Creative Commons

Once Upon a Time...

I used to be a music pirate.

I know! Living among the rest of you law abiding citizens, a foul and dirty secret. But don't act surprised, I'm not alone.

According to some studies, as much as 95% of all music downloaded is illegal. Not only that, but the average teenager's iPod contains over 800 illegal tracks. Maybe at the going iTunes rate of "$0.99 per song", some teenages just don't have 800 dollars laying around to get their fix, even though they are thought to have more disposable income than the adults they leech off of.

Regardless of motive, it boiled down to some very simple reasoning for me. I felt like CDs cost too much for what they were, but they were still a product I wanted. There was a defining moment for when I felt justified for piracy, when I bought an album by Depeche Mode.

Let's start a year earlier. The year was 2000. I was a junior in high school. Piracy was still in it's infancy, Napster was still an avenue for piracy instead of a legitimate and now overpriced corporate entity. A few kids had CD burners and in my school they made money making mix CDs for about $5 a pop with all the tunes that you wanted to hear from your favorite high school shows like "TRL" (the last bastion of music from the now very poorly named MTV.)

It felt like a drug deal the first time I asked a kid on my school bus for a mix, nervously naming off singles which I hoped to be able to play on the CD player in my graphic arts class. It was a mini status symbol to have a popular new mix in that class. You felt very cool to be the Prometheus of music to your classmates back then. I paid up my $5, got my Sharpie labeled disc, and like a cocaine junkie with his first fix... I was a pirate.

It wasn't until the following year that I found my justification. Back to Depeche Mode. In 2001 Depeche Mode released "Exciter". The single, "Dream On" had the amazing guitar licks reminiscent of then popular bands like "Tantric" with ragged but then modern sounding vocals similar to U2. It got a lot of radio play, and I liked it. I rushed out to Best Buy and dropped $15 (around 3 hours of after tax work for a high schooler at the turn of the millenium) only to find that the album version wasn't the same as the radio. 

I never did figure out how the radio stations could justify playing a version that wasn't on the album, or how record companies could justify selling us a version we weren't hearing on the radio... but I was pissed. The rest of the album sucked, and with "no open return" policies on all music, I was stuck with a misrepresented and low quality purchase. My money was in the greedy mits of the RIAA, and I couldn't do a thing about it.

My mind spiraled back to the good feelings of my less expensive disc I bought the year before. I'd actually acquired 2 or 3 by that point. I decided to put my AOL dial-up connection to use, and fired up my favorite Yahoo search engine (before discovering Google). Soon, I was hooked. I used P2P sites like Kazaa, Limewire, and Frostwire to find individual tracks by the dozen.

CD technology led to DVD data discs. Mix CDs were soon replaced by MP3 players. Soon I graduated to broadband and discovered the magic of Torrents. I began getting full albums, and then album collections. I traded collections using portable hard drives and burnt DVD data discs. 

I quickly amassed a collection of music so long that if you looped the first track through til the last... you'd not hear the same song twice (unless you got a live version) for over a year and a half. I had so much music even I hadn't heard it all. It stopped being about the music, and started being about how much I could collect. Even though I could probably name a dozen or so CDs I would listen to regularly, I had hundreds of albums.

iTunes came along, and my obcession became categorizing and properly tagging my collection. Labeling folders "My playlist" and "Banned from my Playlist" (I couldn't delete music, even if I didn't like it. Except for AC/DC and Rush... they sucked enough that I broke that rule for them.) I had to have album names, release years, and album art. I even started wearing an "anti-RIAA" t-shirt to show people how much I disliked the group who was out to stop the thing I loved doing.

I started making videos for fun, and for church. Google (through their recently acquired video service YouTube), deleted 3. Their smart audio search had found copyright infringment on my videos. Crap. The ironic part? The music I used in my videos was music I owned legally. None the less, I was spurred to look for alternatives. That is when I found something that changed my download life.

Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is music which is free to download. Yes, Free. Up and coming bands, and musicians who are truely in it to be artists... not rich rock stars. Some give you the option to support them if you like what they do. Others such as Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead are successful enough that they can afford to experiment with different distrobution methods.

The difference between Creative Commons and Public Domain is that the artist still can control their music to varying degrees. There is a strong Creative Commons community where sharing and distribution happens freely. They rate and exchange opinions, and you can download individual tracks, or whole albums.

Much of the music under this license sucks. But there is gold there too. For me, the hunt is more exciting than the spoils anyway, so this has become my new hobby. Since graduating college, I have more expendable income. Over the past few months I've started shopping on Amazon for used music, and have kept an eye on the CDs of my local Goodwill stores too. I still don't want to put money into the pockets of the greedy record executives at the RIAA, but my music collection is nearly legal now (and should be 100% before too long).

Instead of browsing the plethora of torrent sites currently defending themselves in courts across the globe, I'll spend my time browsing sites like Jamendo, and Fingertips. While I won't get my radio favorites, I will get a great catalogue of stuff. The fact that much of this music is indie gives me some sort of strange street cred, plus I don't have to worry about the bullies at the RIAA trying to take my entire life away because they own the courts.

This is not to say that I completely rebel against mainstream music. I think that modern music might actually be making a comeback. (It's hard to say, but the radio has become much more listenable to my taste than it has for the past 7-8 years!)

I was afraid for a little while that either I was becoming old and out of tune with new music... or that music was dying. I don't think I can be blamed for having that opinion... let's take a look at the best selling albums of the 2000s.

• 2000 - NSYNC - No Strings Attached
• 2001 - The Beatles - 1
• 2002 - Eminem - The Eminem Show
• 2003 - 50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin'
• 2004 - Usher - Confessions
• 2005 - Mariah Carey - The Emancipation of Mimi
• 2006 - High School Musical Soundtrack
• 2007 - Josh Groban -Noel
• 2008 - Lil Wayne -Tha Carter III

We have crap pop, party rap and a compilation album from a band that was at the height of their popularity 30-40 years ago. No wonder music sales have been declining!! The recording industry would have us believe that it is because of illegal downloads, but even in the hayday of my piracy, I always bought good music. I think it's because they have been churning out mass produced garbage for so long.

Which brings me back to my pseudo-point to begin with. Had my experience been better with Exciter.... had music been more affordable from the start, I doubt I would have ever been tempted towards piracy to begin with. Between my inability to afford overpriced CDs and the fact that I had no return options or ability to know what I was getting before I bought it... piracy turned into the free alternative, and my own personal form of retribution towards "the man".

With new outlets like iTunes (where I can preview tracks before I buy them), Amazon (where I can buy music cheap or used), and Creative Commons (where I can satisfy my desire to hunt and download and find good music for free... I think my piracy days are over.

Now that iTunes isn't bogging their music down with Digital Rights, I have lost my only other reason not to want to download my music the legal way. I have great avenues for both my OCD desires to hunt and collect plus my playlists for work, working out, and entertainment.

Good thing I never got into downloading movies.