It's Hating My Head Hurt
- thoughts on physical media and Internet Music, and stuff
October 6, 2013
Yes, that photo of me is a selfie. My brother recently said to me, "Dude, you need to stop with the selfies!" He had this look on his face that made me think he thought that I should know better, and that my use of selfies revealed that I was as pathetic as all of the 20-somethings who post selfies as their profile pics on Facebook: "Here I am with my new haircut" or "here I am with my new tat."
My reply is that nobody knows me as well as I do. I see me more than anyone else does. I know what I look like and this selfie expresses much of what I have to say in this rant.
Plus, it makes a point up front, before I ever get started, and I have a hell of a lot to say this time! I have discovered that for many reasons it has become apparent to me that when I make statements on Facebook, the Internet in general - it is OBLIGATORY to state that these are my opinions, my thoughts, things that I think. Everyone has opinions and these are mine. They are not your opinions and I do not expect you to believe what I do.
Anything I state here is not a personal criticism of YOU. That's right, YOU!
People on the Internet get their feelings hurt so easily: if someone else states an opinion that conflicts with or even slightly casts doubt on the beliefs or lifestyle of the reader the reader becomes offended and hurt - instead of just accepting the statements of the other person as THEIR opinions and worth considering because THAT person is going to the trouble to share THEIR worldview.
Maybe it's an Internet thing, or maybe it's a generational thing, not sure. But I have noticed that Generation X and Millennial people don't like to be TOLD anything - especially not by Baby Boomers! Ha!
In 1998, when I released my H8 cassette album, a handful of people wrote to me, telling me: "I know that the title of your new tape is directed at me, that you hate ME." Sure, why not? But remember, as I wrote in my song "Equal Opportunity Hate": "you can rest assured that I hate you at least as much as I hate myself." H8 was for the most part an abstract work. I did speak on the album but I never directly addressed the listener. So why did anybody think that the title was a statement about hate, my hate for them, or anything other than a letter and a numeral?
Having dispensed with those niceties, let me address the topic. A good friend of mine here on Facebook, who has also been doing homemade experimental music since the 1980s, shared with me that he and another hometaper from the 80s had been talking about whether it was time to give up on physical media audio (cassettes, discs). The other hometaper person was taking a stand that they would refuse to release any more physical media because that person cares about the environment and the impact on the environment that physical media creates AS waste product.
The good friend went on to ask if I thought that maybe they and the other hometaper and I shouldn't all make a statement together (in a sense) as an example for others to follow, perhaps home audio artists younger than us. The good friend wanted to know my feelings on the matter and was a little unsure about my feelings on the topic - because in the past I had made rather strong statements in favor of Internet Music as opposed to physical media, but that recently I had also been making my recordings available on Cassette and CDR.
First of all, I will say that any motivations I might have to abandon physical media have nothing to do with the environment. Quite frankly, I couldn't give a rat's ass whether a cassette or a disc adds to the pollution of the environment. It is a lost cause any way, and I don't feel that one more tape or disc is going to make it any worse than it already is. A few years ago there was discussion about the environmental "footprint" of cassettes and discs, and some people who spend a lot of time thinking about such things, were not convinced that computers had any less of a negative impact on the environment than hard copy media.
If we are going to talk about pollution and its causes we need to talk about its root cause - and indeed the root cause of 95% of today's ecological and political strife - but it is a topic that NOBODY wants to talk about - OVER-POPULATION. And over-population is an inevitable result and/or REACTION TO Capitalism, for good or bad. Until we seriously address this issue and stop making babies, I don't want to talk about pollution, Global Warming, or any other Earth-shaking problems.
The greatest single failure of all of the radical, revolutionary, "progressive" movements of the 20th Century (and after) was that their practitioners GAVE IN to making babies, The Family, Marriage, yada yada. A total failure! Babies will make it better - "Our children will create the world that we weren't able to!" Yeah, right. I do not see why gay people should give a shit about marriage. Goddammit if it isn't obvious that marriage and family and 2.5 kids isn't the best way for The Man, Big Brother, The Military-Industrial Complex, whatever, to keep us all too busy to complain! The whole thing is a CONTRACT.
There are obvious examples of marriages and long-term relationships, hetero and otherwise, that have been fruitful and happy and meaningful. I applaud those people! You have created something great in seemingly impossible conditions. Good for you. You are braver than me!
