Pirates Ahoy

I went online looking for a leak of Neon Bible. While I’ll be buying it when it’s released, they’re playing on the 7th of March and the album comes out two days earlier. I’d like to be familiar with the stuff on the night.

After fruitlessly browsing the usual suspects I accidentally happened upon the new Willy Mason album and downloaded it all-excited. Twenty seconds into the opening track I closed it down and deleted the folder. There’s no reason for me to steal the work of a young musician whose album I’ll be able to buy in a month.

Music piracy is a massively complicated issue that’s over-simplified by both sides. Record companies say that copying an album is the same as stealing. It’s not. Stealing is taking something from somebody. If someone gives me a copy of an album that I would never have bought, no one is actually losing anything. Of course, it’s almost impossible to say that I would never have bought it at some future date, so it’s complicated.

But those people who suck gigs of music off their friends laptops and never spend a cent on a CD are fooling themselves if they think they aren’t leeching off an art form and community they profess to love.

I copy a fair bit of music, but I’m sure I spend more on it than 95% of the population as well. The truth is that most music-heads become music-heads on a diet of bootlegs and copies. My first Pavement album was a cheap CD-R. That has directly resulted in ten-plus purchases and counting, when you factor in solo-Steve Malkmus and the full Silver Jews catalogue. A certain amount of piracy nourishes the scene. I just don’t know how to limit it to that amount. Or if it is something that can be controlled.

While DRMs, rootkits and ludicrous lawsuits raise the gorge of every single music purchaser I have ever met, there is one tool in the fight against falling record sales that is wholesome, positive and might actually work. My sister bought me Tom Waits: Orphans for Christmas. Three CDs packed in a beautiful miniature-book with faux-wear and classic-typography that feels like holding a physical manifestation of the man’s music. A pleasure to own. Have you seen the new Of Montreal album? It’s like unwrapping a psychedelic, slightly scary present. And somehow I can’t see the impetus for these works coming from the minds of record label executives.

I’m not going to stop copying the occasional album, especially when I’m broke. It’s only fair to remind myself while I’m doing it that the individuals in most of my favourite bands probably earn less than I do. And yeah, they should be getting a higher percentage of the price but that’s not an excuse to give them nothing.

I found the Arcade Fire album eventually, it’s sitting on my desktop. I’m terrified to listen to it in case it’s not the finished versions. Piracy: more painful than it looks.