I would make the argument that removing all traffic lights from the music-collecting highway inevitably creates careless listener practices — like, for instance, judging a band or an album by one song, or even a portion of a single song (I’ve done this, and I bet you have, too). One time, scrolling through my music collection, I found dozens of albums I had downloaded over a year before and had never even listened to once. I imagined my own band’s music lost in someone’s massive collection, totally unheard, just the act of downloading fulfilling their passing curiosity. What a depressing mess! I missed my romantic relationship to music. I wanted to smash my iPod and go back to scouring CD racks. I wanted to pay careful attention to one thing at a time. I considered the downloading lawsuits to be 100 percent counter-productive, while the fake-file method was too obvious and even overtly funny to be permanently dissuasive. I thought that, to be truly effective, to actually change people’s minds about how we consume music, the situation called for something subtle, insidious, and almost invisible. In The Phoenix, Ryan Walsh talks about his brilliant piracy project, The Overdub Tampering Committee.
Feb 15th @ 5pm / reblog