But whatever. I don't think that the human race as a whole is worth worrying about saving. When people talk about the human race they act like it's a thing that can even be conceived of. To me it's a total abstraction - like Love or Peace. I cannot love the human race and I care less about its future and making the world "a better place for all mankind" - BECAUSE in great part I don't have kids and so it won't matter. And what WILL matter once I am dead?! Nothing will matter to me, period. I will be dead. Death is the end. It's final.
I prefer to give my love and caring and attention to individuals, be they family members or friends who have, through their personal qualities made me admire them! It's that simple.
And when I meet people in my daily life I do my best, with varying degrees of success, to treat them as individuals -- not based on their skin color, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual preferences or political and philosophical beliefs.
Other than my mom and dad and sister and brother and dog and coffee and my job the only interest that I have in life is MUSIC... and/or art. And I like and admire various people who make music. I like them and admire them because they make interesting music.
You can call me a "hedonist" if you like. But I live like a monk, almost. I picture a hedonist as being constantly engaged in an endless bacchanal, drunken orgies, the works. I don't drink alcohol, or smoke or do any drugs. The only vices I have left are coffee and self-gratification. I do not own an automobile. I ride the city bus to work and borrow my brother's car whenever I need to go some place that I can't get to on the bus.
One of the biggest complaints that I and many other people have made about Internet Music is the doubt that anyone REALLY listens to mp3s. You know, people don't listen in the same GENUINE way that they do to a tape or a disc. And of course physical media proponents claim that people don't actually listen, they just hoard files for the sake of it - because they can.
I have news for you: I have literally hundreds and perhaps thousands of cassettes and CDRs and CDs that hometapers have sent to me that I have never ever listened to! There are unopened packages from two, three, four, five years ago. No shit.
My friend Brian Noring, who used to operate the F.D.R. Tapes label pretty much stopped his label activities in 2003-04 and spent the next two or three years listening to every tape, record, and CD in his entire music collection. A year or so ago he started over again.
These items are taking up valuable space in my bedroom in my small apartment. Sometimes I don't have enough room for me and my dog to sleep unless I shove a pile of physical media from one place to another a few inches away.
Does it make sense for me to allow other people to send new recordings of their music to me, when I haven't even listened to everything that I have ever received? Why haven't I listened to every tape and disc that I have ever received? I don't know. Am I lazy? Disorganized? Uncaring? Or just overwhelmed? Do depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia enter it? Sure, all of that stuff!
No, clearly, it doesn't make sense for me to keep on receiving physical media recordings from other people. And, by the same token, does it make any sense for me to keep on sending out tapes and discs of my music?
Let me take a close look at some actual facts and figures.
Since the beginning of 2013 I have mailed, sent out, sold, traded, given as gifts, etc. --
555 Cassettes
137 CDRs
How many of those have I sold, did I receive money for?
88.
So, clearly, I spent much more money to give away and send out and mail out those recordings for free and for trade to other people. Why would I do such a thing? Why would I allow myself to LOSE MONEY with my music? Isn't that stupid?
If you ask me, I will tell you that it is because I am doing it for the love of the music... that the money doesn't matter as much to me as enabling people to hear my music if they want to.
Trading tapes and discs is a great way for audio artists to exchange sounds and hopefully enrich and inspire each other to do bigger and better and more daring music, to experiment! Trading is great because you are getting something that hopefully means more than money. For many artists a trade is much more valuable than a sale.
So, why do I allow people to buy my recordings at all? If it is all about the music, why should I let money enter into it at all? Why don't I limit myself strictly to trading recordings with other artists or giving my music away as gifts?
The answer is simple: it is because there are some people who don't make music of their own and they want my recordings and they don't just want me to give it to them for free, nor do I want to put myself in a very awkward position. If I did, how chaotic would that be? I would go even broker!... I would spend even more money on giving my music to other people!
Just imagine:
"Hey Hal, I love your music, man, I really do. However, I have no money to buy your tapes. And besides, it's not in the proper 'anarchist' spirit for me to be forced to spend money on your music, is it? Music is FREE, man, like the wind. So, uh, please send me these 27 titles of yours on cassette and I will enjoy them, okay?" With what guarantee that they will ever actually listen to them? And then I would have gone to all of that time and effort and expense for what?
And really, that's what Internet Music is all about, isn't it? Everything is free free free! We don't have to pay for anything. We don't have to give anything! We don't even have to listen if we don't want to, dammit! We can just consume for the sake of it. Hooray! Freedom!
