By Greg Burgett
www.songsaboutknives.com

Music and pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman made an extra-inning contribution to the unfortunately pretty-much-extinct discussion about the meaning and consequences of the unpaid-for and unauthorized music downloading in a piece titled “Anyone Seen My $4.2 Billion?” that ran in Esquire this past April.

While Klosterman thankfully spares us from his amusingly inconsequential sports/music analogies—I wouldn’t have been surprised if he explained how the Baltimore Orioles ’68 Season perfectly mirrored the career of Ozzy-era Black Sabbath within his 1,200 words, and connect it superfluously to his argument—he also squanders his opportunity to say anything particularly consequential about kids these days and how they get their MP3s.

Opening with the bland observation that “no one buys albums anymore” and somehow coming up only with “people stopped buying albums because they wanted the fucking money” as his conclusion, the Klost spends five hay-bale-sized paragraphs in the middle of his essay not only talking about collegiate credit-card debt and the corporate structures of major labels, but he also potentially affirms the puke-worthy assertion that “music longs to be free.”

The reason, of course, that Chuck explores this topic in such a manner—giving us a stack of numbers about album sales and industry revenues—is to rightfully debunk the idea that people, when they download, are taking an explicit stand against the industry or the commercialization of the medium. “It [isn’t] political or countercultural,” he writes. “It [has] almost nothing to do with music itself.”

Klosterman gets kudos for not going the painful route that many critics have who usually elevate Limewire-crazed 12-year-olds from Cheyenne to China for defying The Man and his “unfair” CD- pricing schemes. But the fact that he eschews all the real issues at the center of the downloading controversy to make room for his economic musings (he postulates simply that dorm dwellers have MasterCard bills to pay instead of music to buy) is unfortunate. That “it has almost nothing to do with music” is precisely the problem.

If you attempt to engage someone under 35 about the ethical considerations of freely downloading an album or song that its owners or creators intended solely as a purchase-able product, you’ll hit a wall pretty damn fast (especially if you are, as in my case, 27 years old—far too young, by almost any of my peers’ standards, to be suckered into playing by the rules).

The winning argument (not coincidentally mine) is as a simple as any: Recorded music is the end-product of someone’s labor—their investment of time, effort and money—and all of the people involved in that process, from the writers and performers to the label lackeys and marketing folks, deserve to get paid. Forcefully taking the fruit of someone’s labor is essentially enslaving them. 

Klosterman’s dead-on when he notes that music is the easiest thing for consumers to steal—you can send or receive small chunks of compressed data through a fiber-optic cable without even the remotest grasp of what’s happening, either technologically or morally—and frankly, that ease of graft saves anyone from having to think too hard about the meaning or consequences of their actions.

This argument doesn’t quite attempt the more commonly opted-for line about how “music has been undervalued by downloading.” Fact is, musicians have been devalued—but so have the labels, either indie or major, who are so clearly entitled to something in return for all the iTunes libraries so liberally stocked with their investments.
Most people, when confronted with such obvious arguments, are unable to, or opt not to refute them (as the consequences for divorcing the act of labor from the receiving of wages is dire). And even Ol’ Klosty ain’t about to step in with guidance here. Downloaders will acknowledge they’re wrong, but they will just as quickly say that they aren’t going to stop.

And then they make their case: My opponents, clothed in a mesh of justifications so thin that the dimmest of Todd-P-basement-show lights renders it transparent, plays its trump card.

“Greed!” they say, their index finger extended mock-courageously at this beast, this “music industry.”
If the cost of music is too high, if the work is inferior, if those making it are over-compensated, the obvious answer is to simply take it on one’s own terms. This is the argument that Klosterman says the masses do not make: But when forced to justify their actions, becoming quasi-countercultural is, in fact, what they expect will save them.

If there has ever been a hypocritical charge, my generation has made it: stealing in the name of combating greed. If you want to know who’s greedy, take a look at the downloaders. Is there a greedier or more childish act, anything less civil and unlearned, than taking something and giving absolutely nothing in return?

Sorry, Chuck: The brats in the playpen aren’t old enough to have debt, let alone worry about paying it off. But can they have their toys now?