Music is my Muse

I’ve been sitting here at my little lap top with a co-opted dual-monitor set up, typing away at the kernel of my latest No1 Best Seller (I can dream can’t I?) listening to music. There is some great stuff in my collection, some obscure stuff too. L7 just passed a few tracks ago, those tampon tossing hoes pumping out Everglade, and do you know what struck me?

No? Or maybe you said “yes”, but I can’t hear you through the monitor…. never mind, I’ll tell you.

Copyright crossed my mind. Back when I bought Bricks are Heavy…. that’s the L7 album by the way… I’m pretty sure I owned the music. I purchased a CD, but there was something about being able to keep the music in electronic format, which I of course did. Now over the years, the dozens of moves across and between countries those old CD’s got busted all to hell, lost, or ‘borrowed’ by friends. All I have now is the mp3 of this and a myriad of songs. There’s no i-tunes license, no record I ever even owned it, yet own it I do.

As far as I’m concerned, when I purchase music I’m paying for the privileged of listening to that artists work. Seems sensible to me, but copyright and downloading laws seem to ignore that. If I go to the store and buy a Twinky (what a revolting idea) I’m not paying for the wrapper that just happens to be around a semi-edible food, I’m paying for the damn contents. Similarly if I buy a CD I’m buying the music, if my goal was simply to attain a CD I could buy them in bulk a few hundred at a time. Let me tell you, they’re a damn sight cheaper without the pretty covers and digitized noise inside them.

The way the music industry is going (total freaking greed driven insanity) I’m giving serious thought to tuning back into the local radio and never buying another song again.The sad thing is that most of the stuff I’m craving is well over a decade old, tracks by Juno Reactor that you can’t buy on CD for love nor money.

I understand keeping ownership of a process to prevent duplication of a product, I mean it worked so well for Milly Vanilly for years, but once something is distributed there should be a time limit of maybe 5 years for the record labels to do their gouging.