Kenneth Goldsmith

Back in the day, I was never convinced by the ‘home taping is killing music’ argument any more than I would subscribe to the view that home cooking is killing restaurants.

On the contrary, the fact that I taped countless albums borrowed from friends or my local library satisfied my ravenous musical appetite  and introduced me to countless artists I would never otherwise have heard of.  I certainly didn’t buy any less music as a result

I recognise that the MP3 revolution is a different kettle of fish and offers a flood of free temptations for music obsessives but,even so, l don’t think that file sharing is killing music either.

Napster cat

As  fellow addicts will know there is no limit to how many new sounds you can consume and there’s never a point where you say ‘I have enough music to listen to and don’t need more’.

The more you hear, the more you want to hear – it’s an itch that never goes away.

A man who understands this craving is the founder of UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith who presents an intelligent perspective on this issue  in an article in this month’s Wire magazine.

Of his first exposure to Napster, he writes:  “It was as if every record store, fleamarket and charity shop in the world had been connected by a searchable database and had flung their doors open, begging you to walk away with as much as you could carry for free. But it was even better, because the supply never exhausted; the coolest record you’ve ever dug up could now be shared with all your friends”. 

Personally I very rarely buy CDs these days and have never made a purchase on I-tunes. I go to gigs as often as I can (always the best way to ‘support’ an artist) and I also ease my conscience by subscribing to e-music where the message boards regularly feature posts from those questioning the morality of using file-sharing websites and talk about going over to the ‘dark side’ .

Users will even have qualms about downloading an album they have already bought on vinyl under the ‘theft is theft’ argument. Get a life!

Goldsmith’s  counter argument is one that I find it easier to relate to.

Ethically, his position may not stand up to close scrutiny but he seems to belong to the real world and I’m sure expresses the viewpoint of the majority of true music fans.

He’s also on the button when it comes to the way culture is being consumed these days when he notes: I think the ways in which culture is distributed have become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we’ve experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we’ve come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine”.

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