i think you should also note that for home taping, someone had to have an original! i remember that if I wanted an album, I’d ask around the 4 or 5 people at school who liked that kind of music, and if no-one had it, then at least one of us was going to have to go and buy it! Which obviously we don’t have now – hop on soulseek and get it off some dude in Peru or wherever….

I think this is the heart of the matter. Music is losing its relevancy as a form of identification for the Web 2.0 generation. Kids used to be defined by the band logo on their shirts/cars. Now kids are defined by their social network more than anything else.

@Maura
Thanks for expanding on your thoughts. I would be interested to see a comparison of paid v. unpaid music collections – however those metrics are only one part of this issue.

@KingofPants “Well, it’s just kinda weird to try and compare home taping to mass file sharing, both for reasons of scope and the fact that home taping didn’t produce an exact reproduction in digital-level quality.”

Reproduction quality is irrelevant if it’s still good enough to keep someone from buying the album. I think we could all agree that the lowest common denominator for acceptable music quality is pretty low, otherwise 4th gen tapes or 128bit mp3s would never have been used.

“My bigger problem with the comparison is that I don’t remember feeling so self-righteous about taping an album, and I don’t think anyone passing around their 4th generation tape of Appetite for Destruction thought of themselves as a rights advocate or a ‘freedom fighter’.”

And back then the RIAA hadn’t gone through several years of a fear campaign of directly suing individuals for tens (hundreds?) of thousands dollars. Reality has changed, music publishers are much more adversarial these days, which would IMHO cause an equal but opposite reaction from the other side.

*dwindling shelf space given to music at big boxes, the number of indie or chain record stores closing, the relative amount and variety of music on U.S. TV/MTV/radio vs a decade or two ago (and I think this is, again through personal experience, not as bad off in western europe, where they seem more engaged culturally with pop music than Americans do), plus the factual and quite striking shrinking record sales blah blah blah strongly suggest that non-downloaders are buying– even being exposed to– much less music now than they once were, and I would gather piracy and its impact on the overall health of the music industry can be attributed to that in some ways. People who don’t file trade simply don’t have anywhere close to the same access to music they once did. And, alas, don’t even seem to be making much of a fuss about that.

Getting something for free will always beat paying for it.

So you know that boomer canard about Gen X, that they didn’t have a Vietnam to rebel against? (Anyone else remember the really tepid anti-war movement about Gulf War I?) Ok, so if that’s true, then think about the generation after. If they’re sitting there in a suburban bedroom with a fat pipe and BitTorrent…I mean, it’s all Hot Topic-y angst, really. It’s what the Internet enables: the motions of actual action (like, say, rebellion) without having to lift your ass from the computer desk.

What really pisses me off are the Ars Technica/Wired/BoingBoing cheerleaders, because they are, without a doubt, the most boring fucking people on the planet. And yet they have somehow positioned themselves as (well-compensated) cheerleaders for some sort of “revolutionary” stance. ‘Course, the checks stop rolling in if you make the dilemma as essential as “people like free shit”, so they have to tart it up because it obviously can’t be that simple. It’s precisely like the pro-marijuana argument. “People want to get high.” Simple, no?