It's not just because of their lead-footed public relations that I have little interest in mustering sympathy for the Recording Industry Association of America. It's not just because they sued 12-year-old Brianna LaHara for downloading such songs as the theme from Friends and If You're Happy and You Know It. The fact is, I feel a certain glee that the pop-music industry -- the source of so much painful irritation in waiting rooms and taxis and on telephones and on television, the sausage plant for aural spam -- is being told by young people that it is unnecessary. I hope it crashes and burns and we never have to listen to Nickelback again. File-sharing is a rejection of the social power of bland culture. Why should we pay for crap?
It's not that I don't want artists to get paid for their work. This is not about artists: It's about crap. File-sharing of pop music reflects a refusal of price-gouging for crap, for what is largely a disposable product anyway.
Anyway, it's not the artists who are taking these supposed losses in the first place. Unless you count megastars such as Britney Spears as artists, which is a tough exercise in classification, since she doesn't write her own songs and the product manufactured and distributed by her industrial team is more precisely a form of advertising for a line of merchandise. No, it's not artists who are opposed to music sharing: For them it's excellent publicity and fan-base building. It's the record companies who are upset. They make far more profit on CDs than artists do: Most of the artists' share of CD sales goes to "reimbursing" the record companies for elaborate videos and other promotions anyway. And record companies like to control what we listen to and who we drool over in magazines: They like to control what we know about and what we don't.
Most real musicians feel that they are excluded from the major channels of attention and remuneration. We live in an age of such constant exposure to music that we feel music -- or noise, as it becomes when inescapable -- is literally everywhere, and yet with our 500 channels and the radio in every taxi and stairwell, we still have very little choice of entertainment. If you listen to pop-music radio and watch the music-video channels, you are going to be exposed to an extremely narrow band of culture. You are going to see a few hits repeated everywhere, endlessly, and those hits are going to be of such a stupefying banality that you might guess that they are manufactured as ambience for a 7-Eleven store somewhere in suburban Des Moines.
This non-selection does not represent what is desired or created by anyone I know. I do not know anyone, of any age, who is not dissatisfied by the range of music that is offered by the mass media. (This is yet another example of how a supposedly free market can end up affording remarkably little freedom.) And if you're in a band doing something interesting, it is unlikely that you will find representation in the front window of that new HMV store that has just opened in your local strip mall (which is now the only place to shop, since the little downtown record store run by the long-haired nerd closed).
Without a radio station playing you, without a major record label wasting all your profits on videos directed by Steven Spielberg and Coca-Cola, you have to find a way to spread the word, get well known, allow your fans to communicate with each other. The Internet does exactly this: It publicizes your work by allowing millions of virgin ears to hear a sample of it. If they like it, they will eventually buy something of yours, whether it's your next CD (because they haven't figured out a way to hook up their I-Pod to their car stereo, and they want to hear it while they drive) or a $15 ticket to your live show. The more fans you reach, the more likely you are to profit in very concrete ways.
I say this as someone with something to lose if my own artistic products are not paid for. Interestingly, the publishing industry has not collapsed because of photocopying or even because of the possibility of uploading e-copies (even rewritten e-copies of novels, as have circulated). Nor have libraries -- where free copies of published works are available for sharing, exactly as they are on Kazaa -- lost any writers any money. I am delighted, as an author with several books for sale in bookshops, when I hear of someone borrowing one from a library. I do not regret the loss of a sale. I am pleased that someone is taking an interest -- someone who might, if she likes the book, tell someone else about it who might also borrow it and tell someone else. This is all good for me.
The only thing the publishing industry hasn't done -- yet -- is get itself hated the way the music industry has. Books, so far, aren't quite as saccharine and omnipresent as Celine Dion is. The rebellion against record companies is an aesthetic one: It reflects a dissatisfaction with what's on offer.