In the Internet Age we have all of the world's knowledge at the click of a mouse button. We can see any famous artwork, see any film/movie, hear any piece of music, and not even have to pay anything for it. It's all there for the taking so why not take it?
Why do I and many of my associates still feel drawn toward physical audio media such as tapes?
A few years ago I read somewhere, and I can't remember where - and I'm going to paraphrase this badly - that the Pre-Internet Age (The Analog Age) was typified by lack and want (by not enough), and the Internet Age is typified by abundance and surplus (by too much).
In the 1980s, in the Cassette Age, I remember that we were thrilled to receive packages from all over the world containing cassettes of weird music by weird people! Cassettes were all we had then. It's all many of us could afford as a means to get our music heard -- at all. You'd mail one of your tapes to someone in a foreign country and a month later you'd get a tape from them in trade. It felt amazing and almost like a religious experience, LOL. Those tapes were so individualistic and odd and free and strange. Sure, there was a lot of emulation and copy-cat stuff, but there was also a lot of experimentation, trying new things.
Now every recording by every artist who ever made a recording is available on the Internet. And most of it is free because it is uploaded to the Internet without the knowledge or consent of the creator. The beauties of digital media! Art and sound transformed into 0's and 1's. It is a lot more fluid and transportable than analog media. It's also kinda sorta easier to "steal." I am sure that to Prince the most important thing is that I get to hear all of his wonderful music, right? No matter if I pay for it or not -- he's rich enough. Sure, there are "legit" sites where I can pay for it, but why do that, when I can just download it from a blogspot for nothing? I'm broke - I don't have money to pay for music that I like. Oh, I'd better hurry up and download all of those freebie bootleg mp3s before "someone" forces them to take it all down. Hoard.
These words ring in my ears...
In 1985, during the time that Debbie Jaffe and I were operating the Cause And Effect cassette label we were getting ready to reissue "Live At Inroads" by Borbetomagus. I negotiated a reasonable payment to the group per copy sold and I mentioned to Jim Sauter that tape trading was a regular part of our operation, and that I would not be paying Borbetomagus any royalties for trade copies of Live At Inroads. He counseled me: "Don't give away too many copies for free. people value things more when they pay for them."
Ahem...
Pause...
There have been numerous underground recording artists who either through sheer undeniable talent (they create good music), hard work, luck, fashion, or compromise have been able to sell recordings of their music. I'm not suggesting that many if any DIY experimental music people have been able to live off of it. To those people who have been able to sell stuff and sell it consistently, I say the more power to you. Good work.
Back in the 1980s a lot of us in the cassette scene talked about how we were anti-establishment, against big record companies, against the music industry... as a matter of dissent and revolt. It was obvious to some of us that the music industry, TV networks, movie studios, all of commercial media, was in cahoots with Big Brother and that they were the propaganda wing of the Military-Industrial Complex.
People outside our subculture were using cassettes to make copies from their favorite record albums, which they traded with friends, or bootlegs of live shows by their favorite bands.
There was a favorite slogan back then:
"Hometaping Is Killing The Music Industry."
This was often accompanied by a logo of a line drawing of a cassette with a skull and crossbones on it. Since then I have come to realize that this meant two things to two different groups of people. The music industry used it to discourage people from making illegal home tape copies of commercial music albums, because this would undercut the profits of and eventually destroy the music industry. To those of us in the underground it meant something different. It meant that through our efforts to use tapes to spread our own music and that of our associates we would give people alternatives to the brainwash garbage that the big record companies were dealing out. And, there was a third group who just wanted free copies of commercial music and were just using tapes to get free stuff.
Plus in the 1980s DIY underground there was the anti-copyright ethic - nobody owned sound! - nobody owned words! So, many of us, in our art and other efforts tried to subvert copyright in any way(s) possible - re-appropriation, plunderphonics, remixing the mass media and spitting it back at them in an effort to destroy by feedback. William Burroughs employed and described methods by which we could take the ugliest bullshit signals that the State and Big Corporations were feeding us, turn it inside out, cut it up and rearrange the signals in such a way that it changed the message and play it back to the Ugly Forces.
Not everybody was into this way of thinking. Some people just wanted to get their music heard and cassettes were an easy, affordable way to do it. Many people used their tape releases as stepping stones to bigger and better things, such as record releases.
