I teach a course on rap music here at TTU and, in our discussion of the music business, the cost of producing a CD came up. I asked the class (about 20 students) how many of them still purchased CDs and they all shook their heads. Downloading is evidently here to stay.
On a related note, we talked about cell phone ringtones. Sumanth Gopinath has a fascinating essay on the ringtone industry, which evidently accounts for about 10% of the global music market.
I don't have an iPod. I don't think I ever will. I subscribed to iTunes and downloaded a whopping two tracks in the past six months. I like unwrapping a new CD, looking at the cover art, reading the liner notes. I like the smell of new CDs. Beyond the physical object of the CD, other things are lost by downloading music, I think.
First, by downloading single songs (usually the "hit" song from a particular album), one could miss other gems on the recording. Some of my favorite songs are "B-sides" (to invoke another form of recorded music--the LP). Related to this is the impossibility of a "happy accident." I've overheard colleagues lamenting JSTOR for similar reasons: one can access exactly the article they want and they have no need to flip through the rest of the journal. As a result, they may miss the interesting book review that follows the article, or the equally interesting essay that preceeds it.
Second, downloading the album piecemeal may take away from the album's structure as a whole. Shaugn O'Donnell has written about the large-scale structure of Pink Floyd's Dark side of the moon, a structure that would be compromised by downloading only part of the album. I miss my cassette tapes sometimes (I never had many LPs, but the effect is the same) because of the distinct break that followed the last song on side A. One then had to get up out of the chair, and flip the cassette (or LP) to side B.
My favorite example of this is Metallica's *And justice for all...* Side A ended with the song "One," a story about a young man confined to a hospital bed, paralyzed as a result of injuries he suffered in combat. Heavy stuff (no pun intended). There was a long pause after that song and before the end of the tape--the subject matter of that song seemed to me to demand it. Now that I have this on CD, I feel cheated by the lack of break between what was the last song on side A and the first song on side B. There's no time to ruminate on the poor lad's condition, to consider the horrors of war.
Ringtones do an even greater disservice to the artist, in that typically, only a small section (in most cases, I would surmise, the hook or the chorus--I don't download ringtones either) is made available for purchase. In much the same way downloading individual MP3s destroys the integrity of the album, ringtones destroy the integrity of individual songs by decontextualizing the "catchy" bit.
I'll maybe reserve the topic of playlists, ringtones, ontology, and individual musical taste for another posting...
(much of what is written here is inspired by Theodore Gracyk's fascinating tome, Rhythm and noise: An aesthetics of rock (Duke U. Press))
Comments?
On a related note, we talked about cell phone ringtones. Sumanth Gopinath has a fascinating essay on the ringtone industry, which evidently accounts for about 10% of the global music market.
I don't have an iPod. I don't think I ever will. I subscribed to iTunes and downloaded a whopping two tracks in the past six months. I like unwrapping a new CD, looking at the cover art, reading the liner notes. I like the smell of new CDs. Beyond the physical object of the CD, other things are lost by downloading music, I think.
First, by downloading single songs (usually the "hit" song from a particular album), one could miss other gems on the recording. Some of my favorite songs are "B-sides" (to invoke another form of recorded music--the LP). Related to this is the impossibility of a "happy accident." I've overheard colleagues lamenting JSTOR for similar reasons: one can access exactly the article they want and they have no need to flip through the rest of the journal. As a result, they may miss the interesting book review that follows the article, or the equally interesting essay that preceeds it.
Second, downloading the album piecemeal may take away from the album's structure as a whole. Shaugn O'Donnell has written about the large-scale structure of Pink Floyd's Dark side of the moon, a structure that would be compromised by downloading only part of the album. I miss my cassette tapes sometimes (I never had many LPs, but the effect is the same) because of the distinct break that followed the last song on side A. One then had to get up out of the chair, and flip the cassette (or LP) to side B.
My favorite example of this is Metallica's *And justice for all...* Side A ended with the song "One," a story about a young man confined to a hospital bed, paralyzed as a result of injuries he suffered in combat. Heavy stuff (no pun intended). There was a long pause after that song and before the end of the tape--the subject matter of that song seemed to me to demand it. Now that I have this on CD, I feel cheated by the lack of break between what was the last song on side A and the first song on side B. There's no time to ruminate on the poor lad's condition, to consider the horrors of war.
Ringtones do an even greater disservice to the artist, in that typically, only a small section (in most cases, I would surmise, the hook or the chorus--I don't download ringtones either) is made available for purchase. In much the same way downloading individual MP3s destroys the integrity of the album, ringtones destroy the integrity of individual songs by decontextualizing the "catchy" bit.
I'll maybe reserve the topic of playlists, ringtones, ontology, and individual musical taste for another posting...
(much of what is written here is inspired by Theodore Gracyk's fascinating tome, Rhythm and noise: An aesthetics of rock (Duke U. Press))
Comments?