The MUSIC GOES ROUND and ROUND

The prefects are moving in on illegal downloaders. Research revealed by something called the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property calculates that some 4.73bn (yes, billion) items are ripped off each year by illicit filesharers in Britain, let alone the rest of the world. For its part, the International Federation of the Phonograph Industry reckons that for every paid-for download to a British computer, there are six items that are stashed in collections without payment. These statistics, by the way, were stolen from an on-line article in The Guardian. As I have been buying the paper since before most of its New Media correspondents were born, I feel that I have already paid handsomely to make use of this info.



As one who certainly wishes to protect his own intellectual property rights, I don’t for a moment condone naked piracy. At the same time, I daily download material without paying for it and I do so with no compunction whatsoever. Permit me to explain.

I have never sought to watch a movie on-line or in any other circumstance on my iMac because I doubt that my screen (even at 17 x 11 inches) or my sound system will do it justice. I have picked up a couple of torrented episodes of American television drama serials that, for one reason or another, I missed on transmission but, believe me, that isn’t denying anybody any income because I am not about to buy the DVD of the whole of, say, season four of The West Wing just to bag one episode. In fact, if there had been no other way of accessing the missed episode, I would have been more likely to give up on the whole enterprise.



But I do download a lot of music. In the last year or two, I have certainly taken many more copies off filesharers’ sites than the “songs” (as they call each track) that I have paid for on iTunes or, lately, Amazon. Downloading is not anyway my preferred manner of collecting music. I will never love any recording medium the way that I – and those of my generation – loved vinyl but, even with the lack of tactile pleasure and vastly reduced user-friendliness of so-called jewel-cases and their booklets as opposed to album sleeves, I am reconciled to CDs (though I was a very late convert). And I will go out and buy CDs far sooner than download them, paid for or not.



But the music retail trade is in full retreat. It’s of course a chicken-and-egg situation but the fact is that I find it easier and easier to find what I want on-line and harder and harder in shops. Last Tuesday, I asked after classical CDs in the central Bristol branch of HMV and was told that they were to be found as “a sub-section of Easy Listening”. How grotesquely shaming. Mind, as the meagre selection on offer appeared to be dominated by the likes of Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson and violin-scraping glam group Bond, it was perhaps not an inappropriate arrangement.

HMV originally built its business on selling recordings of classical music. When I first shopped at HMV in the 1960s – what was then its sole outlet, situated on the south side of Oxford Street – classical LPs were what greeted you as you entered the store on the ground floor. “Pop” and other vulgar stuff was relegated to the basement. In their day, I bet HMV made more relative income from the sale of 78s of Richard Tauber, Kathleen Ferrier or Dame Myra Hess than they ever have from CDs by Girls Aloud, Sonic Youth and Eminem.



There are now two branches of HMV on Oxford Street – both of them on the north side – and each does actually carry a very useful if (necessarily) not all that comprehensive range of both recent and standard-repertoire recordings, though not of course on the ground floor. I never leave either branch with fewer than a dozen purchases. London also boasts the legendary Harold Moores Records on Great Marlborough Street (where I rarely find what I’m looking for but discover all manner of other treasures while looking), the specialist Opera Shop on St Martin’s Lane and, in a different part of the forest, the fabulous Dress Circle on Upper St Martin’s Lane. The Virgin stores (which became Zavvi), that often had good selections for those who didn’t just want pop/pap, are gone now.

Down our way, we are pretty lucky with Bath Compact Discs and the timeless Duck, Son & Pinker, also in Bath; Sounds Good in Cheltenham; and Blackwells Music Shop in Oxford. But the internet has really opened up the retail of CDs and indeed LPs for the discriminating, largely because local storage is not an issue if your business is mail order or commercial downloading. These days, on-line shopping has made deleted recordings available in greater profusion than ever before.

And this brings me back to the matter of “pirated” acquisitions. While I am a steady purchaser of current recordings as mp3 downloads from iTunes – and I never dream of seeking free access to new or recent releases – the music I download for nothing is, in the first place, very largely by people (composers, songwriters, arrangers, performers) who are dead, frequently quite a long while dead. I am not denying residuals to these artists and if I am denying income to their descendants and other exploiters of their back catalogues (reissuers, repackagers) then I cannot feel badly about it.



Next, even among those artists who are alive, the examples of their work that I am most apt to download are long deleted. The only way I am likely to encounter this material otherwise is through high-priced specialist dealers or via the serendipity of charity and other junk-type shops. Either way, none of the profit is going to anyone associated with making the music. For the customer, getting what one wants by such means is considerably more of a lottery than is finding a like-minded filesharer on the net and gratefully copying the collection that he – let’s face it, it is always a ‘he’ – uploads to his blog. For the sites I am accessing without money changing hands are those set up by enthusiasts who take pleasure in sharing their interests. And there are hundreds of them.



Now I could go to, for instance, the incomparable Footlight Records store in New York City and spend a fortune on well-preserved long-players of show scores and standards singers but, again, only the store would make any money from it, not the songwriters or performers or musicians. And while I will assuredly always visit the store when I am in Manhattan, I wasn’t there yesterday when I was able, without leaving my study, to download for free a Dinah Washington 10-inch LP that the store might – or of course might not – have had in stock for (you can be sure) a pretty fancy price.

And here’s the crucial point. I am downloading the stuff because I can. It’s a resource that I am availing myself of. Take this treasure trove away and it will benefit the music industry nothing. Because it is there and for free, I am, on the one hand, filling a few gaps in my huge and ancient collection, from Scherchen conducting Mahler or Eleanor Steber singing Samuel Barber to long-deleted LPs of the likes of Lee Wiley and Moondog. On the other hand and much more significantly, I am greatly expanding my knowledge of areas of music on which I have previously had a much slenderer grasp – for example, jazz and blues – as well as widening my view of areas that hitherto I have always cherished – classical music, show tunes and standards. Thanks to the uploading enthusiasts, I have increased my store of stylists of the past, from Mabel Mercer to Johnny Mercer, by way of Carmen McRae, Gordon MacRae, Connee Boswell, Eve Boswell, Judy Holliday, Billie Holiday and all the rest. I have further investigated the music of Bernard Herrmann and Woody Herman, Bill Evans and Gil Evans and so on.



Now, I would never have bought these things, either because finding them would be too much trouble, too fraught with disappointment – imagine rushing home with a precious vinyl recording of Pablo Casals, say, or Luisa Tetrazzini and finding the surface noise was intolerable – or because I knew too little about the work and/or artist and would be reluctant to spend money on spec. I don’t mind a bit downloading for nothing and then investigating an artist whose work I am not familiar with – recently, for instance, Cannonball Adderley, Jane Froman, Charlie Patton – but I’m never going to hand over folding money for them, sight unseen.

So what I’m saying is this: the downloads that I am taking for free are having no effect whatsoever on the economy of the music business. Indeed, by widening the compass of my interests, this “illicit” activity is making it more, not less, likely that I will expand the number and scope of items on my shopping list. So the authorities should beware of jumping to the conclusion that by shutting down the filesharing market they would be righting a wrong. As with most issues, it just isn’t as easy as that. Unless of course the Department of Culture can ensure that CDs at competitive prices by, say, Blind Willie McTell, Sylvia Syms, Lotte Lehmann and Ellis Larkins will be generally available in perpetuity, it seems to me that it would be better all round if that true free market – the internet – were left alone.