Downloading music:friend or foe?

10th Nov 2009

Down­load­ing music has become a norm in a lot of our lives, espe­cially for a typ­i­cal stu­dent; who strug­gles enough to afford the inflated roof above their head while try­ing to save enough cash in order to stum­ble home from Broad Street on a reg­u­lar basis.

There has recently been a lot of press con­cern­ing the impact that down­load­ing has been hav­ing on the finan­cial suc­cess of music artists. Every­one has become famil­iar with how you can access music through tor­rent down­load­ing, shar­ing sites or the recent phe­nom­e­non of Spo­tify. How­ever, step­ping back from artist rights and legal or ille­gal down­load­ing, I feel we are inevitably pay­ing another con­se­quence.
Over time, your com­puter is guar­an­teed to have had some form of mal­func­tion which has led to either minor or major data loss. If you fail to back up your music then you could lose your entire col­lec­tion should you not have the phys­i­cal copies.

I have found that since com­ing to uni­ver­sity I have stopped buy­ing CD’s. It is more con­ve­nient to stream from Spo­tify or scav­enge music from your friends than to head to a record store or wait for a deliv­ery every time you want to check­out new music. It is this con­ve­nience which has rapidly estab­lished dig­i­tal music as the dom­i­nant for­mat.
How­ever, when my hard drive ‘fried’ at the begin­ning of this year, I lost a large amount of my music. Even though it had been backed up some months before, the rapid­ity in which down­load­ing allows your music col­lec­tion to expand meant I had lost giga­bytes worth of the music which I had played con­stantly at the time.

Even if you have a near mil­i­tary rou­tine of back­ing up your music col­lec­tion there is still the issue of edit­ing your library. I con­stantly find myself delet­ing songs which I have lost taste for over time. This removes the embar­rass­ing nos­tal­gia of years later dis­cov­er­ing a holo­graphic cov­ered Iron Maiden CD in a dusty stack in your bed­room.
Obvi­ously there has been an evo­lu­tion­ary cycle over the last half-century in the way music is stored and pre­sented. Music has been con­tained on records, cas­settes, CD’s and every sub for­mat in-between, but now for many young peo­ple our music is only con­tained as data on a com­puter with no phys­i­cal product.

Look­ing at your parent’s record col­lec­tions, just reminds us that the sim­i­lar his­tory of how our music tastes devel­oped may be lost in years to come. After your shelf full of 90’s Dis­ney cas­settes and cringe wor­thy 00’s ‘nu metal’, the rest of your music library will be rep­re­sented by a soli­tary hard drive. It is dif­fi­cult to con­ceive there being any phys­i­cal music for­mat around another 30 years from now.

The tech­no­log­i­cal won­der of being able to store a life­times worth of music, in a sin­gle ‘black box’ (or even streamed from the internet),should cer­tainly be cel­e­brated from a per­spec­tive of pure convenience;  this is almost cer­tainly the way for­ward for the music indus­try as soft­ware like itunes and Spo­tify con­tinue to take preva­lence in our homes, but one can­not help but won­der if in this dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion,  our music is los­ing a great deal of its identity.