Revolutionary change brought about by technology is usually very simple in its effect. It makes certain devices and rituals irrelevant to the point that is plain for all to see. The only subtlety about the fundamental shift in music distribution is that the change has been quite gradual, largely due to the inconvenient internet speeds of a few years ago. Today this is a no-brainer. You can now download an album with lossless compression (ie, CD-quality files and better) in a few minutes. Visiting a shop to pay good money for a hardcopy does not make sense.

My remarks about thinking of what happened before technology were an attempt to say this: imagine that digital technology and fast internet arrived overnight 120 years ago. Would record companies and their punitive contracts ever have existed? Clearly not. Artists would be making direct deals with cost-efficient digital studios and then using the internet to get their music to as many people as possible. That way they could travel from city to city across the world, knowing that an appreciative audience would be in waiting – thereby growing their established business of playing live for a living. Anything else would not have made any business sense – no one would be willing to pay for the stuff if it’s so easy to copy and distribute to everyone.

Given the slower pace of technology over the last century, the naysayers would have us believe that free-downloading is an immoral and counter-productive approach. Standing back and viewing the facts that now confront us, adherence to a previously workable business model is nothing short of illogical.

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SoWhatNow seems to have it all figured out, and thank god for that. It’s such a convenient and well constructecd idea to be able to buy into: a century of evil capitalists abusing technology to rob poor creative musicians. And now “Let’s go back to the era before recorded music technology” what a great f*!kin idea – so we’ll jut download whatever / whenever and pass the hat at the live gig?

“Fact: most of the world’s musicians have historically made more money from live performances than they ever have from album sales.”

A highly dubious claim at best.

The whole situation is more complicated than SoWhatNow would have us believe and right now there doesn’t appear to be a clear solution.

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What absolute twaddle.

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But back to the core issue – technology is ensuring that our previous notions of “intellectual property” and “copyright” will soon become redundant. These are things that were invented by business when technology first made recording and reproduction techniques possible. And lets be honest, it is not the artists who have benefited the most from these laws since then – it is the exploiters who do not have much creativity of their own. So if we are going to do right by our musicians and creative thinkers, lets imagine what the world was like BEFORE recording and duplication technologies existed. How do we reward creativity to the point of making it sustainable without relying on album sales? Fact: most of the world’s musicians have historically made more money from live performances than they ever have from album sales. That’s because they don’t need an entourage of CD pressing plants, distributors and widely scattered retail outlets to perform in front of an audience. That’s the way that it was and it’s the way it will continue to be.

Recordings will in future be nothing more than promotional material – from a business perspective at least. Artists will reach a much wider audience than before due to the removal of economic constraints and music lovers will have access to a much wider variety of material than ever before. This is a very good thing if you value art above commerce. And besides, greedy businesspeople are so “inventive” when it comes to revenue generation they’ll find a way to make a quick buck somehow, no matter how much “illegal” downloading we do.

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