entropy via mediafire: more complex adventures in narcissism
i just found my way to a post on a blog called shock mountain, where you can currently download my 2006 album “entropy begins at home” – all 34 glorious minutes of it – via a mediafire link.
only one click away from here, you can get it on a shiny disc for $18. after a relatively painless paypal transaction and a bit of a wait while it travels through the post, it’ll arrive at your home in an envelope i packed myself. but only two clicks away, you can have the whole thing right now, for free.
go on, do it. i promise i’m not looking.
i am in no way naive about file sharing. i love mp3 blogs and i love file sharing. i download heaps of music, and buy music rarely. and in countless conversations with friends, family, other artists, whoever, i’ve constantly maintained my opinion that i fully support file sharing, and that i would hope that my music is shared through each and every network. i do sell my music, but if you can find my music through other means and feel cool about doing so, so be it. i’m not making music to make money, i just want you to hear it. but even if i were in it for the cash, there are smarter ways to do it now than simply selling it. blah blah blah way of the future, new music economy, music wants to be free, and all of that.
so why does this mediafire link make me feel so dirty and… no, it couldn’t possibly be… maybe just a little… angry? perhaps thats too strong a word – we’re not in lily allen territory. but lets say “miffed.” i felt miffed. my initial reaction to the blog post was “hey, cool, someone likes my music enough to talk about it on their blog!” – my second reaction was when i hovered over the album image, saw the mediafire link, and realised that there it was, the whole thing just sitting there like a freshly baked, steaming apple pie thats been left on the windowsill. while old granny wanders to the front door to attend to the milkman’s visit, a devious freckle-faced delinquent sneaks around the corner of the house and nabs the pie right out from the open window, cackling with glee and running into the open fields to have his way with his stolen prize.
but wait, i thought i was cool with file sharing!
my heart sank when i read this:
I stumbled across a song by Faux Pas called “For The Trees†which I really liked, but could never find the album for. Years passed, I forgot about Faux Pas, but days ago, I came across it again, this time finding the full album.
an eager commenter asks: “this is amazing! have you got your “paws†on any other stuff by them?” our protagonist replies: “i’m not sure about their other stuff, I’ll scour the interwebs for it though! If I come up with anything, I’ll share!”
hmmm. i ain’t hard to find. i have a ridiculously OTT web presence – google “faux pas” and you’ll find this very website within the top few search results (and its been that way since way back 2006 when “for the trees” came out). so yeah, my heart sank a little when i realised that “could never find the album” meant “could not find it for free” and that “this time finding the full album” meant “this time i found it on soulseek, or bit torrent, or whatever.”
so. its not quite good enough to pay money for but worth waiting until a free download turns up somewhere? like – not worth going to the cinema for, may as well just wait until its on the telly? i think thats just my dented pride talking.
so what exactly is it about the mediafire link thats giving me the willies? confronted with the reality of whole-album sharing, am i uncovering a latent disgust for file sharing somewhere deep in my soul? well then, suppose i better delete those hundreds of albums i’ve downloaded over the years.
am i grieving my lost sales, sales of my CDs that never got to happen like little babies that didn’t make it to term? “file sharing” as a sort of grisly financial miscarriage, little bundles of cash that never got born… its definitely the sort of gross and unsettling analogy that would surely spice up some of those RIAA court cases. am i looking at this as “hooray, hopefully some people download my album and like it” or “oh no, there goes a few lost sales, gotta get my cash money, call my lawyer etc?” is there a little lily allen in me waiting to burst out?
perhaps this all actually has something to do with my own romantic notions of what it means to be a mp3 blogger, and what i feel mp3 blogs should or shouldn’t be about. when a blogger starts giving whole albums away, just zippin em up and out the door – it don’t sit well with me for some reason. some of the love is gone. i imagine my favourite bloggers to be like friends recommending me music – and good friends don’t dump whole albums onto your hard drive like, hey, check this out later, whenever. they sit you down, get you comfy and play you that one song thats going to get you excited. in my rainbow-colored fairy world, mp3 bloggers start you on a journey of discovery, they don’t just deposit you at the destination.
but no that ain’t right. this blogger’s heart is in the right place. and who is to say that by giving one of my albums away for free, he isn’t perhaps encouraging people to track down other releases and maybe even part with cash for them? its the same logic on a bigger scale.
no, i think its the ‘dented pride’ thing. being a tender-hearted and fickle human, i can generally trace “feelings of miffed-ness” back to some kind of ego bruising at the source. perhaps this is it, finally – seeing my album starkly presented on that blog, in full, in amongst countless other full albums being offered on that blog alone, in amongst countless other blogs all offering their own giant catalogues of mediafired and yousendit-ified albums, whole back catalogues zipped up in bit torrents, whole careers only one click away… a tiny glimmer of faux pas like a tiny speck of sand in a immeasurable galaxy of surreptitiously distributed pitchfork BNMs… it all just reminds me that although i’d like to think i’m a special flower, my album is simply one folder sitting on your hard drive amongst thousands of others, wedged somewhere in between the fauves and foreigner. and thats if i’m lucky.
ahhh, my Electric Light Orchestra Complete Discography torrent has finished downloading.
oh and hey, as a means of concluding my treatise on a peace-and-love note – much love and thanks to shock mountain for blogging about my music! WE ALL GOOD Y’ALL!!
