This is something that I was asked to write possibly for a magazine article, as a member of a band that offers content for download.
To me, file sharing or copyright doesn’t seem like the greatest cultural concern. Iraq is occupied, people are detained in camps in Guantanamo Bay and many other places, there is a really complicated debate about immigration in the US, and there are wars and disasters that are adversely affecting peoples’ lives all over the world. But, I like media, and I like culture, and media has informed me about a lot of the issues that I just mentioned and culture has given me a framework to begin sorting out my feelings and ideas about these issues. So, things that effect our ability to create media and culture merit at least a little discussion.
The downloading of media, illegal or otherwise, is the reality that we face as media producers and consumers. Rough mixes of our latest recordings that we only gave to a few friends, somehow made their way onto the Internet and folks were singing along to new songs at shows before the record was even released. So, the real question isn’t “should bands encourage downloading?”, because it’s going to happen. The real question is, “what should bands do in a world where media is easily reproduced and shared?”
The band that I play in, Defiance, Ohio, has approached this issue by making audio files of every song that we’ve ever released freely available on our website. Having the files available from an “official” location, rather than just being available on a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network, lets people see more information about the band, our ethics, ideas, and lyrics, where they can see us play, and where they can buy our records. Downloading the files from our website gives them context to the songs that just doesn’t exist on a P2P network. In a SoulSeek download window, a Defiance, Ohio song doesn’t really seem much different from the pirated files of any other band.
I think many people would agree that the value of cultural products like songs can be far more than the six dollars you might pay for our new record, or the thousands of dollars cited in numerous RIAA lawsuits. At the very least, it’s safe to say that it’s a very subjective assessment. Giving away our songs as gifts on the Internet, in addition to selling them on CD or LP, lets people decide what the value is, for them, and how they want to respond to the gift. Some people might think the songs are total crap and delete them, others may choose to buy the CD, others may write us a note telling us their thoughts on our music, some might put the songs on a mix tape for a friend, others might be encouraged to make their own songs and share those on the Internet.
In addition to making the songs available for download, we’ve released these files under a Creative Commons license (see http://www.creativecommons.org for more info) that empowers others to redistribute, reuse, and, and remix our songs under certain reasonable conditions. I hope that all the artists and writers that are using tools like the Creative Commons licenses will encourage people to not just consume media, but to create something themselves, and to share the things they make in kind. I just read a really awesome comic book, “Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?” that talks about rethinking copyright, fair-use, the public domain, and how all these issues contribute to our culture. The comic is available as a free download at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/ and anyone interested in how copyright policy affects our culture should check it out.
Does giving away our songs for free on the Internet mean we’ve sold fewer records? Who knows? Maybe. However, I really like the fact that I’ve met people from France, from Iceland, from Russia, Japan, and Australia, from small towns in the US that I’ve never heard of, people from all over the world, through the music that we make. I don’t think that would have been possible had we not made our music so freely available. Many people have written and said that they really appreciate that we offer the songs as downloads, and a few have been encouraged to do the same for the things that they make. Finally, hosting our files on a site like the Internet Archive (http://archive.org), and just making them easy to reproduce and share, in general, makes it possible that a hundred years in the future, after CDs, LPs, and MP3s have gone the way of the 8-track, after we’ve long since ceased to be a band, and ceased to be living people, that someone who might have interest in Defiance, Ohio could listen to our songs. Ultimately, making our songs available as downloads has been a good decision.
So, we’ve chosen to address the whole issue of illegal downloads by just making our songs available to download and share legally. As for bands that encourage illegal downloading, it seems contradictory and confusing that to do something as natural and simple as sharing a part of our popular culture, to do something that’s encouraged, one has to do something illegal. Hopefully, this contradiction will give everyone the opportunity to think about how we value culture, how we share things that are important to us, and whether we, as a culture of people who make, distribute, and enjoy media make choices that reflect those values.