Confessions of a Free(down)loader

I download music illegally. So do you, probably. Or you used to.

At the very least, you tried it once in college and it didn't affect you that much so you didn’t bother doing it again.

But lately I’ve been thinking about why I download music illegally. (Movies, too, when they’re not on the only streaming service I actually pay for, which is the one you just thought of.) And I don’t think it’s only because I’m cheap. 

(Although I definitely have an absurd and probably unhealthy relationship with money. To illustrate: I would never pay $10 for airplane Wifi, but I would pay an extra $10 for a flight with free Wifi.)

I’ve got two theories: the personal and the political. And, as always, the truth is probably some tincture of both of them. You decide the proportions.

First: downloading music feels like a hunt. It taps into some primal instinct that recoils against being handed things too easily. You've got to type 10 different variations of what you’re looking for into Google (“fleet foxes download album zip,” “fleet foxes 2008 free download online rar,” etc.); navigate the seedy websites of the wild wild west of the world wide web, which look ancient enough that you can actually use phrases like “world wide web”; play a round of rooftop “he’s the fake, I’m the real one!” with the download buttons; and after all that, cross your fingers and pray that when you open the file it doesn’t ask you for a password. There’s a perverse thrill to it.

Pictured: Will Smith's attempt to be Woody, since
he had already been Buzz with Men in Black, and/or
 round out the Back to the Future trilogy. Little did he know
the secret was to combine them, as in NSYNC's tragically
underrated "Space Cowboy" (featuring Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes!)

Plus, going through all those steps gives me time to reflect if I really want to download this album. Do I care enough? Or could I live without it? And hey, while we're here, what is desire, anyway?

One-click downloading leads to impulsivity. Which, of course, is the point.

Which brings me to the systemic issues at play here. (I know - never a sentence anyone likes to hear.) Under capitalism, art was turned into a commodity. A product to be sold and bought. Which - fine. Not ideal, but at least it makes sense. Say what you like about capitalism (and plenty of people smarter than me have said plenty) but there is a consistency to its logic that you’ve got to admire.

But then, at some point, music underwent a de-commodification. It is no longer tied to anything physical. Anything that can be understood as “property,” whether you believe in property or not. But they managed to keep the transactional framework in place, except that now you are not actually paying for a thing. You’re paying for digital code. Ones and zeroes, right? And it’s not like they have to make the ones and zeroes separately each time. Once the files exist, they can be downloaded once, twice, a thousand times, and it makes no difference. And something about paying for that seems absurd.

I wonder where this will go next. Money itself got de-commodified a while ago. It may have even been the first casualty, which probably means something. Clothing? As of right now (March 11th, 2020, appx. 7 AM), when you buy a shirt, you're still buying an actual, literal, physical shirt. It’s been well documented that people will pay more for a shirt that bears a certain brand logo (or one that is stamped invisibly with the "Kanye" brand), but at least there’s still a shirt involved. But imagine if you already had the shirt and you could just pay for the Nike or Supreme logo to be projected on there. 

I'm not 100% sure about the technology this would require, but I feel like if it doesn’t already exist, someone’s working on it at some start-up somewhere.