Back to the Salt Mine

British performer Billy Bragg rails against the music business this month, claiming big entities like MyFace ruthlessly leverage massive market share to dole out recordings for free, exploiting hapless artists merely to grow larger still. It’s a provocative proposal and one that’s fairly widespread among artists generally, who by and large sidestep sticky issues of fan culpability. Says Bragg:

The people who are doing the most damage to our industry are not the music fans swapping files for no commercial gain – it's the sites that are making money without paying for content that are really ripping us off.

To be fair, Bragg doesn’t let fans totally off the hook. He acknowledges they may play some part in his nightmare but basically blames the record companies’ decline on continuing corporate gluttony. While historically such greed has been a factor it doesn’t negate the fundamental reality behind the collapse of the modern music industry.

Here lies a very hard truth: music lovers themselves discovered a simple way to distribute content for free and took to it with gusto, and copyright values according to author Nora Ephron and others have become nil.

Until Bragg and the artists who cling to misguided myths come to terms with this immutable fact all the op-ed pieces in the world, and rants against Ares, BitTorrent, Blubster, FaceBook, FastTrack, LimeWire, MySpace, PirateBay, RapidShare, SoulSeek, WASTE etc. will add nothing to the debate beyond distractions and dissemblances.

Artists are not merely at war with faceless corporations. The sharper conflict lies with the very record buyers vowing love to the artist, and those vows, when screamed at the top of all those lungs, probably mean as much as the performers do when they return it at the end of a show.

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

- Joni Mitchell

Forty summers ago rebellious fans, determined to get in free, flattened fences at a fabled music fest and had their way with it. The only remaining barrier between organizers and ruin was the financial commitment of a major film studio underwriting a legendary documentary. It hasn’t been 1969 for a very, very long time, but really, not much has changed.

- js.