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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Opinion / Mike McCray / News Is it even worth the double-click?
Posted By Mike McCray on Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:50 AM
Admit it, there's no way you dropped thousands of dollars in the iTunes store for that massive music collection.
Unlike the past, where people visited download and BitTorrent sites anonymously like they were cruising for porn, the threat of getting letters saying you owe $1,000 dollars for downloading The Perculator probably aren't going to come.
That's cool. Already having the shame of owning that song and quite possibly Aqua's "Barbie Girl" in your library are bad enough, there's no need to pay a fine, but what's more, the new era in music has created a digital dilemma that completely changed the way we value music.
As one of my professors put some eloquently during a hip-hop panel years ago, "I get my major league bootleg on." It's not that we don't buy music anymore, we just don't buy music we aren't sold on or haven't heard already, anymore.
I can vividly remember standing in Best Buy every Tuesday in high school, only having enough money for one album but holding two and trying to decide which one I needed the most — which one had more value to me.
Now that scene is more like me scrolling free sites on the couch, looking for links to faster sharing sites like MediaFire and Megaupload, and literally staring at some albums that I know I could get for free and asking myself if it's even worth the double-click. It's crazy to think now that I took my chances on artists we never heard from again like Ms. Jade and Slimm Calhoun in high school, now I know that would never happen.
Forget the risk of feeling of like your favorite artist dicked you for $12 when an album you bought fails to meet expectations, now fans harbor those same emotions when an album they paid nothing for disappoints. Larry David often talks of how is time is more valuable than his things, and for the music downloader wasting a few minutes downloading then over a half-hour listening to an album that sucks feels just as bad as blowing money on it.
Today, the importance of a mixtape or other free material is more important than ever. It's a low-risk way of generating buzz and getting people's mouth to water for your music in the future. I think about all the music I've paid for lately and most of it is from artists who released mixtapes or teasers I really liked, with the artists I looked over more or less sealing their fate with crappy free material. Like a free sample at Costco, that mini sausage link of music made me say, "you know what, I will buy the whole thing."
And maybe that's a small step towards music once again having the value you it had before but until then, you can't convince me to click twice and wait, I don't know, five or six minutes for Eminem's Relapse.
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