Hey Tim,
I started Shock Mountain as a quaint personal music blog to share music with people I knew back in February. I got the blogging bug and my blog soon became popular so I added on two of my friends as contributors shortly thereafter. I just wanted to say that I am aware of the concerns you and any other artist we have posted has. Let me assure you that we share because we care and are always sure to post links to buy the album. I know that does nothing to justify sharing another’s material, but it really is our hope that we can help people find and buy new music. We host no advertising, receive no “donations”, and pay for our hosting fee’s with our own money. It’s definitely a morally grey area, but I just wanted to assure you that we do indeed spend quite a bit of money on physical music releases and care very much about fostering growth in underground music.
If you would like us to take the album down, simply say the word.
- James
I also contribute to Shock Mountain, and I am really grateful that you’re being so cool about this. I used to run a blog of my own and once received an impersonal, formulated message directing me to remove an album, but this is so much better because we do get to hear both sides of the story, positive or negative.
I think you’re on the right track when you’re thinking of creating a physical copy of your album that CANNOT be reproduced online. A special packaging, limited edition print, a voucher that grants the bearer a 2 hour Tim Shiels cooking class, something that ads to the Faux Pas experience. And tour – play live. That’s an experience that can’t be downloaded and the majority of the money will be yours in the end.
As a music consumer, I think I’m on a similar page. I find all my music on the internet and for a while there I din’t buy music at all. Now I make a point of purchasing music that I want to support – that mainly means independent releases where I know the money goes to the artist and not to some crybaby label exec. Or I go to the show. I sent my entire family in Sweden to go see this amazing Swedish band called Detektivbyran just because I felt bad for downloading their music (and on that note, please do check them out – they’re amazing, http://www.detektivbyran.net).
So to end my rant, make something cool out of this album you got up your sleeve. I’m sure it’ll be amazing and I’ll happily pay for it. And come to your show. And I’m sure a lot of people share my sentiment.
/A
I agree with the comment above me so much. I’m a sucker for cute things, so even if an album comes with some dopey, cheesy bonus, it makes me much more likely to buy it. I think this is why vinyl has experienced something of a resurgence in America. Artists can do so much more with the artwork, plus the possibility of colored vinyl + numbered copies + etchings + any sort of hand-made anything will usually, if I’m on the fence about getting an album, convince me to drop $5 or $10 on it, just for the experience.
Interesting reflection! Have you seen Bob Ostertag’s thoughts on sharing music online? You can see them here: The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician.
Great post, Tim. I feel the same way about “discovering” artists. I’m currently working my way through Nick Cave’s back catalogue….slowly. Like, as slowly as Mute is re-releasing them. I know I could go download them all in the next four minutes but I am enjoying my time with just an album at a time. I fear that experiences like that are going to be increasingly rare as the kidz nowadays are not used to waiting for music (exceptions being new music, of course).
Anyway, loved reading this post. Cheers.
And just to prod the Shock Mountain people a wee bit…
As a blogger myself, I would never post an entire record. I tend to stick to single mp3s that labels or bands have approved. But, like Tim, I can’t say I’ve never illegally downloaded entire records so maybe I have no credibility here. Anyway, James specifically says in his comment that you Shock Mountain peeps spend a lot on music (I don’t doubt this) which is, obviously, great. I know a lot of other bloggers tend to only blog tracks that they themselves have actually physically purchased (exceptions being all those promo mp3s floating around, of course). Given Tim’s considered response to you illegally giving away his music maybe that’s a route you guys might consider with Shock Mountain in the future? I mean if you are going to be giving away someone else’s work it would be nice if at least one person involved actually compensated the artist for making it?
