The Day the Music Died

July 31, 2002

There‘s a dandy little machine called an iMac on my desk these days with a program called iTunes that allows me to steal from the likes of Aerosmith, Bob Dylan and Snoop Doggie Dogg.
Not that I‘d ever be caught dead listening to Aerosmith, but you get the picture. It‘s so easy to go over to the library where they have something like 10,000 CDs available for loan and burn my favorite discs. Last week it was the Chess Records collection of seminal blues artists -- next week, who knows? Maybe the new Chemical Brothers or even some opera; having a CD burner is like being a kid with the keys to the candy store.
It‘s even easier to download MP3 files straight from the internet, and new software will actually go out and search for pirated copies of whatever new stuff a musician kicks out.
But we shouldn‘t kid ourselves that it‘s stealing to take someone‘s intellectual property without paying for it, even though it seems that everyone‘s doing it these days, especially people under the age of 25 who used to be the primary purchasers of music.
Still, it wasn‘t until reading that Harmony House is going out of business after 55 years of selling music on LPs, CDs and tapes that it began to sink in that we are killing the music industry. Harmony House is closing 21 of its stores (down from 38) and putting 200 employees out of work. Their Traverse City store was one of our biggest advertisers prior to having its plug pulled a year ago, so in a small sense, we share some of the pain of their loss here at the Express.
Internet piracy of music had a lot to do with the death of Harmony House, according to an article in the Detroit Free Press by Brian McCollum. He quotes the chain‘s owner Carl Thom as saying, “I think the Internet has been our No. 1 problem. It has absolutely eroded the value of music to young consumers. You‘ve got kids who have never bought a CD in their lives.“
Indeed, I know many music lovers who wouldn‘t dream of buying a CD. Why bother if you‘ve got hundreds of hours of songs backed up on your hard drive or iPod?
Well, one good reason to keep buying CDs might be because we‘re killing the music industry. Harmony House is a canary in a coal mine whose death warns of an imminent explosion.
If there‘s no longer any money to be made selling CDs, then what happens to musicians? What happens to music stores, recording companies and concerts? When the money‘s gone, those things will be gone.
To draw a metaphor from biology, to be a successful parasite, a critter has to make sure it doesn‘t kill the host that provides its daily meals. Organisms that kill their hosts come to an evolutionary dead-end.
We‘re killing the host.
Not that the music companies aren‘t complicit in the crime. When CDs first appeared in the early ‘80s, they were supposed to be far cheaper to produce than LPs in addition to their superior sound. But the savings was never passed on to the consumer. Perhaps the new generation of pirates would be willing to return to the racks if CDs were priced $10 or less, rather than $18.
Human ingenuity being what it is, music will certainly go on. But you have to wonder if the great age of the rock star and the pop goddess is over. The release of a CD by a major artist is no longer a big headline-making “event“ as it used to be. In 1968, music lovers stormed the record stores to get the first copies of The Beatles‘ “Magical Mystery Tour.“ They did the same in the ‘70s for the Rolling Stones, for Guns ‘N‘ Roses in the ‘80s, and Dr. Dre and Pearl Jam in the ‘90s. But today‘s musicians bob like apples on ocean swells -- now you see them, now you don‘t. Who will recall Nickelback or Shakira in a year‘s time? Or even next month?
It makes you wonder what we‘ll be listening to 10 years from now once music is no longer a profitable business for anyone. Perhaps we can listen to the hum of our CD burners... a pleasant little hum.