Misspent Sunday afternoons in front of the radio…

I’ve been trying in my previous posts to give you an idea and a little bit of background in the whole world of being a musician, and quite what the costs are involved in getting involved in such an industry. This post hopefully will allow me to tie up any other thoughts, and then from here on in we can start looking at what is going on with the filesharing issue in particular and also the ins and outs of things we should know, understand and appreciate when deciding whether to go out and buy a cd or to jump on Pirate Bay or something similar to download the track.

Firstly this whole phenomenon is nothing new – I’m sure I’m not alone in sitting recording the tracks on radio 1 chart show when a bit younger in order to catch the top forty. Annoyingly of cause the dj would start talking just before the end of the song thus wrecking the end of the song, but you would then religiously listen to on your way to and from school. There was then of cause CD, minidisk and a whole host of other mediums to copy music from one place to another. This is even before making mixtapes for your latest beau and friends.

So what has changed this time? We often hear people say that copying music has happened forever, this is just the latest in the line of ways of exchanging tunes and that people shouldn’t get so upset about it. To a certain extent I would say this is true (remember although this is probably borderline anti-filesharing I still haven’t made a decision which way I am swinging on the issue…) but the differences are stark. For a start the ease of getting whatever your wanting to listen to. Whereas before you’d have to find a mate with the cd of the band your wanting to listen to, then convince them to tape it for you, then get the damn thing back again and then being able to listen nowadays you can jump on the internet, neatly dodge the porn and its there nicely in your player for your aural pleasure.

Depending on where you look on the internet, to the point that I wouldn’t even like to start quoting the numbers I have seen you can find a whole array of figures that have been spun by various industry ‘officials’ but we do know it is affecting sales – just taking a walk around HMV (or wanting to have a stroll round Virgin) would show that where there were once mountains of CDs are now games. Ironically of cause many of these games allow you to play along on virtual guitar with bands playing their hits, but where there once were CDs, there are now games.

But has it affected the industry as much as we are made to believe? Is there a way to keep recorded music at a high quality, when there is no money available to develop the ideas and sounds that can only be found and developed in a studio?

That my friends is for next time…