasing will do anything except perpetuate it.

the idea of music is always more powerful than the reality (i remember reading record reviews in my pre-internet days and imagining what the records sounded like, it was always more radical and better sounding the real thing) and similarly, there is much less need to be a performer/communicator through music when you can solipsistically get gratification from other peoples records. often i think the only scenario where music could effect any more change culturally/politically/personally then it does at this moment in time would be a truly radical world wide shift where the freedom of communication the internet provides is kept but it's fetishistic need for documentation is rejected. barring anything like that we are more or less stuck with the bacchanal of personal gratification, and therefore someone's personal rejection of labels or file-sharing is pretty insignificant.

[Charon]

Down with labels because the less people that know who you are the better because you probably don't warrant the attention anyway, only record things with your phone, manufacture on shit cd-r and for fucks sake keep that box of disks at the bottom of your closet.

(what's wrong with recording things on your phone if you have a reason to?)

nothing wrong with it. it's what i do. not sure why you would need to "have a reason to".

Oh you record on a phone? OK, it just sounded from the quote above like you were dismissing people who record on phones as 'probably not warranting attention'.

things like "having a reason" and "great album" are phrases that only make sense within the the record label model of production.

I can see why you would say that "great album" only makes sense within the record label model of production, and indeed that is why I am looking forward to the coming change in the role of labels, and hoping that this will lead to a decrease in the importance of the "great album" concept. But I can't see why you would say "having a reason" has anything to do with record labels. I have plenty of reasons for recording things on my phone (for example), and none of them have anything to do with record labels.

everyone self releasing doesn't get rid of labels, it creates a saturated culture made up of millions of tiny labels where "great albums" have no impact anymore. when there is a multitude of "great albums" in all genre's coexisting at one time they drain each other of their greatness and become nothing more then individualized "stuff i like to listen to". EAI fans should know this better than anyone.

if that's a system you object to, you're lying to yourself if you think turning to self releasing will do anything except perpetuate it.

So self-releasing leads to perpetuation of the "great album" culture? How so? Doesn't it depend on how you self-release? If you self-release things in a way that plays into the "great album" culture, then yes that would simply perpetuate it, in the same way that releasing things on labels in a way which plays into that culture does, but if you self-release things in a way which does not play into that culture, then you would not be doing anything to perpetuate it, surely?

there is much less need to be a performer/communicator through music when you can solipsistically get gratification from other peoples records.

Could you expand on this?

[Damon_Smith]

I had the good fortune to have a duo with Peter Kowald to start my own label (his idea! My Idea was the quartet that came out on Nottwo). The bass saxophonist Tony Bevan was in town so I started the label with those two recordings and continued with established musicians + my colleagues and I as well as some Henry Kaiser releases I am not on until the last few years where it seems I have my own audience who will listen to my work with peers and even younger musicians.
I got a graphic designer who was not me, cover art from working visual artists, I always used an outside set of ears for the sequencing and decided the liner notes would be written by bass players.
In other words, I tried to make a label with an identity that created a context for myself - not just a dumping ground for projects I don't want to send around.
I have enough sold out titles and sales to call it a success.

At this point, I rarely contact labels because I have one. I only contact labels where I like the vision & production (like Simon's label, Nuscope, etc) otherwise I'll just use mine.
So I think with a little care you can go a step up or two from "self-releasing" - even though that is really what it is. A label just serves to create a context for the music, it is possible to do it on your own, just not the "Chadbourne" way when you are not Chadbourne!

[normalioifyp]

[

things like "having a reason" and "great album" are phrases that only make sense within the the record label model of production. everyone self releasing doesn't get rid of labels, it creates a saturated culture made up of millions of tiny labels where "great albums" have no impact anymore. when there is a multitude of "great albums" in all genre's coexisting at one time they drain each other of their greatness and become nothing more then individualized "stuff i like to listen to". EAI fans should know this better than anyone.

if that's a system you object to, you're lying to yourself if you think turning to self releasing will do anything except perpetuate it.

This is just a side-effect of a decentralized media and a fragmented culture. In truth, greatness is banal. If you open your ears enough, you can find jaw dropping music in every corner of the world. But in the past, when there was one good radio station in your town, and everybody listened to it, when there was one record shop in driving distance, and one music program on TV, whoever dominated those venues would ascend to become the "great artist" everyone is talking about. It didn't mean there were no other great artists. Just that they were harder to find, and nobody called them great because they didn't have a larger than life media presence.

