“Sure, the big companies will tell you that you’ll only hurt yourself, the quality of your entertainment and whatnot - and they are right.” No, sorry, the big companies are not right about this. Just read Brad DeLong’s blog entry “Fake Steve Jobs: The Music Industry Noobs Have Finally Figured Out What We’re Doing” or Steve Albini’s essay “The Problem With Music” (available online). The recording industry has been suffocating art and American public culture for decades.. Every wonder why you don’t hear the Velvet Underground, or the Replacements, of Fela Kuti on the radio? (Payola anyone?)
Oink created a community where large numbers of people had ready access to art, and art should be free to the public. (Yes it has to be funded, but there are ways of funding it other than intellectual copyright.) What the recording industry is most afraid of is that people are going to start thinking that all this mindblowing art that’s been recorded over the last 100 years is something they should, as citizens, have a right to hear without having paying a bribe to Guido at Warner Bros. That listening to Public Enemy, or Burning Spear, or Albert Ayler is part of how you begin to understand the avant-garde, or grasp the consequences of racism or imperialism. They’re afraid that people are going to start to recognize that music isn’t “product,” that musicians don’t make it to earn money (as if any of them ever did), that it’s not it’s just property like a television or a spare tire. They want you to be ashamed of stealing art, but art can only be stolen from the public; it can’t be stolen by it. Oink was something to be intensely proud of. It was one of the best public libraries I’ve ever seen. I got a lot of good records because of it, and I shared a lot of good records with other people. That’s not “stealing,” that’s educating.
oh well...
