The digital music renaissance

Having all your tunes at your fingertips isn't just fun -- it makes you a more avid consumer of music. So why are the recording companies fighting the future?

By Andrew Leonard

Jul 1, 2004 | I bought a 120 gigabyte external hard drive to back up my music collection on Sunday. It was a moment of relief. I now have about 13 gigs of music -- around 2,700 songs -- on my home computer, and the prospect of losing it all in a hard drive crash has been giving me the cold sweats. All those evenings spent ripping my own CDs, transferring the mixes friends had made for me, making sure all the identifying information was correct -- I couldn't bear the thought of doing it all over again. For the rest of my life, backing up my entertainment files is going to be one of my core missions. When I send my kids off to college, one of my parting words of wisdom will be, "Remember to back up your music files!"

Amid the relief, there was also satisfaction. Thanks to computers and the Internet, I am now a better, happier and more productive consumer of music than I have ever been. I am exposed to more new music, I listen to more old music, and I purchase more of all kinds of music. I've spent more money buying music this year than in any of the previous 10 years.

The music industry hates this. By their every indication, record executives appear to be unhappy that I am more engaged with popular music. They are busy cooking up half-baked copy protection schemes that will prevent me from ripping my own newly purchased CDs. They are pushing legislation intended to criminalize all kinds of behavior and technology. Rather than make it easier for me to spend money, they would rather I return to the neolithic times when if I heard a song on the radio I liked, I would have to trudge to the record store and spend $18 on bloated filler. Why am I not excited?

I'll return to their nuttiness in a minute. But first let me explain in more detail why I'm experiencing a musical renaissance in my own head.

Some people might wonder why a grown man would spend hours every night ripping CDs he already owns to a computer -- unless his nefarious plan is to make them all available on peer-to-peer file-trading networks. After all, there is usually some decrease in sound quality when you compress a music file. Why voluntarily listen to lower quality sound?

Those people have yet to experience the joy of creating playlists from one's entire collection, or the surprise that comes from iTunes randomly playing some tune you'd forgotten you owned or never listened to that closely. Or maybe they don't appreciate how much easier making mixes for their friends is when one's whole collection is point-and-click accessible. I suppose there are still people who don't understand how much more fun it is to have all your music at your immediate command. (Or how frustrating it is when it isn't! My 9-year-old daughter became irate when I told her she could not burn a CD from iTunes on the family computer, because it was streaming iTunes over my wireless network from my work computer in the basement. To her, everything should be accessible, all the time. The Internet already seems to come through the air, why not all of popular music, too?)

Next Page: I am a better consumer now. So why is the record industry at my throat?

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