Then you had MTV, which further homogenized music tastes, and eroded much of the regionalism. Now everyone in the country watched one TV station, and if you got your music played on it, everyone in the country (or world for that matter) would buy your CD. You would have never had superstars like Michael Jackson without MTV. But while Michael Jackson is great, he's not unusually great. There were other singers who, if given the chance and tools, could have emulated his success. But there's only 24 hours in a day to play music videos, and thus only a few slots for new superstars.

The internet has made everything flat. Now, the nobodies compete on the same field as the giant megastars. And what people have discovered is that greatness is pretty common. Megastars weren't as great as we made them out to be, and the nobodies were pretty good after all. Look at the playlists of young people and you'll find big names from the old days coexisting with small acts they found on youtube. It's all the same to them.

I am overjoyed this is happening for a number of reasons. First off, it grounds us in reality once more. "Great Albums" were always a myth. In reality, there are just albums you love and albums you don't. When tv, radio and the press were gatekeepers, it was easy to believe the myth. Now the internet exposes all music under the same light, and we can no longer deny that greatness is banal.

Second, the demise of "great albums" abolishes pretentious myth making that afflicted previous decades of music. No "experimental" examples come to mind, but when it comes to popular music, I'm sure you've all heard someone tell you how Kurt Cobain saved "real" rock music from hair metal. Such a herculean feat of single-handedly redeemind rock music could only be ascribed to someone with inhuman greatness, and the illusion of inhuman greatness was undoubtedly shaped by having a centralized media. But if you saw the whole picture, you'd know that grunge had been around for years, and all Nirvana did was popularize it. In reality, Kurt Cobain was a moderately talented punk songwriter, and that's all he ever wanted to be. Believing the myth* just detracts from his honest intentions.

And third, it's empowering. If there are no pantheon of music demigods to pray to, we're forced to return to working on a human scale. Now, greatness is something anyone can achieve if they work hard, practice, and believe in themselves. Isn't this what we always wanted anyway?

* Some music, however, depends on myth making. You'll notice Sun Ra is in my avatar. This sort of playful, artist-made mythmaking doesn't have to go away. Sun Ra was never a product of TV and Radio, and besides, we all knew he wasn't from Saturn (though sometimes I wonder).

[rainey]

everyone self releasing doesn't get rid of labels, it creates a saturated culture made up of millions of tiny labels where "great albums" have no impact anymore. when there is a multitude of "great albums" in all genre's coexisting at one time they drain each other of their greatness and become nothing more then individualized "stuff i like to listen to". EAI fans should know this better than anyone.

if that's a system you object to, you're lying to yourself if you think turning to self releasing will do anything except perpetuate it.

This may be true if the idea of "releasing" music is merely a choice between a label putting out an album vs. an artist self-releasing the same thing. Already that idea is very much blurred by artists who put more casual "sketches" or works-in-progress on things like SoundCloud. These partially-realized works have the potential to deflate ideas of greatness, which, it's true, can injure the way many of us enjoy recorded music (there is a certain pleasure and abandon believing in a myth); however, I believe that the opportunities (capitalizing on accidents, uncovering processes, discovering new collaborations, etc.) that this sort of casual sharing opens up are worth the cost.

Ultimately, I think it's important to look beyond the binary of "label" and "self-" and seek more interesting and fluid forms of collaboration. Again, I don't see this as destroying labels as much as absorbing, altering, and maybe even strengthening them.

the idea of music is always more powerful than the reality (i remember reading record reviews in my pre-internet days and imagining what the records sounded like, it was always more radical and better sounding the real thing)

I like this story. Titles and album covers often had the same effect on me.

there is much less need to be a performer/communicator through music when you can solipsistically get gratification from other peoples records.

Which is one reason why I like recordings that are not "complete" or perfect or entirely pleasurable, that incite listeners to "finish" them, either through music, ideas, or some other discipline. This, to me, is how music can be generous.

[leroysghost]

things like "having a reason" and "great album" are phrases that only make sense within the the record label model of production. everyone self releasing doesn't get rid of labels, it creates a saturated culture made up of millions of tiny labels where "great albums" have no impact anymore. when there is a multitude of "great albums" in all genre's coexisting at one time they drain each other of their greatness and become nothing more then individualized "stuff i like to listen to". EAI fans should know this better than anyone.

if that's a system you object to, you're lying to yourself if you think turning to self releasing will do anything except perpetuate it.

This is just a side-effect of a decentralized media and a fragmented culture. In truth, greatness is banal. If you open your ears enough, you can find jaw dropping music in every corner of the world.

right so why get rid of labels then? if everything is so flat labels can exist for those who want them and be ignored by those who don't. you'd be better off abolishing qualitative listening altogether. just give up listening to and releasing records and just make music with your buddies (or yourself). only then will there be a remarkable sea change. until then i'm going to continue listening to the labels that consistently release what for me is brain candy.

