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Prof. KindaMuzik: bootlegging and cultural flow

In November last year, I travelled to Amsterdam to see three shows by Tom Waits at the Carre Theater, immediately followed by a show in London. The concerts were, as I expected, excellent and, as a person who spends (too) much of his time collecting live recordings of his favourite performers, I immediately started thinking about who had taped the shows and how soon could I get copies.

Tekst: Lee Marshall

Normally, through a process of trading recordings with other collectors around the globe, this would take me a couple of months. This time, however, was different. While I was checking the newsgroups and messageboards for news about who might have a copy, someone posted a link to a ‘torrent’ at a site called Easytree. Jackpot!

Easytree is, or rather was, a site dedicated to the trading of concert recordings. It did not store the files itself, but rather published a ‘tracker’ which guided your computer into downloading the show using BitTorrent, a form of peer-to-peer file sharing. Over the next few weeks I, along with a few hundred other people, managed to download all of Tom Waits’ European tour (8 shows) as well as DVD-video recordings of three of them. More than this, however, I was also able to download concert recordings of many other artists, some who I already owned lots of recordings by, and some new to me. Easytree published probably a 100 different shows a day, and it became one of my most visited sites on the web. Imagine my distress, then, to find a message on 6th April informing me that Easytree had been closed down because of legal threats.

The material available via Easytree was what is traditionally understood as ‘bootleg’ recordings. Bootlegs feature either recordings of live concerts or studio outtakes (songs that didn’t make it onto a finished album). The defining characteristic of bootlegs is that they feature music that has not been released on a record released by an official label. This makes bootlegs distinct from, say, counterfeit recordings, which copy the sounds of an official release as well as the cover art. Easytree was, in fact, particularly fastidious about ensuring that absolutely no officially released material was available via their site. They are collected by people like me, who own all of the officially released work of their particular artists, but still want more. So why are we prevented from consuming as much of Tom Waits’ music (or Bob Dylan’s music, or Franz Ferdinand’s…) as we want?

Economically, it makes little sense for the industry to try to prevent bootlegging. Despite proclamations from the lobbying organisations of the record industry – IFPI, RIAA, BPI and so on – bootlegging is actually inherently small scale. Commercially available bootlegs (while easytree was a trading site, so no money was involved, there is a small scale industry which produces ‘proper’ CDs of bootleg recordings and sells at record fairs and through mail order) are produced in quantities up to about 500. The extremely popular – the 4th most popular torrent on the site – recording of Tom Waits’ Hammersmith show was downloaded by about 3500 people on easytree. Such figures pale in comparison to recordings released in the legitimate industry: it is estimated that an album released by a major label has to sell 300,000 copies just to break even. As I have argued elsewhere, it is plausible that bootlegging actually has a positive economic effect on the music industry, not least in acting as a stimulus to all those box-sets with ‘previously unreleased’ tracks on them. When analysed financially, it seems that all the effort and costs that the industry expends in stamping out bootlegs just isn’t worth it.

That’s because the major issue is not economics but control. The record industry wants complete control over its products, to present them in the way it wants to present them, to give us access to them when they want. In part, this makes them just like any other capitalist industry trying to control the market for their product. But it isn’t just a market, it’s culture, and it goes deeper than that. The regime of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) that supports record labels’ control of music is premised upon the notion that individuals create things out of thin air and therefore deserve absolute control over their creations (the fact that they have to sell their right to absolute control to large corporations is slightly more than coincidental). Now, Tom Waits is a very talented guy, but he doesn’t create things out of thin air. His style has been influenced by Harry Partch, Captain Beefheart, Charley Patton, Blind Willie Johnson and countless others. Should they be given a share of his royalties? His current work is shaped not only by direct collaboration, but also through his experience of contemporary cultural work and the more ineffable circulation of cultural meaning generally. I am here reminded of an oft-repeated statement by Keith Richards that songs are all around in the air and he just happens to be an antennae reeling them in.

So how should society (or, for example, Tom’s home town) be rewarded for their contribution to these songs? Perhaps we should give up the mirage of wholly individualised creativity. Rather than establishing an elaborate profit and loss account in which we try and work out exactly who contributed what to which song, perhaps we should start thinking about the rights of everyone else rather than the just looking at the rights of artists. That way, rather than restricting the circulation of culture, we could encourage the flow of ideas and meanings and help develop some new artists who may be incredibly inspired and influenced by hearing a recording of Tom Waits’ Hammersmith performance. That’s how culture works.

Lee Marshall is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol, where he researches on various aspects of authorship and copyright. Sage has just published his new book » Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry<[] and he is currently writing a book on Bob Dylan and rock stardom.

» Visit Lee Marshalls website
» email Lee Marshall for a sample of his upcoming book

» 01 januari 1999 » artikel doorsturen » artikel afdrukken

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