History 390 blog

I don’t have too much to say this week, but I just want to highlight a particular thing from Stephen Witt’s book How Music Got Free. Of course a big theme of the book was piracy and what I would call the revolution of the MP3. Reason I would call it the revolution is because this was the time when MP3’s first came out, and enabled for the first time a way to download music for free, but illegally according to law. The one thing in particular I wanted to talk about was how he compared music piracy of the 90’s to drug experimentation in the 60’s. Honestly when i think about, he’s not totally off in what he’s saying. At first sight it makes you say “huh” but when you think about it more in detail you get exactly what he is talking about. Since it was such a new wave, and people were curious about it without thinking too much about the possible consequences they are definitely comparable. The thing about it, I would say streaming services, which just became big a few years ago, is what really stopped this trend because though it was probably happening at a higher rate in the 90 with MP3’s, I remember people talking about trying to download albums, and music off the internet for free just a few years ago in 2014. Shoot to be honest, I’ve even downloaded music before that could be considered piracy, but the reason I did it was just like why everyone else in my generation did it in trying to get some music for free because we couldn’t afford buying it. Don’t get me wrong, whenever I could support an artist, and I had some money to, I definitely would, but times growing up as a teen, and early in college a lot of times I didn’t have the money to buy music, and I know for me personally I wanted to stay up on the latest music. That was the case for a lot of people, so I could only imagine how bad it was in the 90’s when it was first introduced. I understand the grip the artist would have as well because it took time, effort, and money to create the music they created so they wanted compensation, but when your young, and don’t have the revenue to buy the songs you resort to doing things like pirating music. Also people just wanted to help out other people in keeping them up with the latest music. Overall, I agree with Witt, and though it is an illegal practice, it was a way of listening to all the music you wanted to without paying, and tell me what kid, teen, and young adult is going to resist that opportunity.