The Intangible Losses of the Move to Online Music Acquisition

There is no doubt that online music purchasing or sharing sites, such as iTunes or etree.org, have empowered new generations with unparalleled access to one of the most sacrosanct art forms in history.

• What makes an art form more or less sacrosanct? Are you sure you are using the adjective correctly? I don't know how to differentiate degrees of sacrosanctity.

Lower prices, easier and larger access to diverse genres, and instant gratification are just a few reasons that can be offered for the idea that there is a net gain for individual music listeners. However, I argue that the mainstream discourse concerning the merits of the process of digitalization of consumer music, as found in Rolling Stone and other prominent publications, ignores several intangible sources of loss to listeners.

• As it turns out, you don't mean "intangible," you mean "subjective and personal." The idea of listing things that you don't personally like about change is saved from mere nostalgia only by the analysis that reveals something larger or more significant than mere personal regret.

Sources of Intangible Loss to Individuals

The scope of this paper does not intend to create an exhaustive list nor to address what intangible gains digital acquisition may offer. Instead, it seeks to examine three sources of loss to individual listeners which are easily obscured in the race to embrace music downloading.

• This is apparently supposed to function as a protection against criticism: you weren't supposed to say anything larger than an expression of personal regret, because you weren't trying to be either balanced or comprehensive. Therefore it doesn't matter if you don't say anything.

1) The Loss of the “Record Store”

As the recent closing of Tower Records shows, digitalization is moving the locus of music acquisition from a physical store to a personal computer. Record stores are, however, not just physical warehouses for commercial transactions; they are part and parcel of the musical experience itself.

• Maybe for you. They're not for me. Perhaps the concert hall isn't "part and parcel off the musical experience itself" for you, but it's a goddam sight more musical than Wal*Mart, which as you may know is the largest bricks and mortar vendor of music in this society. You are regretting the loss of the Wal*Mart musical experience?

Movies such as “High Fidelity” and “Empire Records” showcase the value of personal exchanges, such as the sharing of stories or suggestions between patrons during the purchasing process, which give added meaning to the listening experience. Intangible value derived merely from the physical acquisition experience itself is lost due to the absence of human contact through digital acquisition.

• Human contact is a large part of "digital acquisition," as anyone getting their music through MySpace will tell you.

For example, a suggestion from an ex-hippie store owner may not only carry more weight with a rock fan than reading remote message board suggestions, it may be part of enjoying the musical experience itself. Thus, a listening of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) might be more thoroughly appreciated by a young consumer in light of listening to the hippie’s tales of Dylan’s importance to the political movements he experienced first hand.

• Has it possibly occurred to you that the people who experienced the political significance of Bob Dylan's mid-60s music might be law professors rather than "ex-hippie store owners"? I think the assumption that the guy in the record store is our primary source of social resonance for the music we listen to is about as bogus as it is possible to get.

Similarly, online discussions via message boards might not be able to adequately replace the value of body language in an in-person debate about whether Clapton or Hendrix was a better guitarist. In this sense, it might be hard to replace the record store as the locus for fan related interactions with online forums filled with anonymous personalities behind avatars.

• Give me a break. Where do the discussions with body language of Palestrina and Josquin Desprez go on? Or is this all about "music" only to the extent that it involves rock musicians living or recently deceased?

I concede that many in-person facets of the acquisition process may have online equivalents, but such equivalents, lacking the sounds, colors and textures of a record store, may not preserve the complete musical experience as it stands today.

• The "complete musical experience" seems to be mostly about people talking. Are you sure that's music you've been listening to?

2) Loss of the physical album

The physical act of holding an album differentiates in-person purchasing from internet acquisition. First, finding an item “in stock” on a check out screen or “active” on a peer-to-peer site may not approximate the excitement of discovering a sought after album at the bottom of a bargain bin or finding the last copy of an album on a shelf because of the added sensory perception of touch absent in the online process.

• Woo hoo. The special importance of touching cardboard. Do you read music? Or is having the score not part of the "complete musical experience"?

