An artist's love-hate relationship with P2P

Filed in archive Artists , Commentary on July 27, 2006

Will Sheff of the group Okkervil River chronicles his ongoing views of P2P over a period of several years.

It starts:

Over the nine-odd years that we in Okkervil River have been trying to make a living playing music, I've developed a kind of love/hate relationship with the world of file-sharing. The first good job I ever had was at the website Audiogalaxy.com, where I drew a respectable salary for writing music reviews and editorials as a kind of not-very-convincing camouflage for what was at the time one of the world's largest file-sharing networks. At the time, my attitude about file-sharing was that it didn't particularly hurt artists - most of whom were being ripped off by their labels anyway (it's a little known fact that very few musicians actually make any money off of record sales) - rather, it helped spread the word about their music to people who, if they liked it enough, would buy the CD. I felt that the party who genuinely had cause to be frightened of file-sharing weren't the tiny little indie bands but the colossal major labels; if you put out a Britney Spears CD with only one good song on it, I figured, people would just steal the one song and no one would buy the CD. When feeling grand - usually after one or two of the free 20 oz. Mountain Dews available in our office kitchen fridge and a few rounds at the Nerf hoop - I'd imagine a new and digitally reinvigorated world in which sales of major-label behemoths like Britney and Creed would plummet, in which major labels would topple, in which culture would be reinvented as a kind of meritocracy where anyone with artistic ambitions could draw a decent living by setting up a PayPal tip-jar on their little corner of the internet. Don't laugh - you thought that, too.