Throwaway Download Culture

I know this is slightly off-topic, but it is related to some degree. The point I was making about reproductions of art not being the same as the real thing was about the limitations of the CYMK printing process that cannot capture the full colour spectrum of real life. This is also true of RGB monitors that also cannot replicate the full colour spectrum of real life. With a tube of Ultramarine Blue and a tube of Titanium White pigment paint I can in a single brush-stroke create an infinite blend of shades from one colour to the next - I cannot replicate that digitally - the RGB and CYMK colour systems will render that as 255 shades of blue and 1 of white. In fact the two systems even cannot replicate each others colours, it is impossible to print RED, BLUE and GREEN as you see them on the screen using a colour printer because those colours are out of gamut of the CYMK system. In this respect alone there is a difference between a printed album cover and/or CD booklet and a JPEG image (regardless of image resolution or compression ration - which incidentally produce highly visible artifacts even at low levels of compression)

 

So in the visual art analogy the medium is important, and this is why (for me) the medium is important in aural art - though the differences between digital and analogue are less apparent and practically impossible to quantify, they do exist. (However the differneces between recorded and real life are even greater )

There is a line missing from your conceptual graph and that is the cost of production (i.e. recording, manufacture, distribution, promotion, feeding the band, paying the studio staff, buying equipment) - simply throwing mp3s at the internet will not magically create interest in an artist, all you think you are finding by "internet word of mouth" is artificially created by street teams and marketing specialists, all of whom take a cut of the bottom-line - all these people put a lot of effort into this to make it look like it blossomed spontaneously.

Try and imagine CD sales and downloading in the form of a graph. The two are linked in the sense that as Downloading (Legal or Illegal ) increases you'll also see CD sales rise. The more people that know about the band the better, and in today's technological age the best way to do that is the one-two punch of "Internet word of mouth" and bootlegging. 

All you are taking away from the gallery is a memory - the same memory you would take away from hearing a song on the radio, or listening to an album at a friends house.

But that is a close-loop feedback system that is self-sustaining - without CD sales the band would not be popular enough to attract large audiences and sponsorship deals.

In many ways this comes down to Marshall McLuhan's old adage, "the medium is the message."  A technology is never just a transparent means of delivering music, it fundamentally transforms the nature of the music, how it's made, produced, experienced, etc.  Hell, Bing Crosby became a star because of the development of the microphone--the close, low croon as opposed to the operatic belting out--and pop music changed forever.

MP3s obviously represent a further miniaturizing and condensing of sound from the miniaturization and condensation offered by CDs.  We can easily get nostalgic about lost forms (I know I often do), but they were already b*****dizations of something that came before.  I have a colleague who just retired who swore by his 78s!

 

That's true. But then again, when you brag about a collection of records you even have something physical to brag about.. In the other case, you have to say "excuse me while I turn on my computer where I store pretty much all that's important in my life: memories, photographs, documents, and now even music". And as you mentioned Mike, when you compared a reproduction of a painting to a jpeg, now even pictures!

 

Really, the dependency on one single device to manage everything scares me. We'll depend for everything on an computer.