Dreaming in Digital

The music recording industry and record labels have been battling illegal music file sharing and piracy for almost a decade now. Claiming losses for the past few years due to music consumers sharing music files over the internet and or through sharing CD's and CD-R discs to copy and transfer music files of popular recording artists songs and albums with out ever paying for the original CD released by the Artist and or record label.

I remember growing up as a kid, my parents and other family members had home stereos that could and did record and or dub records to 8 Track Tapes or reel to reel tapes and later on cassette tape decks became mass marketed. I recall friends dads would have reel to reel tapes containing several record albums recorded on to one reel to reel tape, thus eliminating the need to flip records from side A to side B and change records constantly at parties or for background music while hanging around the house. As a teen my friends and I where always dubbing cassettes of albums for each other, one friend would buy the cassette and then make up to 10 or more copies on cassette for the rest of us, and we would return the favor when we purchased a cassette tape of a popular album. We even went as far as going to our school library and making Xerox photocopies of the album art, lyrics, and liner notes folding and cutting the black and white paper copy to fit in the cassette tape's shell case like the store bought copy would. Your still only talking about distributing illegal copies on a small scale to our friends locally and such, but I'm sure this was still going on in every social scene worldwide in some way. The ease of the public gaining internet access and mass marketing CD-R burners and home computers was when sharing music truly went global. For the commercial recording artist I guess this is a loss, but for the independent and Do It Yourself recording artists this became and answer to their dreams, they now could have their music heard worldwide. That's why most of us got into music in the first place was just to have our music creation or talents heard by someone other than a handful of friends in our home towns and to hopefully make some sort of living doing what we enjoy.

I've been playing in independent rock, punk, and metal bands for about 15 years now.

I started jamming with friends on guitar and such around 1994 and on, at first all we had available to record audio with our home stereo cassette decks and a cheap microphone. We would record our songs and practices to help keep track of song ideas and progress.

Later as our budgets allowed we moved up to buying mixing consoles, better microphones and eventually four track cassette recorders. At this time digital recording was around but still out our budget since digital audio recording was still pretty new. So only the working recording studios and a few elite at best had a multi track digital tape recorder. I would intern at a couple different studios over the years just to learn the higher end digital recording equipment out there and picked up some great knowledge in audio recording along the way.

Some where around 1999-2000 digital audio recording software, and computers in general where just pumped into the hands of musicians and the rest of the world almost over night.

That's when I got my first laptop computer and soon after companies like Gateway and Dell where cranking computers out to consumers on easy installment credit. So I bought a little larger desktop PC with better soundcards and multiple CD-R drives to record and burn my music on. Then P2P software and websites like MP3.com became available so sharing our music went global over night. I had my 56 Kbps dial up modem constantly on sites like Audio Galaxy, Morpheus, and Napster sharing my music and what other audio files may have been stored on my drive, and I downloaded a fair share of other recording artist's music as well.

As internet connections became faster new file sharing programs and social networking sites rose and fell giving way to things like Lime Wire, Myspace.com, and Itunes.com as well as many others over the years.

I still enjoy sharing my music through the never ending array of websites, websites like AssociatedContent.com has now give a great place to upload my audio files and get paid for every listen to the audio track. I sell digital albums through Soundclick.com and similar websites, so truly the internet helped put the power to get my music listened to by consumers worldwide. This is great for starving artists like myself worldwide trying to show some kind of earning for our work writing, practicing, performing and recording our music, and a good kick in the jock to the record industry that has been taking advantage of starving artists for years with lengthy loop hole filled recording contracts in their favor, insane amounts of royalty advances to artists they know wont be able to recoup, and dropping artists or putting them on the back burner as the market shifts genres and tastes almost monthly.

Where now approaching 2009 and heading fast toward 2010, I wonder what new advances in audio and video recording this next decade will bring the public as technology like Blue Ray Laser Disc players and burners are currently being mass marketed worldwide. Public Television stations have almost completely switched from analog transmissions to digital, what's on the horizon for this digital generation. I'm eager to see the things to come and how they will continue to change the face of music and audio and video recording.