Henry Rollins: The Column! Copping MP3s For Free Is Not Cool

Henry Rollins: The Column! Copping MP3s For  Free Is Not Cool

By Henry Rollins Thu., Oct. 6 2011 at 6:00 AM

[Look for your weekly fix from the one and only Henry Rollins right here on West Coast Sound every Thursday, and come back tomorrow for the awesomely annotated playlist for his Saturday KCRW broadcast.]

See also "People Who Pirate Music Are Assholes"

Yesterday, I met up with a longtime pal, a very creative man named Alex Winter. Many know him from the Bill & Ted's films; he's the guy who's not Keanu Reeves. Alex stays extremely busy shooting everything from advertisements to documentaries. Several days ago, he asked if I would take part in a documentary he's shooting about music downloading and how it has changed the music industry and how we get our jams.

It is a topic that I find very interesting: the good and bad aspects of it, the winners, the losers and whether or not downloading an album for free should be considered stealing.

With the cameras rolling, we went over all of this for quite sometime. The point that I really wanted to stress was that the music file and file-sharing have changed the currency of music. A song is just a piece of information; there are no humans in those strings of numbers, just their digital representation. Many find them no more than mere crumbs to be vacuumed up into their hard drives and listened to in all their cold, tinny wretchedness. For many, an album is no longer a considerable feat of an artist but just sounds to be half listened to while one is halfheartedly engaged in something else.

If you are a musician who has released albums, it would perhaps be morbidly interesting to know how much you would be owed if everyone who now has your music had actually bought your record. In my life, I have released a lot of records and have no idea as to what I am "missing." I don't lose sleep over it, as it's nothing I can do much about.

Recently, my assistant told me that she was able to find all my albums for free download online. I get letters from young people telling me that they're broke and download my albums for free. They ask me what I think about that. I now have a standard line. I tell them I would rather be heard than paid.

Perhaps it's just conditioning on my part. I have never once in my life released a record and thought of the money to be made. Profit and bulk tonnage of units moved were never problems I had to endure. In fact, I am used to not getting paid or accounted to.
There is one thing that many who download music for free will never understand, and that is how damn hard it is to write songs, record them and get an album released. It really doesn't matter who the band is, big or small, great or terrible -- it is hard, hard work. This is the part that rubs me raw at times, when I think of someone downloading a record for free. It's not the money lost, it's the crass disrespect to the time and life force expended.

Respect must be paid to these heroic sacrifices. Cramming all that pain and beauty onto an MP3 file is destructive enough, but dragging it off the Internet for free is adding insult to injury.

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R. Wayne

Whatis not accounted for in your article (Copping MP3s For  Free Is Not Cool) is that purchasing music (albums, cassettes and now CDs) is anincredibly overpriced venture. Inmy youth, I heard that most musicians make most of their money on tour. My point being, that as "HARD" asit is to make good music, it has never made sense to spend 15 hard-earneddollars on the chance that that new band with the cool name will actually be more than hype.

On a late night showIrecently saw the Deftones perform "You've Seen the Butcher,” and it blewme away! I thought how I have not seen this band before? I wentimmediately to my file share/illegal download site and, voila, 5Deftones songs.

Downloading allowed me to sample the Deftones without shilling outtwenty bucks on a prayer. Now, when they come to town. . .I'm There

Jennie Vasquez

For some reason this article brought back vivid memories of my version of free music. I would sit for hours waiting for a radio station to play the latest song I was infatuated with so I could tape it. I'm old now and know how hard it is to make money. I know that if a product or a service is provided and you can afford it then pay for it. You wouldn't expect to walk into a store that is part of a large grocery chain and walk out with food without paying. You also wouldn't walk into the corner store owned by a guy barely breaking even and take food without paying. Regardless if an artist is super rich or dirt poor, we all would want to get paid for what we do. Really how many of us would want to work for free? With that said, I would hope that if I were too poor to pay for food that someone would give me some for free but most of us at least here in the U.S. really are fortunately not that poor. I would hope that most of us are not so poor that we can't pay 99 cents for a download. If someone is that poor and some people unfortunately are especially during these times, and they can find music for free well who am I to judge?

One thing that does disturb me that wasn't mentioned in the article is that often times people download their favorite singles rather than entire albums. That is unfortunate because at least for me, my favorite songs from an album have never been the hits released as singles. My favorite songs have always been the hidden gems included in an album and I think some of the best music isn't being listened to because we move from one hit single to another in our music libraries. That and maybe because I'm old, I still enjoy going places like Amoeba and sifting through the selection and picking out what I want by touching and reading the product. I still enjoy opening up the jacket of the cd and reading the lyrics as I listen to my new purchase.

JonathanG

I often wonder what the difference is between buying a piece of vinyl in a used record store, and downloading a recording from the internet, say from The Pirate Bay, for free. There is a commonality in that the artist doesn't see a dime from either transaction. The used record store owner sees a profit for sure, but does he pay royalty to the artist? Nope. Did he buy the vinyl record from the record label before re-selling it? Probably not. As far as the artist and record labels are concerned I see no difference. Do we as a a society vilify the used record store owner? Nope, quite the opposite, we music lovers generally laud him as a hero, a person who keeps the music alive, ignoring the fact that he, understandably, seeks to profit from his actions. Do we vilify the internet sharer who is willing to give the same music away for free? You bet we do. We litigate against him and raid his home seizing computers then rifling through the contents of his hard drives.

So...what really is the difference between the used record store owner and the internet sharer? I don't know that I have an answer, but I wonder when record companies are going to start litigating against the guy selling vinyl in the run down strip malls all across this country just as they litigate against the people giving it away for free.

REGEND

In addtion, the used record stores that would sell records that say "For Promotional Use Only" in order to make a profit and the artists sees nothing of it even if it was 1,000 12" pressed. Hereo's? or Capitalists? I often wonder if someone I can download for free translates into something monetary. Should I send the artist a money order of how much I feel it is worth? There are a lot of artists that as a DJ I have received free records from that deserve that money order. This is why I love bandcamp...enter the era of PAY WHAT YOU WANT...and it goes directly to the artists. I do enjoy the tanglible...recording music to vinyl is one of America's greatests contributions to the world. I hang up Black Flag records up on the wall because they are truly artistic creations deserving praise.