So, now, 25 to 30 years later, we have Internet Music, and "nobody" can sell anything... or so we are told. We are told that the music industry is suffering huge losses every year through Internet piracy and illegal downloads. Up and coming bands who are trying to "make it" can't sell merchandise because people just get it off the Internet. But I wonder if things for the Big Mass media types is really all that bad?
Meanwhile, by using the Internet I can get my music out to more people more quickly than ever before. I give people the option to purchase a download for whatever price they choose or pay nothing. Needless to say, I'm giving away a lot of free downloads, because very few people voluntarily CHOOSE to pay anything.
Again, you know, I'm still not in it for the money. But when people choose to purchase a download that little bit of money helps me to pay my Bandcamp and PayPal fees and to pay my website fees. Yes indeed, it costs me money to offer my music for free! Somebody is making money off of my music, but it's not me.
A big part of the reason that I have not bothered with making a big effort to sell my music is a philosophical reason - I consider the experimental noise scene to be a community of peers. Other noise artists are my comrades.
I can imagine this exchange between two peers/comrades:
"Dude, here's my new tape - it's $5
"Awesome, here's my new tape - it's $5"
-- and the two noise dudes exchange tapes and $5 bills.
Earlier I applauded those who ARE able to get people to pay for their music. I've just never been able to care about doing the things that are necessary to get people to buy my stuff. I just want people to hear what I do. If they choose to listen, great! I don't ACTUALLY know how many people ACTUALLY REALLY listen. With offering my stuff as downloads I'm not really getting anything back - not even a trade! The only value exchange of any sort is that I know that people have access to my music.
So why am I still offering my music on cassettes and CDRs IN ADDITION to the Internet? -- because people, some people, still want their tapes and discs! That's cool. It's just that now I'm spending twice as much to make my music available essentially for free! LOL. It's all good, though... for now.
But eventually, and I can foresee that day, I will stop making tapes and discs because it'll be pointless.
My efforts now center on combining the best qualities of the analog tape world with the immediacy of the Internet. My Museum Of Microcassette Art project is a nice working model of those efforts.
These were some rambling thoughts here, and hopefully not too incoherent, and I hope that attentive readers can connect the dots that I have left unconnected. I'm tired of writing and you're probably tired of reading, so that's enough for now.
Yes, that photo of me is a selfie. My brother recently said to me, "Dude, you need to stop with the selfies!" He had this look on his face that made me think he thought that I should know better, and that my use of selfies revealed that I was as pathetic as all of the 20-somethings who post selfies as their profile pics on Facebook: "Here I am with my new haircut" or "here I am with my new tat."
My reply is that nobody knows me as well as I do. I see me more than anyone else does. I know what I look like and this selfie expresses much of what I have to say in this rant.
Plus, it makes a point up front, before I ever get started, and I have a hell of a lot to say this time! I have discovered that for many reasons it has become apparent to me that when I make statements on Facebook, the Internet in general - it is OBLIGATORY to state that these are my opinions, my thoughts, things that I think. Everyone has opinions and these are mine. They are not your opinions and I do not expect you to believe what I do.
Anything I state here is not a personal criticism of YOU. That's right, YOU!
People on the Internet get their feelings hurt so easily: if someone else states an opinion that conflicts with or even slightly casts doubt on the beliefs or lifestyle of the reader the reader becomes offended and hurt - instead of just accepting the statements of the other person as THEIR opinions and worth considering because THAT person is going to the trouble to share THEIR worldview.
Maybe it's an Internet thing, or maybe it's a generational thing, not sure. But I have noticed that Generation X and Millennial people don't like to be TOLD anything - especially not by Baby Boomers! Ha!
In 1998, when I released my H8 cassette album, a handful of people wrote to me, telling me: "I know that the title of your new tape is directed at me, that you hate ME." Sure, why not? But remember, as I wrote in my song "Equal Opportunity Hate": "you can rest assured that I hate you at least as much as I hate myself." H8 was for the most part an abstract work. I did speak on the album but I never directly addressed the listener. So why did anybody think that the title was a statement about hate, my hate for them, or anything other than a letter and a numeral?
Having dispensed with those niceties, let me address the topic. A good friend of mine here on Facebook, who has also been doing homemade experimental music since the 1980s, shared with me that he and another hometaper from the 80s had been talking about whether it was time to give up on physical media audio (cassettes, discs). The other hometaper person was taking a stand that they would refuse to release any more physical media because that person cares about the environment and the impact on the environment that physical media creates AS waste product.
