Impulse

I’m dri­ving home late on a thurs­day night. Other dri­vers look like they’re think­ing about get­ting to bed, tomorrow’s work, or how much they like the music play­ing. Me, I’m think­ing about the anthro­po­log­i­cal under­cur­rents of the fight against music piracy. I’m weird that way. Still, I can’t shake the though that our need for self expres­sion and our deep­en­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with our music con­spire to make the war impos­si­ble for the record­ing indus­try to win.

Be your­self. Express your­self. Geek out unapolo­get­i­cally on what­ever that grooves you — just like that ebay ad with the lime-green fanatic. We hear these are mes­sages all the time. It’s in adver­tis­ing. It’s in self help books (The Artist’s Way; any of the books by SARK; heck there’s a whole sec­tion at Barnes & Noble). It’s the spark behind per­son­al­iz­ing every­thing: ring tones, ipod cases, skins for every­thing, per­son­al­ized news, even cus­tomized check­ing accounts. Fight Club had a great send-up of the whole thing, (Jack while read­ing an Ikea cat­a­log) “I would flip and won­der, ‘What kind of din­ing room set *defines* me as a per­son?’”. It’s per­va­sive. It’s part of the con­sumer cul­ture.
Meanwhile, we have inte­grated the music we lis­ten to into our very self-identity. We quickly learn about a poten­tial friend or date by ask­ing, “So, what kind of music do you lis­ten to?” Since the 60s teens have been emu­lat­ing their favorite bands — wear­ing the same clothes, hair cuts, even using the same speech pat­terns. Remember in high school know­ing that you wouldn’t fit in with a par­tic­u­lar crowd because of the music they lis­tened to? Nowadays we even go so far as to pub­lish our musi­cal self-identities via iTunes playlists or Now Playing sec­tions of our blogs, then use those def­i­n­i­tions to find like minded peo­ple — which, if you think about it, is exactly what hap­pened in high school, but with cooler gear.
Now, on to the dilemma — the one that record com­pa­nies are fight­ing in their bat­tle against piracy: We iden­tify with our music. We have a cre­ated a cul­ture of self-expression. So, we nat­u­rally want to express our­selves by shar­ing our music with our friends — even in the benign but tech­ni­cally ille­gal case of, “Listen to this track. I think you’d really like it. You should buy this cd.” Fundamentally, the record com­pa­nies are fight­ing not the actions of a few indi­vid­u­als, but the cul­ture itself. Ironically, this cul­ture is one that the record indus­try cre­ated, and requires in order to main­tain high sales (why else would we spend so much money on music if we didn’t build it up as an essen­tial part of our iden­tity).
Now, all that said, I do believe you should buy your CDs (I always do), so the musi­cians — espe­cially local bands — can get some more cash to make another CD. But: the record­ing indus­try needs be aware that some peo­ple will copy a few CDs. It’s inevitable. It’s life. They need to find a new way to make money off us.

Related posts:

1. Benjamin Zander: on music & leadership