As if on cue, The Wire has this interview with Chris Cutler (of Henry Cow) about downloading and its effects:
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/6715/
I should point out that Cutler is responding to pomo princess Kenneth Goldsmith's article about filesharing:
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/6445/, where he states that:
Quote:
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Epiphany No 6: It’s all about quantity. Just like you, I’m drowning in my riches. I’ve got more music on my drives than I’ll ever be able to listen to in the next ten lifetimes. As a matter of fact, records that I’ve been craving for years (such as the complete recordings of Jean Cocteau, which we just posted on Ubu) are languishing unlistened-to. I’ll never get to them either, because I’m more interested in the hunt than I am in the prey. The minute I get something, I just crave more. And so something has really changed – and I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed have become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we’ve experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we’ve come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.
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How boring!