The good friend went on to ask if I thought that maybe they and the other hometaper and I shouldn't all make a statement together (in a sense) as an example for others to follow, perhaps home audio artists younger than us. The good friend wanted to know my feelings on the matter and was a little unsure about my feelings on the topic - because in the past I had made rather strong statements in favor of Internet Music as opposed to physical media, but that recently I had also been making my recordings available on Cassette and CDR.
First of all, I will say that any motivations I might have to abandon physical media have nothing to do with the environment. Quite frankly, I couldn't give a rat's ass whether a cassette or a disc adds to the pollution of the environment. It is a lost cause any way, and I don't feel that one more tape or disc is going to make it any worse than it already is. A few years ago there was discussion about the environmental "footprint" of cassettes and discs, and some people who spend a lot of time thinking about such things, were not convinced that computers had any less of a negative impact on the environment than hard copy media.
If we are going to talk about pollution and its causes we need to talk about its root cause - and indeed the root cause of 95% of today's ecological and political strife - but it is a topic that NOBODY wants to talk about - OVER-POPULATION. And over-population is an inevitable result and/or REACTION TO Capitalism, for good or bad. Until we seriously address this issue and stop making babies, I don't want to talk about pollution, Global Warming, or any other Earth-shaking problems.
The greatest single failure of all of the radical, revolutionary, "progressive" movements of the 20th Century (and after) was that their practitioners GAVE IN to making babies, The Family, Marriage, yada yada. A total failure! Babies will make it better - "Our children will create the world that we weren't able to!" Yeah, right. I do not see why gay people should give a shit about marriage. Goddammit if it isn't obvious that marriage and family and 2.5 kids isn't the best way for The Man, Big Brother, The Military-Industrial Complex, whatever, to keep us all too busy to complain! The whole thing is a CONTRACT.
There are obvious examples of marriages and long-term relationships, hetero and otherwise, that have been fruitful and happy and meaningful. I applaud those people! You have created something great in seemingly impossible conditions. Good for you. You are braver than me!
But whatever. I don't think that the human race as a whole is worth worrying about saving. When people talk about the human race they act like it's a thing that can even be conceived of. To me it's a total abstraction - like Love or Peace. I cannot love the human race and I care less about its future and making the world "a better place for all mankind" - BECAUSE in great part I don't have kids and so it won't matter. And what WILL matter once I am dead?! Nothing will matter to me, period. I will be dead. Death is the end. It's final.
I prefer to give my love and caring and attention to individuals, be they family members or friends who have, through their personal qualities made me admire them! It's that simple.
And when I meet people in my daily life I do my best, with varying degrees of success, to treat them as individuals -- not based on their skin color, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual preferences or political and philosophical beliefs.
Other than my mom and dad and sister and brother and dog and coffee and my job the only interest that I have in life is MUSIC... and/or art. And I like and admire various people who make music. I like them and admire them because they make interesting music.
You can call me a "hedonist" if you like. But I live like a monk, almost. I picture a hedonist as being constantly engaged in an endless bacchanal, drunken orgies, the works. I don't drink alcohol, or smoke or do any drugs. The only vices I have left are coffee and self-gratification. I do not own an automobile. I ride the city bus to work and borrow my brother's car whenever I need to go some place that I can't get to on the bus.
One of the biggest complaints that I and many other people have made about Internet Music is the doubt that anyone REALLY listens to mp3s. You know, people don't listen in the same GENUINE way that they do to a tape or a disc. And of course physical media proponents claim that people don't actually listen, they just hoard files for the sake of it - because they can.
I have news for you: I have literally hundreds and perhaps thousands of cassettes and CDRs and CDs that hometapers have sent to me that I have never ever listened to! There are unopened packages from two, three, four, five years ago. No shit.
My friend Brian Noring, who used to operate the F.D.R. Tapes label pretty much stopped his label activities in 2003-04 and spent the next two or three years listening to every tape, record, and CD in his entire music collection. A year or so ago he started over again.
These items are taking up valuable space in my bedroom in my small apartment. Sometimes I don't have enough room for me and my dog to sleep unless I shove a pile of physical media from one place to another a few inches away.
