Harvey, Eric - The Social History Of The Mp3 (Pitchfork)

The Social History of the MP3
by Eric Harvey, posted August 24, 2009


Considering all the new music we have to sort through so far in the 21st century, we've sure been focusing an awful lot lately on two of the biggest stars of the 20th. Decades after their respective popular peaks, recent events reminded us, neither the Beatles nor Michael Jackson have loosened their grip on ourimagination. Yet one particular thing I noticed amidst the nostalgia surrounding the latest (and likely last) Beatles CD reissues, and Jackson's sudden passing was a sense of resignation that the eras within which both stars emerged seem highly unlikely to happen again. The Beatles, in 1963-64 and 1967, and Michael Jackson in 1983-4 arguably represented for pop music what World Cups, the Olympics, and SuperBowls do for sports, and what blockbuster summer hits do for movies: the ability to command everyone's attention at once.

The latest chapters of these two long-running pop narratives not only celebrated their art and pop-culture impact, but also-- with MJ posthumously topping the Billboard charts and millions preparing to shell out again for new copies of Revolver and more-- commemorated theritual of paying for it. It's a way of framing these events that could only happen now, at a time when mp3s and file-sharing networks have allowed millions of disparate global collaborators to create the largest shadow economy in history, which has eaten away at the music industry like termites on the foundation of an old house. In its place, an unstable infrastructure that has created infinite newdemands for our attention, yet is far too unstable to support world-conquering superstars. We've all read the trend pieces and editorials lamenting the record industry's poor decisions and crumbling business model, the fact that kids don't value music anymore, and the outmoded strategies used to try to win back paying customers. So omnipresent have these discussions become, in fact, that it'spossible the past 10 years could become the first decade of pop music to be remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual music itself.

This is a chastening thought, but at the same time we have to be careful not to overlook how the technologies we invent to deliver music also work to shape our perception of it. When radio came along, its broadcasts created communities ofmusic-listening strangers, physically distant from each other but connected through the knowledge that they were listening to the same song at the same time. Where radio brought listeners together as a listening public, the LP started splitting them apart. The LP and 45 rpm formats took the phonograph, which had been in existence for over half a century, to the masses, right as the Americanmiddle-class was going suburban and privatizing their lives. We could then use musical objects like we'd been using literature and art for centuries prior: as collectibles, and signifiers of personal taste. The emergence of the cassette--the first sturdy, re-writeable music technology-- allowed us to "manufacture" our own music in the privacy of our own homes and recirculate it at our will, throughmixtape trading and full-album dubbing. By the early 1980s, home taping had become the latest fall guy for an industry trying to blame consumer delinquency for its slipping fortunes, rather than its own overspending.

The cassette "crisis" seems quaint when compared to the rise of the mp3. The first widespread music delivery technology to emanate from outside industry control, mp3s, flowing throughpeer-to-peer networks and other pathways hidden in plain sight, have performed the radical task of separating music from the music industry for the first time in a century. They have facilitated the rise of an enormous pirate infrastructure; ideologically separate from the established one, but feeding off its products, multiplying and distributing them freely, without following the century-old...