Not trying to start a fight or anything, just thought I’d throw that out there.
there’s so much to talk about here that i might get into it in another blog post, but i’ll address a couple of things briefly. well, as briefly as i can, which is never brief.
its totally not my intention at all to “shame” the guys at shock mountain, its obvious that you guys are motivated by a genuine passion for music. its simply that your blog post provoked an unexpected emotional reaction from me, which was a great springboard for some discussion on this – and i’m extremely pleased that you guys are contributing to that discussion. keep on doing your thing over there. i don’t want you to take my record down, no way.
file sharing takes many forms – whether its soulseek, or bit torrent, or mediafire/yousendit blogs, or single mp3 blogs, or your mate who comes over with a portable hard drive and dumps a bunch of albums in your itunes – and its here to stay. it is not evil, or bad, or anything, it is simply the way it is. saying it is bad is like saying compact discs are bad. its just what it is. its where we are at.
technology happens and culture/behaviour takes a while to catch up. when god invented the internet, music became bits and bytes and the world was forever changed. in terms of what music ‘is’ and how we listen to it and engage with it, we are all in a prolonged and awkward paradigm shift, and i think any insecurities and weird feelings that i’m having about it are just symptomatic of that awkward transition. some time in the future – perhaps not even that far away – it will seem very silly that we all squabbled and debated and pondered over these issues. kind of like when we all thought the world was flat, and that the sun revolved around the earth. very silly.
its like a kind of digital puberty. i’m not a doomsayer really, i have a naive optimism for the future – we’re in the ugly, dank cocoon of file sharing right now, but we will emerge like beautiful butterflies! just as soon as we all let go of this idea that music is a thing that you can buy, and sell, and own, etc. its our own hangups that are in the way; my now well-documented “miffed-ness” is merely a case of some puberty blues. i thought i was cool with file sharing, but… well, sometimes its awkward when hair grows in funny places. but it turns out great in the end.
oh and andreas, totally up for the idea of a faux pas cooking class for Premium Members. i’ll get 20 people around, and y’all can all teach me to cook something that doesn’t involve tinned tuna and/or minced garlic.
and… you sent your whole family to sweden?! you know i’d love to see detektivbyran play too… do you have a sister i can marry or something?
oh hang on andreas, i just re-read your comment. you sent your family in sweden to go see detektivbyran.
still, the idea of you shepherding various uncles, aunts, grandparents onto a plane heading to sweden… “trust me nanna, you”ll love these guys!”
here’s a tangent for you: you know, i never thought of this before, but here in sweden i think we are kind of getting… over this puberty stage? or um, into a new one. let’s say we’ve got our pubes and have started growing our chesthair: there are a million registered swedish users on spotify and quite a lot of people have even started paying for it. everyone seems to sort of agree that it’s good. artists are ok with it, labels like it (more or less, but they’re there, at least) and users love it. it’s sort of crap for finding new music and it has been hard for small labels to get their stuff on there, but it (combined with the legal action taken against the pirate bay-guys) has sort of made people like my little sister (no, you can’t marry her, tim) and her friends stop downloading. they just don’t do it anymore. they don’t need to.
my friend the it-journalist usually says re: file-sharing that all the discussions about morals or law are not that relevant, that in the end the best technology wins. torrents used to be the best technology, but it’s not anymore, so users are moving to spotify because it’s easier/better for them.
so i guess what i’m curios about is how you feel about that? does it make your “miffed-ness”-o-meter go up or down if no one downloads your album, but very few people pay you for it, and most of them hear it bracketed by some mighty annoying radio commercials?
You ARE a special flower Tim… : )
I have a cat called ‘Shock Mountain’, ‘Shocky’ for short. On more than once occasion i’ll find Shocky in the ravine behind my house. He’s typically there doing cat things like chasing woodland creatures, napping in open sunlight in little mounds of dirt and leaves. Shocky is, by society’s standards, a fairly normal feline. He deviates slightly for such a label in the sense that he enjoys classical music. Most cats I know are fairly indifferent to such noise. His preferred composer is Johan Brahmms and his favorite piece, Symphony No. 2, Op. 73.
Little is known of Johannes Brahms. Brahms, like Shocky is a fairly dodgy character. He is believed to have been Dutch and to have possessed at least a rudimentary knowledge of music composition and theory. No photographs exist, but he has been described as five feet seven or five feet eight, with small, piercing eyes—one green, one blue—and extremely annoying.“A genius,†the Post-Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec once said. “His appetite for life was surpassed only by his appetite for food, which was surpassed only by his appetite for crossbreeding house cats with wild squirrels. Also, he smelled of cumin.†Although the two artists never met or corresponded—nor were they really contemporaries—their unique and idiosyncratic bond remains one of the most fascinating artistic partnerships of the nineteenth century.
This is the best thing ever.
Really liked this post, I had a similar feeling a few weeks back about seeing my stuff come up on a torrent search for the first time. Similarly, once my almost completely immoral pre-leaked LCD Soundsystem record got to 100%, I felt a lot better.
Hanna: Thought I’d pick up your comment on Spotify, I agree that it’s a step in the right direction, have you seen what digital play royalties actually look like? We’re talking small fractions of cents, according to this infographic 4,549,020 plays – http://current.com/11bdg4c . My recent performing rights return included a massive .29c for digital plays – I’m not exactly doing U2 numbers here, but I did have a bit of a giggle at that. :)