Why Pay for Recorded Music Anymore? Part 3
These days, you almost can’t get away from hearing music without charge. It is playing in every restaurant, bar, coffee shop, grocery store, and retail shop you go into. Technology has made it possible to hear music of every style everywhere. With all this music literally floating in the air, it is easy to get conditioned to the idea that music is omnipresent, like air, or tap water. No one pays for air (they do pay for bottled water). So why should we pay for music? Other than “watering the roses in our cultural garden”, what’s the point?
Well, for one, you can choose the exact music you want to hear, play it wherever and whenever you want. Of course, one might reply, “I can do that anyway with all the free music I download from the internet and copy from my friends’ collections.” And this may be true.
This attitude, however, reminds me of what seems to be the attitude of most chronically homeless people. The psychology they have instituted to survive is the policy of being a scavenger, at the mercy of whatever they can gather from dumpsters, generous passers-by, restaurant workers who are disposing of leftovers, public shelters, space under a bridge, etc. Whether or not their homelessness is due to genuine misfortune, lack of support, mental illness, loss of will to live, or a basic refusal to take fundamental responsibility for their lives, their policy for action is the same. It is an expression of extreme powerlessness. They are completely at the mercy of strangers and of nature.
Yes, we’ve all downloaded music for free when it is available, we’ve all copied our friends’ CD’s, we’ve all gone to MySpace pages of artists we’ve like and listened to the music they’ve posted for sampling. However, when we decide that this is absolutely the only way in which we will acquire music to enjoy, we are casting our own psyches into the roles of beggars. We have impoverished our spirits, just as those who are chronically homeless are impoverished spiritually. Their physical poverty is, at least in part, both a result of and an expression of that impoverishment.
Being a scavenger on those occasions when it is truly necessary is a useful, resourceful skill. Being a Scavenger as a permanent and global life policy, it a serious cop out.
If a person can afford to purchase music recordings, (and if YOU are reading this on your own computer, then YOU can) then why would anyone voluntarily impoverish their own psyche by acting like a helpless scavenger on general princple? Why would anyone voluntarily be willing to take on such powerlessness, rather than take authentic ownership of (and responsibility for) the things they truly value in this world? Isn’t this one of the glories of being human?
Just food for thought.