Napster hit right as my adolescent self was finally developing an identity defined by music. The idea, then, that I could just pull down any song I imagined from the Internet as easy as searching Altavista [1] was a dream that instantaneously became an accepted fact of reality. That music was free was as obvious as needing to eat or sleep to live. When Napster collapsed under the weight of the RIAA, I moved to AudioGalaxy, then to SoulSeek, then to BitTorrent, and suddenly a whole decade—if not longer—had passed, and I’d accumulated more MP3s than could fit on even the largest of iPod classics. When I started, if you wanted to listen to MP3s on the go, you had to burn them to CD. [2]
Though I’d bought digital music from legit services—Amazon MP3 and iTunes, though my first “legit” digital music was the 10 free MP3s from eMusic—illegal downloading was just… easier. Either that, or the workflow was ingrained in my head, like a clueless user searching for Facebook on Google. I bought music when someone gave me an iTunes gift card (pre-App Store), or in those rare cases when something was so new and obscure as to not show up on the torrent sites for a few days. Sure, it was easy now, but illegal downloads had just become my personal default. Until I decided it wasn’t.
Earlier this year, I decided to stop pirating music. Mostly. Partly because I’d accumulated a gigantic backlog of music I’d downloaded and not listened to, and partly because I had friends who were in the music business and figured if I was going to support them, I should support the musicians who weren’t my friends, too. I would also try, when money allowed, to buy legit versions of the albums I’d acquired illegally—because I have too many illegal MP3s to use iTunes Match.
I said that I had mostly decided to stop, however. There are exceptions in my quest to legitimately purchase all my music. I have two qualifications for something that’s okay to pirate:
The album is not in print, digitally or otherwise.
Acquiring the album legitimately would be prohibitively expensive (i.e. import CDs).
This is a fair set of exceptions. If a record label wants to get upset that I’ve downloaded an MP3 of the B-side of an out of print single from 1987, they should provide a way for me to give them—and the artist—money for it. For artists with large swaths of their discography out of print, tracking down MP3s is often easier than finding a legitimate copy. The cost to a label to digitize and distribute this back catalog stuff borders on nil, but they still sit on vaults of recordings they won’t make money on, for reasons.
I created the second exception, however, because import CDs are often painfully expensive, and I’m not in a place where I have a lot of room for piles of physical media. If I’m just going to rip the darn thing to a bunch of MP3s, why should I have the piece of plastic? Let’s skip a step. The distribution deals that lock albums and artists to specific parts of the world are frustrating to me as a music fan in the global age. I never would have discovered the incredible Japanese rock band Polysics had it not been for illegal downloads. I’d happily give them more money, if I could. [4]
That’s an argument some people don’t buy. Fair enough, but unlike with TV piracy, there’s often no legitimate way to get ahold of some of these recordings, short of squatting on eBay and GEMM, or pouring desperately through the stacks at used record stores—all of which I’ve done in my desire to get ahold of something particularly important to have a physical copy of. I don’t feel as though I’m taking money away from an artist when I download an out of print album. I feel like the label is taking money away from that artist. Odds are, they never even recouped the advance before that album was taken out of print anyway. I am a completionist, and someone who doesn’t have room in his life right now for stacks of old CDs and records—or, for that matter, time to spend crawling every used record store for this or that obscure record that may not have even been released in the United States. Not everyone is going to have my mindset.
This only makes it more important that I pay for the new music out there. I’m buying these albums and supporting these artists now so I will have more music of theirs to hear in the future. It’s an investment in my own enjoyment, and an investment in making sure that artists I’ve fallen in love will stay in my heart and others, and won’t have to face the fate of the bands I’m illegally downloading. Conveniently, this also gives me a good moral excuse to justify the one new album this year I did illegally download, Kanye West’s Yeezus. He’s not really going to miss that couple bucks from me.
I kid. I really should go and pay for a legitimate version of that album on principle. I think I’ll do that now.
Let us pour one out for the long obsoleted MP3 CD Player, that transitional step between the CD player and iPods becoming affordable and ubiquitous. ↩
Another exception occurs for albums we talk about on Crush On Radio. The rationale is that one of us likely bought the album, and we’re listening to it for critical review purposes, and so forth. Also, some of the stuff we discuss is out of print, so it falls under exception 1. ↩
Polysics had a handful of albums released in the states, and recently had a few albums released on iTunes. Most of their material, however, is only for sale in Japan, and it seems unlikely that they’ll try to make it in the States again after two attempts to gain a following. ↩
There are, however, downsides to being known on the internet. Last week, I posted a screengrab of one of the many inappropriate messages sent to the band’s social networks every day. After making the post, I sat back and watched with an increasingly open mouth as more and more people commented on the statement. At the time of writing, Facebook stats tell me that the post had reached 581,376 people, over five times the number of people who subscribe to the page itself, with almost 1,000 comments underneath the image. Comments range from the disgusted and supportive to the offensively vile.