Does it make sense for me to allow other people to send new recordings of their music to me, when I haven't even listened to everything that I have ever received? Why haven't I listened to every tape and disc that I have ever received? I don't know. Am I lazy? Disorganized? Uncaring? Or just overwhelmed? Do depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia enter it? Sure, all of that stuff!
No, clearly, it doesn't make sense for me to keep on receiving physical media recordings from other people. And, by the same token, does it make any sense for me to keep on sending out tapes and discs of my music?
Let me take a close look at some actual facts and figures.
Since the beginning of 2013 I have mailed, sent out, sold, traded, given as gifts, etc. --
555 Cassettes
137 CDRs
How many of those have I sold, did I receive money for?
88.
So, clearly, I spent much more money to give away and send out and mail out those recordings for free and for trade to other people. Why would I do such a thing? Why would I allow myself to LOSE MONEY with my music? Isn't that stupid?
If you ask me, I will tell you that it is because I am doing it for the love of the music... that the money doesn't matter as much to me as enabling people to hear my music if they want to.
Trading tapes and discs is a great way for audio artists to exchange sounds and hopefully enrich and inspire each other to do bigger and better and more daring music, to experiment! Trading is great because you are getting something that hopefully means more than money. For many artists a trade is much more valuable than a sale.
So, why do I allow people to buy my recordings at all? If it is all about the music, why should I let money enter into it at all? Why don't I limit myself strictly to trading recordings with other artists or giving my music away as gifts?
The answer is simple: it is because there are some people who don't make music of their own and they want my recordings and they don't just want me to give it to them for free, nor do I want to put myself in a very awkward position. If I did, how chaotic would that be? I would go even broker!... I would spend even more money on giving my music to other people!
Just imagine:
"Hey Hal, I love your music, man, I really do. However, I have no money to buy your tapes. And besides, it's not in the proper 'anarchist' spirit for me to be forced to spend money on your music, is it? Music is FREE, man, like the wind. So, uh, please send me these 27 titles of yours on cassette and I will enjoy them, okay?" With what guarantee that they will ever actually listen to them? And then I would have gone to all of that time and effort and expense for what?
And really, that's what Internet Music is all about, isn't it? Everything is free free free! We don't have to pay for anything. We don't have to give anything! We don't even have to listen if we don't want to, dammit! We can just consume for the sake of it. Hooray! Freedom!
In the Internet Age we have all of the world's knowledge at the click of a mouse button. We can see any famous artwork, see any film/movie, hear any piece of music, and not even have to pay anything for it. It's all there for the taking so why not take it?
Why do I and many of my associates still feel drawn toward physical audio media such as tapes?
A few years ago I read somewhere, and I can't remember where - and I'm going to paraphrase this badly - that the Pre-Internet Age (The Analog Age) was typified by lack and want (by not enough), and the Internet Age is typified by abundance and surplus (by too much).
In the 1980s, in the Cassette Age, I remember that we were thrilled to receive packages from all over the world containing cassettes of weird music by weird people! Cassettes were all we had then. It's all many of us could afford as a means to get our music heard -- at all. You'd mail one of your tapes to someone in a foreign country and a month later you'd get a tape from them in trade. It felt amazing and almost like a religious experience, LOL. Those tapes were so individualistic and odd and free and strange. Sure, there was a lot of emulation and copy-cat stuff, but there was also a lot of experimentation, trying new things.
Now every recording by every artist who ever made a recording is available on the Internet. And most of it is free because it is uploaded to the Internet without the knowledge or consent of the creator. The beauties of digital media! Art and sound transformed into 0's and 1's. It is a lot more fluid and transportable than analog media. It's also kinda sorta easier to "steal." I am sure that to Prince the most important thing is that I get to hear all of his wonderful music, right? No matter if I pay for it or not -- he's rich enough. Sure, there are "legit" sites where I can pay for it, but why do that, when I can just download it from a blogspot for nothing? I'm broke - I don't have money to pay for music that I like. Oh, I'd better hurry up and download all of those freebie bootleg mp3s before "someone" forces them to take it all down. Hoard.
These words ring in my ears...
In 1985, during the time that Debbie Jaffe and I were operating the Cause And Effect cassette label we were getting ready to reissue "Live At Inroads" by Borbetomagus. I negotiated a reasonable payment to the group per copy sold and I mentioned to Jim Sauter that tape trading was a regular part of our operation, and that I would not be paying Borbetomagus any royalties for trade copies of Live At Inroads. He counseled me: "Don't give away too many copies for free. people value things more when they pay for them."