I like recordings that are not "complete" or perfect or entirely pleasurable, that incite listeners to "finish" them, either through music, ideas, or some other discipline. This, to me, is how music can be generous.

this is a fair point. the caveat i've found are that at a certain point your brain is trained to do this automatically and it turns back into the same old one sided conversation.

[Charon]

This:

This may be true if the idea of "releasing" music is merely a choice between a label putting out an album vs. an artist self-releasing the same thing. Already that idea is very much blurred by artists who put more casual "sketches" or works-in-progress on things like SoundCloud. These partially-realized works have the potential to deflate ideas of greatness, which, it's true, can injure the way many of us enjoy recorded music (there is a certain pleasure and abandon believing in a myth); however, I believe that the opportunities (capitalizing on accidents, uncovering processes, discovering new collaborations, etc.) that this sort of casual sharing opens up are worth the cost.

Is a good point, I think. This is what I meant when I mentioned releasing things in a way which does not play into the "great album" culture. And it doesn't even have to be the track-by-track SoundCloud approach either. Sometimes I tend to think that even the act of releasing something on the internet in a way which doesn't force the listener to provide something material in exchange goes a way towards this.

[normalioifyp]

right so why get rid of labels then? if everything is so flat labels can exist for those who want them and be ignored by those who don't. you'd be better off abolishing qualitative listening altogether. just give up listening to and releasing records and just make music with your buddies (or yourself). only then will there be a remarkable sea change. until then i'm going to continue listening to the labels that consistently release what for me is brain candy.

I never said we should abolish labels. Technology is doing that on it's own. If you like particular labels, keep on supporting them. If label owners like running their label, they should keep on doing it. But it's clear to me that a new generation of listeners is growing up with no loyalty to labels, a new generation of artists is emerging without a need for labels, and there's a diminishing revenue stream that's supposed to fund the new generation of labels. I don't see how small independent labels can thrive the next 50 years without drastically rewriting the definition of "label", and I don't think it's important that they still survive. Music will always survive, even if we have new ways of distributing it, and new institutions to support it.

[bedouin]

Megaupload busted
well, I guess that kind of thing may change the landscape a little bit.

a couple of years ago we had a similar conversation (on file-sharing ethics), where I mentioned that what gets me about all this is that money (which is still is spent for music) ends up on IT related outfits that care zero about the music. Even if one disliked the major labels at least some of the money stayed in the industry. I wonder how much of the iPod spectacular business success has gone back to artists.

[billygomberg]

http://www.vice.com/read/we-read-the-me ... -have-to-1

- Megaupload was paying Carpathia, their Virginia-based hosting company, between $700,000 and $1 million per month from a bank account in Hong Kong.

- Cogent Communications, an Atlanta-based ISP, was making a steady $1 million per month from May 2009 until February 2011.

- Megaupload spent $2.4 million on yacht rentals in June 2011 alone.

- The US government is after $175 million in assets, including 59 different bank accounts. Many of them Chinese. Two are from Citibank.

- The US is looking for at least 14 Benzes, a Predator statue, two 108 inch TVs, a Seadoo, a 1957 Cadillac, a Maserati, and a Mini Cooper.

-Kim owned a Rolls Royce Phantom with a license plate that read "GOD." Some of the tags on his other cars included: GUILTY, STONED, GOOD, CEO, MAFIA, and HACKER.

[MRS]

top left

[mudd]

nice.

m

[billygomberg]

well i guess the giraffe is just a statue...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/most-int ... -the-found

[simon reynell]

well mine aren't (God, he's so cheap!)

[surfer]

"Opulence, I has it."

[Gaendaal]

http://www.vice.com/read/we-read-the-me ... -have-to-1

- Megaupload was paying Carpathia, their Virginia-based hosting company, between $700,000 and $1 million per month from a bank account in Hong Kong.

- Cogent Communications, an Atlanta-based ISP, was making a steady $1 million per month from May 2009 until February 2011.

- Megaupload spent $2.4 million on yacht rentals in June 2011 alone.

- The US government is after $175 million in assets, including 59 different bank accounts. Many of them Chinese. Two are from Citibank.

- The US is looking for at least 14 Benzes, a Predator statue, two 108 inch TVs, a Seadoo, a 1957 Cadillac, a Maserati, and a Mini Cooper.

-Kim owned a Rolls Royce Phantom with a license plate that read "GOD." Some of the tags on his other cars included: GUILTY, STONED, GOOD, CEO, MAFIA, and HACKER.

The thing that bugs me most about this whole thing is that he is wearing an awful suit.