One may recall a post I wrote about “Fame, The Internet, and Personal Boundaries.” If not, please give that a read. It makes me sick to my stomach every time I hear about a musician being harassed by “fans” and the seeming normalization of verbal sexual harassment and misogyny on social media. I don’t think it’s a new problem, we’re just hearing about it more—and more people are speaking up against it. Unfortunately, I don’t have any solutions beyond shining a light on those who pull this disgusting shit and hopefully having them scurry back into their holes like the cockroaches they are on society.
To understand the frustration, it helps to think about just what the hell we’re actually doing with these gadgets. This list of the ten most used smartphone apps gets to the root of the problem. Of these ten, eight are social networks or messaging apps. They’re either a constant stream that demands our attention to either catch up or fill the void, or they’re interruptions that take us out of what we’re doing. We lose our place in the reality of our meatspace social interactions—or our work. I don’t need to link to studies about texting while driving, or the effect of multitasking at work. We’ve seen them linked enough damn times that we should know what that’s all about by now.
What a lot of us lose sight of is that a smartphone is a tool, like any other computer. We can check Twitter any time we have an Internet connection, so what makes it so important that we have to check it while we’re at dinner with friends, or a rock concert? I see no harm in filling up the dead time in our lives with the prosthetic distractions on our phones. An hour on the subway zips by faster when you’re reading a book, or when you’re playing Dots. It’s when it starts affecting larger aspects of our lives that we have a problem, and where fatigue sets in.
Perhaps gadget fatigue is another form of the way Facebook makes us unhappy. Our passive interactions with our gadgets—catching up on an endless stream of filtered photos of people’s dinners, inane status updates from our Facebook friends, checking our email every time the phone dings from another spam message—they all cause our brain to expect something less hollow and meaningless. So, we get sad. We get frustrated. We ignore the tremendous potential in these amazing devices in our pockets for the banality of passive consumption. That’s about it. Maybe gadget fatigue is a symptom of not tapping the potential of these things to actually change what we do for the better.
The problem with this theory is that not all of us are going to think about the revolutionary ways a pocket computer will change our lives. We think in terms of product features: “I can check my email on the go!” We think in terms of apps: “I can share pictures with my friends! And I can put filters on them!” Just how most people aren’t going to take up programming, most people are happy with what their phone comes with. 68% of people use five or less apps on their phone every week. Of those apps, I’m willing to bet most of them are in the list I linked to earlier. The possibilities of our smartphones are not limitless—the apps available to us define how we use our tools. Even a web browser is limited enough that it can’t do everything we need, no matter how much Google wants to insist otherwise with its Chromebooks.
I have to go back to my theory of how we can’t see the full impact of the technological changes we’re experiencing. Everything happens so fast, and so often that we don’t have the chance to get a sense of perspective before the Next Big Thing hits. [1] We’re still adapting to the idea of the Internet in our pockets. Designers and developers aren’t just trying to find the limits of what we can do with the new tools we get. They’re also trying to figure out the interface standards for a new class of devices, and we’re only just starting to organically figure out which patterns work best. I don’t see it as a leap to think that the social mores around smartphones and their descendent technologies are still being figured out.
It’s always going to be the tech savvy who figure it out first, because we’re the early adopters. 53% of Americans own smartphones. I can’t find statistics on length of smartphone ownership, but it’s always the geeks who are the start of the technology adoption curve. Assuming you bought your first smartphone in 2007 with the original iPhone, you’ve been a smartphone user for six years by now. [2] That’s enough time to develop a sense of when and where it’s acceptable to use it. The rest of the world has to catch up to us. And geeks are notoriously impatient. That’s the real problem. Until the world gets used to having these things in their pockets and hands, we have a mission to demonstrate how to use them right, frustrating as it may be.
I sometimes wonder if this one of the reasons Apple has product announcements on a more-or-less annual schedule. It’s more impactful if a shiny new iPhone with a colorful case is announced a year after the last one, rather than a month or two. ↩
I also can’t find statistics on people who ditch smartphones, but I imagine it’s a rounding error. ↩
Change scares people. Just look at the reaction every time Facebook rolls out yet another minor (or major) change to the site. Mark Zuckerberg's always had the right reaction to these panicked complaints: “Get over it.” The announcement of iOS 7 and its major UI overhaul caused a similar level of consternation, this time, however, among designers and pundits instead of ordinary users. As the release loomed, there were more than a few pundits claiming that iOS 7's changes would drive users to Android. Sadly, with Steve gone, there's no one at Apple who would dare to be that flippant, except maybe Phil Schiller.
