Relevant to the current masspash of mp3love that's going around (and have I mentioned how I love it? Oh, so much new music! Heaven), here's Woebot worried about the consequences. On some things I agree with him (I'm guessing a 'him', this is musicblogland after all), on others not, but the full entry and comments are really interesting. Me, I tend toward the 'it's fine if it's one song' side of things, and I'll note that I have been burned by this - Broken Social Scene's 'You Forgot it in People', for example, which I picked up on the strength of the utterly fantastic 'Anthem for a seventeen-year-old girl', only to discover that nothing else on the album is anything like it (I quite like the rest of the album, but not enough). But I'm conscious that I might be a dying breed, with my insistence on buying records and where possible buying them where they're chart-eligible.

What really resounded with me was someone's comment about a posited mp3blog poll - the people who answer that poll are more likely to say "yes! I use these mp3s to find records I want to buy!" because that's what they want to be the poll's eventual consensus, and because that's what they want to think they will do. Radiohead's 'Hail to the Thief' sold well, despite being leaked long before release - I'd posit that some reasons for that were:
1) The mixes were different. Actively different.
2) Radiohead fans are Radiohead fans are Radiohead fans, and they will have the physical object.
3) Not everyone downloads, not everyone has the capability. Was there a crop of RIAA-izing at the time? I can't remember.
and, finally -
4) It was one of the first times that such an Important Record had been released after a huge leak, and we mp3-users-and-record-buyers had something to prove. Radiohead came out and said "eh, you know, it's not the leak we mind, it's the fact that it's the rubbish versions you're hearing" - whether that was true or not, whether they just said it because there is a certain image which they do have to uphold or not, they gave the downloaders a line to stick to. If we didn't buy Hail To The Thief, the RIAA&c would have won the moral battle: it would have been A Proven Thing, give 'em it free and they won't pay. But if we got it free and then decided to pay-- well. That showed them, didn't it? We're not just freeloaders, us, we're loving fans who just couldn't stand the wait. We were going to do it anyway.

Some people say 'oh, I don't bother with what I write on the internet, I'm not getting paid for it', people in the business of writing, music critics and fiction writers and fanfiction writers with aspirations, and I near despise them for that. The 'Oh, it's only the internet' attitude irritates me more than words can say - I think it's mercenary, and cheap, and I am a stupid idealist with some false sentimental idea of art and art's purity. But still. I hate it because it's devaluing the discourse they have with their peers: it's saying that their fellow music fans, their fellow original-fictionists, their fellow media fans, are not worth the effort. The amateur has become no longer the one-who-loves but the one-who-can't-be-arsed. It's saying that this new thing we have, this way of facilitating discourse and facilitating fooling-around and facilitating shopping and work and so many parts of life, should only be used for scraps and rehearsals, because the old ways are the only real ways (internet/'RL' rockism, wot). Quite honestly, and this is such a jolly-hockeysticks, can you tell I was brought up on classic British children's lit way of saying it, they're letting the side down. If you deny something the chance to take on real import, it won't have real import: and this is something with so much potential, and it's like the newest, most flexible alloy being used as tinfoil and then thrown out to the landfills.

I read 'Eastern Standard Tribe' the other day. This author, Cory Doctorow, published by Tor, decided to release his work under a Creative Commons License: you can buy the book, if you want, or you can read it online for free. What can he say, he's a cyberpunkscifi writer, a futuristic kinda guy. And people have bought the book: they've bought the book, and they've bought the book before it, which is also under a CCL, and he's happy to be proven 'right'. I thought, upon reading it, huh, right, so where can I buy it? Apparently, that's Murder One, right by 'my' bubbletea place and 'my' Japanese restaurant and 'my' Rough Trade and, basically, in 'my' part of London. I don't even have to go out of my way. Might go pick it up when next I have some time to waste between Soho and Covent Garden.

But I don't like the book that much. I like it, firstly, I definitely like it. It's a good read, it's a neat concept, it's fun, he's got a wonderfully fliud&engaging style, there are some excellent setpieces. It's not something I'd probably want to read too many times, though: fanfic's ruined me and I think things like "well, that's a neat trick for getting the exposition in." It's a bit too short, the ending feels rushed.

I'll still buy it. I'll buy it because I desperately want Doctorow's idea to work - and I want Doctorow's idea to look like it's working.

Warren Ellis tried it at mistersleepless, pulled out on the advice of his agent, and I don't blame him. What he wrote and put up there is the most incredible teaser - if that book comes out, I'll be buying it, probably not just to find out what happens next. He's still putting things up there, still making his stand, doing his bit, for Fiction On The Internet, seems to be still enjoying himself, even if they're 'just' shorts, 'just' cunning little ideas that appear, are fleshed out and then fracture into the thousand imaginations of his readers.

But Doctorow is doing the full novel - and I'm likely to buy that full novel for the sake of its 'politics' as well as for the sake of the writing&story.
After Doctorow, though, what then? If we're a few bigname CCL-novels down the line; if after a while you can pick up a free new etext, a free mp3, and there is absolutely no pressure to buy, not cultural nor ideological; if it's assumed that we'll buy it on the same pattern as we bought Hail To The Thief and Doctorow's novels; were this flush of idealism, of trying so hard to prove our worth as conscientious consumers, gauged to be the future norm--
If we don't have anything to prove anymore, will we keep doing it?

And on that bombshell... good night. ^^