Ah, music. Not sure I can say hand on heart that it’s my first love but it’s definitely up there. When my wife became pregnant for the first time, before she’d had a chance to get her hands on a Mamas & Papas brochure I had starting putting together a tape. If you were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s that’s what you did. You spent dozens of hours filling up C90s until they were perfect. I like to think that as an introduction to music for someone who has never experienced it that Music for Babies was perfect. As the pregnancy progressed I realised that I would also need a much livelier tape to get us to the hospital Get the Bag! was duly assembled...
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not some sort of Pirate. Yeah, throughout the 80s the shareholders of Woolworths and BASF slept well in their beds knowing that I was there to keep putting my cash their way. But Woolies sold music too and I was also a consumer. In fact, my consumption quickly outgrew what Woolworths could offer me. I became a music purchasing Top Carnivore. In my prime I was what is referred to in the pages of The Record Collector as a Completist. Red vinyl, picture discs, poster sleeves, whatever the music industry could devise to part me from my money I was there to pay them for. “Played? Of course it’s never been played!”.
Of all the genres that I’ve enjoyed over the years (and they’ve been a few) the one I still love is Trip Hop. You can find a definition on Wikipedia but it’s essentially Hip-Hop beats mixed with, well just about anything really. If you want to go into sub-sub-genres I like the stuff that combines beats with classical samples, although I’m sure that is sufficiently niche not to have a description. The music industry were still feeding my habit. “Same single with a different cover? I’ll take it”. I would hit HMV religiously every Monday and always leave with a bag and an empty wallet. For about 3 years I was without a turntable, but I still kept buying vinyl. Remember those blue Import stickers that HMV used to use? They were a magnet to me, “The same CD but £17 instead of £13? Put it on the pile sonny”. I still remember ordering an imported compilation CD from my local HMV and when it arrived I went in with my collection card to pick it up the guy behind the counter saying “£19.79? Is that right?” I explained the provenance of the CD in question and he nodded. When I got home I wondered if by “Is that right?” he was really questioning the fact that they were selling some CDs at twice the price of everything else. I still wonder that today.
And so to today. The kind of music I listen to is only being made in very small numbers by very few people, although I still have all the stuff I amassed when the sun was shining. But I still have that musical urge for something new. I still want to skim through the racks and pluck something up, run through the names of the producers and decide that it’s worth a punt. Fortunately, I discovered that the internet is absolutely awash with music. And not just torrented copies of the latest chart stuff. I stumbled across mixtape sites, DJs whose records I’ve brought now making their shows available for people to listen to. Not bootlegs, but bona-fide from the desk recordings. Loads of DJs don’t even bother with the shows, they just mix it and put it up. Stuff that once upon a time I would have paid through the nose for is now being offered to me for free. And most of it is reassuringly familiar, I tend to go for things that are mixes of stuff that I know quite well.
So what’s the legal position on the mixtape? The DJ who made it is offering it for free, often from their own site. But does the fact they’re mixing other people’s music mean that they should be putting money in someone’s piggy bank. But then what happens with labels like Mo Wax and Cup of Tea Records? They went out of business a long time ago, where does the whole copyright process fit in there? Then you’ve got sites that host deleted material from long defunct labels. I tend to steer clear of those to be honest, but usually because I’ve already got it. But what if I stumble across a missing EP, the one to complete the set?
Morally I could download it. My conscience is as clear as the inside of my wallet was throughout my record buying heyday. With the record company closed down, the music far too specialised to ever get a chance of a reprint, surely people making this stuff available online are providing a service to future generations. But legally?
I 01.lose your mind [04:54] |