Now, let's ignore the fact that if a user is afraid of dealing with the changes in iOS, switching to a completely different operating system is going to have an even steeper learning curve. Instead, let's note that aside from two major functional differences, iOS 7 works exactly the way iOS has worked since the first iPhone. Functional difference one is that instead of swiping right from the first home screen to bring up the iPhone's Spotlight search, one swipes down in the middle. The second is that folders now behave slightly differently, and can have pages of their own. That's it. Neither is difficult to learn, and neither dramatically changes iOS. Most of the changes are, yes, surface changes. If that's enough to make you want to switch to Android, you've probably had switching on your mind for a while, anyway. 1
There's a sense among technologically savvy people that ordinary people are, to quote the character of Agent K from Men in Black, “dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.” It comes, I think, from having to help our parents figure out how to find the file they accidentally saved somewhere but their Windows desktop, uninstall Bonzi Buddy, and explain that Bill Gates will not give them a million dollars for forwarding an email. Our parents aren't dumb. They're just new to this stuff, and some pick it up faster than others. What causes a lot of backlash from ordinary users about changes in Facebook and the like is that those changes break how they've learned to use the app. 2
When Facebook moves things around, hides things, and adds new things, the ordinary user who has functional knowledge of how to use Facebook has to re-learn those tasks. Those of us who have a skill-based knowledge of how to use a computer take thirty seconds to see the change, and can usually get back up to speed quickly, pausing only to roll our eyes at the complainers. But, as I pointed out above, the fundamentals of iOS have not changed. The main interface is still a grid of icons. You still swipe to unlock. most of the buttons and sliders are in the same places they were on iOS 1 through 6. It's just that they've changed appearance. For someone with functional knowledge of iOS—they'll be right at home.
By the time I post this, iOS 7 will only have been out for a day. It's too early to tell how right I am with any of the claims I'm making in this essay. Maybe the bright colors, text-heavy layouts, and other visual overhauls will scare people into the cold, robotic bosom of Android phones and tablets. I have my doubts. 3 The real reason technology journalists will make a claim about iOS users potentially jumping ship to Android over some visual overhauls is that it's click-bait. Then again, you also have people complaining that iOS hasn't changed a great deal, functionally, when that's actually it's advantage. When was the last time we got a product that was so visually different than the previous one and still worked almost exactly the same? Probably Windows XP, which still has a 35% market share. Think about that one for a bit.
And, if you can, do switch. I say it, not because I'm a hardcore Apple fanboy, and want you off my platform. I say it because it's a good idea to see how the other half lives. Take two years and live in the Android world if you can. Then, perhaps, switch back. I can't give up some iOS exclusive apps, but if you're not tied in, there's nothing to lose. ↩
The takeaway from Apple’s iPhone 5S and 5C announcement by most people was that Apple had released some fairly boring new phones, one with a plastic case, and the other with a fingerprint reader in the home button. Apple, for the umpteenth time in a row, utterly failed to do what the technology pundits said they should do, which was release a cheap phone to cut into the low end of the cell phone market, dominated by cheap Android phones. Some of the wishful thinking on the part of pundits was misinterpreted as rumor, and so the Apple post-announcement stock price has tanked. Again.
We’ve seen this before. The pundits demanded Apple release a netbook. They got the MacBook Air, which is decidedly not a netbook in anything but size—an 11" model that came out nearly three years after the original. The last time Apple took the advice of pundits was to license their operating system to hardware clones. It damn near killed them. Only the return of Steve Jobs, who quickly shut down the Mac clones and turned the company towards a small, focused product line brought them back to profitability. Something they haven’t had a problem with since.
Apple doesn’t behave like a regular company. It’s not that they don’t want their products in everyone’s hands. Instead, they decided they’d rather make money selling high quality products at a significant margin. I doubt they would mind if every smartphone sold was an iPhone, they’re not going to do it if it means making cheap iPhones that don’t meet their standards. As recent history has shown, Apple’s market share as a priority rests somewhere between making sure there’s decent coffee in the break rooms and keeping the metal floors at the Apple Stores polished on the list that Tim Cook keeps taped to the mirror in his master bathroom.
Selling quality products to a dedicated audience is a great way to make money. It works for Apple, and it works for Jonathan Coulton. Of course, JoCo isn’t publicly traded (yet). If the prevailing wisdom on Wall Street is that market share is more important than profitability, it should make people question Wall Street more than Apple. [1] Certainly this line of thought explains Amazon’s stock price. It’s a problem of conflicting philosophies, and the only real remedies are for Apple to either take the company private, which would be difficult and costly, or tough it out until people come to their senses.
Thinking about it, maybe they should go for the take-private. It would probably be easier.
It’s safe, I think, to assume Wall Street doesn’t give a crap how good a product is, as long as they sell. ↩