The Tennessean made digital music piracy the subject of its Sunday editorial page point/counterpoint (a somewhat recently adopted formula), except there wasn’t any counterpoint.
The newspaper invited NSAI’s Bart Herbison, representing songwriters, and the RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol, representing record companies, to opine in columns on the left and right of the editorial page (literal, not political), while the Tennessean’s editorial staff used its middle column to say pretty much exactly what Herbison and Bainwol said. The triptych of articles reflected a Nashville article of faith, which is that downloading or copying a digital file of a song into one’s personal collection of songs without paying for it (or somebody paying for it somewhere) is stealing as per the eighth commandment (unless you’re Roman Catholic or Lutheran and it’s number seven), an immoral act, a premeditated projectile of spittle in the eye of hardworking songwriters. Now I know moral relativism is really out of fashion here in the South and I do like to think I know right from wrong. I sincerely believe that creators should get fairly paid (and sometimes arbitrarily over-paid) for the fruits of their labor. And I say that as a creator who DOESN’T get royalties on my work. I’m almost always paid on a work-for-hire basis because I work in a buyer’s market and have little leverage to earn any other way.
But I digress.
I only want to point out two things. First is that nobody at all who is in the music business – NOBODY – had to pay for every recording he or she ever heard. They wouldn’t have learned much about music if they had. The records that sent the lightning bolts through their souls and woke them up to a world of sound and art and passion were, I daresay, mostly BORROWED or OVERHEARD. Meet an A&R guy and it’s no surprise to discover that his dad owned a record store, wherein he could play anything he fancied. Meet a singer-songwriter and she probably had unfettered access to her parents’ music collection. As a teenager I traded albums on cassette so that I could become a more fervent and knowledgeable music fan (so sue me). I went to my college library and had them put LPs on turntables connected to a reserved set of headphones. And EVERYBODY in the 70s and before had easy access to radio that played everything – a constant source of novel sounds, new artists and information about them to boot. Herbison and Bainwol included. They sincerely want us to believe that had they grown up today, being the music enthusiasts they are, they wouldn’t have downloaded ANY songs? Or that they would have turned their schoolmates in for jacking into BitTorrent? Kids born after 1990 have a different and more powerful tool at their disposal for music discovery than we did, to be sure, and they should be educated in school about how the internet works, about intellectual property and about the flows of money in the music business. But isn’t some file sharing leading to the same end as the last generation’s exposure to free music -- to music fandom of a higher order than would be possible on a diet of MTV and some branded, researched Clear Channel radio station? Yes, downloading a song off Limewire is stealing at some level, but putting it on a moral plane with larceny doesn’t strike me or those kids out there as passing a certain basic gut check. There are degrees of downloading/uploading evil, and it should be pretty easy to distinguish people who methodically build music collections without purchasing anything from people who use a variety of downloading strategies to discover and filter new music. Few people seem to think that Jammie Thomas is the kind of test case that’s going to change the moral calculus of would-be downloaders. To pretend like there aren’t reasonable ethical and historical counter-arguments to the NSAI/RIAA bright line, law enforcement model of their business isn’t intellectually honest. And that brings me to my second point – that the Tennessean should have found somebody intelligent and persuasive to try to make a case – any case – that would challenge the fortress approach taken by the mainstream music industry. Of course a lot of music business folk in Nashville wouldn’t agree with it. But that’s what a newspaper is supposed to do.
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