Part of the MFA Interaction Design Weekly Thesis Blog series - 13 of 64

A trio of blog posts to contemplate about the future of music, and perhaps the future of a network enabled society.

Emily White, a 21-years old intern at NPR, “I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With”

I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I’m almost 21, and since I first began to love music I’ve been spoiled by the Internet.

Emily cites a common sentiment among the younger generation.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and T-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.

David Lowery, from the Trichordist, responds, “Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered”

I must disagree with the underlying premise of what you have written. Fairly compensating musicians is not a problem that is up to governments and large corporations to solve. It is not up to them to make it “convenient” so you don’t behave unethically.

David questions why we allow technology to dictate our morals.

Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. Although it is the premise of every “machines gone wild” story since Jules Verne or Fritz Lang, this is exactly backwards.

Jonathan Coulton, a musician whose success has come almost exclusively on “new" crowd-sourced, internet-power business model, reflects on this tension between the "free culture” ideology, and the difficult economics of supporting music in “Emily and David”

… the music industry as we know it is almost exclusively based on the idea that there’s a physical object you can sell, and that access to that physical object is the only way you can play the music whenever you want. That’s obviously over. And it doesn’t just put a bunch of corporate suits at risk, it puts artists at risk. We know that the record industry is falling apart because look at these charts and graphs. The scary thing is, there’s also a very real possibility that in the long term, being a musician will no longer be a thing that you can do to make money.

Jonathan then looks even further out, and contemplates the ethics of stealing in a world where even physical objects can be perfectly duplicated.

This is my bias: the decline of scarcity seems inevitable to me. I have no doubt that this fight over mp3s is just the first of many fights we’re going to have about this stuff. Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it’s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It’s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we’re getting out of it.

Understanding where technology is going, I think ultimately music needs a new business model, one which is not founded upon property or exclusivity. On the other hand, this also feels deeply unfair. As usual, I am not sure how this tension should be resolved.

My conclusions lines up with Jonathan’s though. Perhaps in the age of perfect copies, we require a new set of business models, and a new set moral norms. We’re not there yet, so in the mean time, I’ll buy music on iTunes, and back musicians on Kickstarter.