'Thoughts on DRM' - Abolishing Music.

I posted this on March 16, 2007 10:43 AM as a response to Karl R’s post “'Thoughts On Music' - Abolishing DRM” So I'm hoping it counts as that week rather than this one.

I really, vehemently disagree that the copyright system should have anything to do with music. Nor do I think that, even with the music industry fighting their fight with DRM and whatever else they employ in their consumerist war, will DRM or any other copyright related system, or even the music industry continue to be maintain a stranglehold on music creating. What we have seen recently is the rise of bands that employ the internet as a tool for distribution, not merely for marketing. A prime example would be the Artic Monkeys who are often toted as these insightful innovators but who really have nothing to do with their own rise on the internet. They found that their music was popular and had sold out of EP's. As far as I know, they then felt pretty smug about it, but ultimately didn’t really do anything. However, one of their more canny fans put their EP up on the net, and it was over the net, before they had even considered signing on with a record company of any kind (IE Indy or one of the Big 5 – I think they eventually went with a London independent) that their music gained a massive, and in fact global following. (They were playing on bFm over here long before they were being shouted about as the next big thing, which is a reasonable distance for their music to travel.) This shows that even if the music industry put a penalty of death on music piracy, enforced by telepathic robots, they could not maintain the level of control requisite to prevent it.

The thing is that while the record companies may have flotillas of expensive lawyers, billions of dollars, and international copyright law on their side, they're up against their own target audience, which is bad enough, but a group of people who are numerous, decentralised, and largely difficult to target individually, and are technologically savvy, and eventually able to circumvent any rights protection they may come up with, given time. Not only that, but even outside of the audience for particular music’s, are dedicated zealots, willing to work against the Record Companies purely on principal. Furthermore, as the rise of bands like the Artic Monkeys shows, music cannot be held down, and we will continue to see bands that achieve international notoriety not through distribution and marketing by a multinational record company, but rather through releasing self-recorded tracks over the internet on MySpace and Bit-torrent, separate of any copyright law altogether (I hope – except maybe an open source or GNU licence). The music industry & Steve Jobs cannot earn, or legislate, or prosecute that which arises outside of their control – and I think we will begin to see more and more bands rise up to fame and renown outside of the record industry altogether. Also, DRM only really matters for any (copyright) law abiding citizens – I personally am going to try my hardest to continue ‘stealing’ as much music as I can be bothered with, and trying to avoid thinking about the other ways that I am being a corporate sell-out, and continue to develop an ideological high ground with ample room for hypocrisy. Next I might try to be less rambling, too.

Furthermore, although maybe I'm being slightly idealistic, there are great swathes of music makers out there who make music for the sake of making music - money ultimately has nothing to do with it. For every artist on a major label awaiting their latest sales reports, there is literally thousands who are out making music equally as good, if you ask me, and equally prolifically, and not making a cent. And it's these people who I consider the future of music, and these people who have the most to gain from distributing tracks on the internet. I'm too much of a pessimist to think that the music industry will be destroyed by the internet, but I can keep on stealing their music, and obtaining music from outside their system and hope that one day they'll be as irrelevant to everyone else’s listening habits as they are to mine.