True musical fandom is a measure of devotion unlike any other in the entertainment world.
As a teenager, I remember standing in line at midnight to be among the first to buy Pink Floyd’s epic “The Wall.” I had already taped the entire double album when New York radio station WNEW-FM played it on a special a few weeks earlier. But I still had to own it–to hold it in my hands, to savor the vinyl, to study the lyrics and to lose myself in Gerald Scarfe’s artwork. The same was true for every Floyd fan I knew.
The recording industry’s campaign to crack down on file-swapping and downloading is nothing less than a spiteful slap in the face to its most dedicated customers–the hardcore fans who’ve always been the backbone of the industry, buying and supporting the music they love regardless of the vagaries of passing trends or fads.
The Recording Industry Association of America, well-funded lobbyists for the five global corporations that control 85 percent of the music business, insist that their new targets–college kids who use their universities’ high-speed Internet lines to fill their hard drives with free music–are the moral equivalent of shoplifters.
They argue that this “thievery” deprives musicians of money that’s rightfully theirs (never mind the fact that few artists ever see royalties from major-label releases). They say it drives prices up for everyone else (even though the industry itself has long raised prices over the objections of artists, retailers and consumers), and it will ultimately “kill” the music business (or at least minimize the executives’ fat annual bonuses).
This argument is as specious as the similar beef in the early ’80s about cassettes (“Home Taping is Killing Music!” was the slogan back then), or the long-since discredited notion that videotapes would “destroy” Hollywood (in fact, video added a second lucrative market to the movie industry, which is as healthy as it’s ever been). And it’s disproved by a considerable amount of anecdotal and scientific evidence.