Ahem...
Pause...
There have been numerous underground recording artists who either through sheer undeniable talent (they create good music), hard work, luck, fashion, or compromise have been able to sell recordings of their music. I'm not suggesting that many if any DIY experimental music people have been able to live off of it. To those people who have been able to sell stuff and sell it consistently, I say the more power to you. Good work.
Back in the 1980s a lot of us in the cassette scene talked about how we were anti-establishment, against big record companies, against the music industry... as a matter of dissent and revolt. It was obvious to some of us that the music industry, TV networks, movie studios, all of commercial media, was in cahoots with Big Brother and that they were the propaganda wing of the Military-Industrial Complex.
People outside our subculture were using cassettes to make copies from their favorite record albums, which they traded with friends, or bootlegs of live shows by their favorite bands.
There was a favorite slogan back then:
"Hometaping Is Killing The Music Industry."
This was often accompanied by a logo of a line drawing of a cassette with a skull and crossbones on it. Since then I have come to realize that this meant two things to two different groups of people. The music industry used it to discourage people from making illegal home tape copies of commercial music albums, because this would undercut the profits of and eventually destroy the music industry. To those of us in the underground it meant something different. It meant that through our efforts to use tapes to spread our own music and that of our associates we would give people alternatives to the brainwash garbage that the big record companies were dealing out. And, there was a third group who just wanted free copies of commercial music and were just using tapes to get free stuff.
Plus in the 1980s DIY underground there was the anti-copyright ethic - nobody owned sound! - nobody owned words! So, many of us, in our art and other efforts tried to subvert copyright in any way(s) possible - re-appropriation, plunderphonics, remixing the mass media and spitting it back at them in an effort to destroy by feedback. William Burroughs employed and described methods by which we could take the ugliest bullshit signals that the State and Big Corporations were feeding us, turn it inside out, cut it up and rearrange the signals in such a way that it changed the message and play it back to the Ugly Forces.
Not everybody was into this way of thinking. Some people just wanted to get their music heard and cassettes were an easy, affordable way to do it. Many people used their tape releases as stepping stones to bigger and better things, such as record releases.
So, now, 25 to 30 years later, we have Internet Music, and "nobody" can sell anything... or so we are told. We are told that the music industry is suffering huge losses every year through Internet piracy and illegal downloads. Up and coming bands who are trying to "make it" can't sell merchandise because people just get it off the Internet. But I wonder if things for the Big Mass media types is really all that bad?
Meanwhile, by using the Internet I can get my music out to more people more quickly than ever before. I give people the option to purchase a download for whatever price they choose or pay nothing. Needless to say, I'm giving away a lot of free downloads, because very few people voluntarily CHOOSE to pay anything.
Again, you know, I'm still not in it for the money. But when people choose to purchase a download that little bit of money helps me to pay my Bandcamp and PayPal fees and to pay my website fees. Yes indeed, it costs me money to offer my music for free! Somebody is making money off of my music, but it's not me.
A big part of the reason that I have not bothered with making a big effort to sell my music is a philosophical reason - I consider the experimental noise scene to be a community of peers. Other noise artists are my comrades.
I can imagine this exchange between two peers/comrades:
"Dude, here's my new tape - it's $5
"Awesome, here's my new tape - it's $5"
-- and the two noise dudes exchange tapes and $5 bills.
Earlier I applauded those who ARE able to get people to pay for their music. I've just never been able to care about doing the things that are necessary to get people to buy my stuff. I just want people to hear what I do. If they choose to listen, great! I don't ACTUALLY know how many people ACTUALLY REALLY listen. With offering my stuff as downloads I'm not really getting anything back - not even a trade! The only value exchange of any sort is that I know that people have access to my music.
So why am I still offering my music on cassettes and CDRs IN ADDITION to the Internet? -- because people, some people, still want their tapes and discs! That's cool. It's just that now I'm spending twice as much to make my music available essentially for free! LOL. It's all good, though... for now.
But eventually, and I can foresee that day, I will stop making tapes and discs because it'll be pointless.
My efforts now center on combining the best qualities of the analog tape world with the immediacy of the Internet. My Museum Of Microcassette Art project is a nice working model of those efforts.
These were some rambling thoughts here, and hopefully not too incoherent, and I hope that attentive readers can connect the dots that I have left unconnected. I'm tired of writing and you're probably tired of reading, so that's enough for now.