Second, viewing an album cover online can inhibit a consumer’s ability to have a proper first impression of album cover art. Cover art is usually carefully chosen by the artist and it is, in most cases, meant to add a visual component to compliment the audio portion of the experience to complete one unitary work of art. A consumer only gets one first impression and a case can be made that the shock of walking into a record store and finding oneself face to face with a naked 13 year old girl on the cover of Blind Faith’s self titled 1969 album cannot be approximated by finding a small jpeg image of the same picture on itunes. Further, many commercial websites have strict decency standards which preclude some artist’s album art from being properly displayed whereas many independent record stores do not follow such guidelines.

Finally, a physical album is a permanent and tangible piece of art. Downloading music does not allow an individual to open an album jacket and view lyrics, liner notes and credits, nor does it protect her from a hard drive crash which wipes out her music collection.

• I'm sorry about that crash. Have you heard about backing up?

3) The loss of the musical album

An album is the product of a careful process of selecting which songs to place in the final product and in which order the listener hears them. Often, the artist’s creation is necessarily dependent on the consumer’s appreciation of the entire entity.

• Excuse me? That's not even a truthful relation of the way things work in the tiny corner of the universe of recorded music which seems to be the only thing you think about when you talk about "music." Arbitrary pressures both technical and commercial have always affected the combination of pieces of music into the collection called "album" (originally meaning a bunch of 78rpm disks, rather than one 33rpm "LP" disk, which is what you seem to be mostly talking about here). Sometimes "artists" have been involved in those choices, sometimes not. Your understanding of the matter appears to be uninflected by research or study, and is not based on a particularly wide experience with listening, either, so far as one can tell.

Taken alone, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” cannot approximate the full experience of listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety. Perhaps the Beatles intended “Lucy” to prepare the listener, sonically or mentally, to appreciate the final, single note of “A Day in the Life,” which lasts for 42 seconds; a feat much harder to accomplish without the benefit of album context.

• Nothing to prevent one from acquiring an entire album as a single data file, of course.

Further, online sources allow individuals to download a single song from a concept album, a work built around a single developing theme, which was expressly meant to be appreciated in its entirety according to the artist. Downloading a single song from The Who’s “Tommy” or Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” is tantamount to watching only one scene from The Phantom of the Opera; it may be fun, but it does not convey the full experience as designed by its creator.

• Is that a moral rights argument against ever separating anything that the artist thought of as a unit? So much for all those idiotic performances of the Hallelujah Chorus without the previous three hours of oratorio, and the anthem of the European Union will now have to be put back on ice while humankind figures out how to preface each performance with the preceding three movements of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Conclusion

Ultimately, online downloading may lead to a net gain, in both monetary and non-monetary terms, for individual listeners. However, the debate over this premise must acknowledge that the art form as it was known pre-downloading might not be the same art form once it is nearly universally acquired digitally. In order to truly understand the ramifications of moving to a download-centric consumer music model, intangible losses to individual listeners must play a role in the overall calculus.

• This wasn't calculus. This wasn't even trigonometry. You needed to check the concepts and the execution both through the lens of skeptical editing. The skeptical editor would have asked, at the outset, whether these were "intangible costs" or "personal regrets." He would also have tagged, for example, the issue of hard drive crash as an unrelated makeweight, a staple of biased argument.

Eben, this is an article just posted on Jambase.com. i feel that it might be an interesting read in conjunction with my argument from above.

http://www.jambase.com/Articles/Story.aspx?StoryID=13522

Record Store Day :: 04.19.08 The countdown is underway to the first-ever Record Store Day on Saturday, April 19. It's going to be an unprecedented event when hundreds of independent stores across the country join forces to celebrate the essential cultural and economic roles they play, both in their local communities and nationally. During these tumultuous times, it's been so encouraging to hear of the widespread support this initiative has garnered from fans, artists and the industry.

Each and every day, independent stores of all shapes and sizes (and the people who own, manage and work in them) bring not only their heart and soul, but also their creativity and their financial investment in the success of the music business. Artist development... customer service... innovative marketing and promotion... the list goes on and on. They have more than earned this chance to step into the spotlight and take their well-deserved applause from an enthusiastic and appreciative audience.

-- AdamGold? - 08 Apr 2008