The digital revolution

A couple of weeks ago, I caught the video for the White Rabbits on Late Night.

If you were in my classroom for the next few days after that, I'm sure you remember because I played the song "Percussion Gun" pretty constantly.

I'd played the YouTube video a few dozen times over, and I wanted to hear more. My first instinct was to open up iTunes and see if I could buy the song.

No popping open the library website...

No asking students if anybody has the cd to borrow...

No checking their website.

Straight to iTunes to buy the cd.

Because iTunes has made it easy and legal and relatively cheap, I was willing to buy the entire album sight unseen, something that would have been anathema to me even a year ago. I didn't, but my first instinct certainly was to do such.

I've always been a cautious music buyer, purchasing albums in only two situations - a small cadre of my favorite artists (at various times, Neil Young, Wilco, Lyle Lovett, the Beasties, John Mellencamp, etc) put out something new or I'd borrowed and heard almost an entire album from a not yet established band (they need the cash and the promotional love) and enjoyed about 75%+ of the album.

Most of the rest of the new music I would get, I got by checking out the cd and grabbing the one...two...eight songs that I liked from the album. Sure, it wasis illegal, but I justified it in my head that in any of a half dozen ways (it's only a little illegal...they've already got a bunch of money...I go to their concerts anyway...the record company would just get most of the money...it's easy). I still do all of that, sure, but my first instinct now if just to pop open iTunes and pay for the music.

The music people have clearly won with me, at least.

I've gone from being willing to steal the music - not quite to the extent of Napster and Limewire, but steal it none the less, I know - to being willing to give them my money because they've made it so frickin' easy.

This is a musical revolution the likes of which I've certainly never known in my lifetime. I was born in the era of the 8-track, came of age at the dawn of the cassette, and became a music consumer in the time of the cd. Of those, only the cassette could have possibly scared the music industry in the same way that the switch to music without a physical housing has done. They knew that once the cassette came into being, the power for people to copy - and even chop up and rearrange - their music had been unleashed and the record companies would never again be the same for it.

The cd revolution swung the other way, favoring the music companies because the cd was static, unyielding, and pricier. There was no way - for a decade, anyway - for us to take music from a cd, maintain the cd-quality sound, and do anything to alter the package. You bought the album, you might loan out the full cd, but you couldn't make a mix cd. You couldn't copy a cd onto another cd. Onto a cassette? Sure, but that wasn't the point. Cds were cooler - better sound, more durable packaging, neater and shinier than cassettes.

But then came the digital revolution. We could take music from cd without losing any bit of sound quality, save it to our computers, make new cds or send the music out through the ether to any of a half million of our closest friends with almost no effort at all.

And the music industry was screwed...and scared...and angry.

They started to sue. Every transgression was viewed as grand larceny, a single event of file sharing was accused of being tantamount to stealing the entire album masters and was prosecuted in the same way.

...until a few industrious souls found ways to let the freedom of the music stay but to let those of us who would rather do the right thing, rather do the legal thing simply pay for that freedom.

At first there were hiccups - drm and Apple's instance on the AAC formatting being the most painful - but I feel I'm fairly safe to say that those hiccups have largely been passed by, and we're ready to rock the digital music world.

We've got hard drives large enough to back up thousands and thousands of songs. The sound quality is outstanding. The music is portable on tiny players and in our cars.

Viva la digital, folks.