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Music Matters
Take, for example, a popular pop/techno artist with a one-word name who espouses page after page of radical environmentalist talk - you should be ashamed to have the computer desk upon which your computer sits on which you read my website, he writes, because trees had to be killed to make that desk. You horrible, mean tree-killer. Being a reasonable environmentalist is commendable, but if he's so concerned with the death of trees, why hasn't he come out against himself for selling millions and millions of CDs that all have paper booklets and tray liners? Or how about a musically-groundbreaking funk/rock band whose name explicitly defines their anti-establishment status: Despite that, they are owned by Sony Music, their music is played on Clear Channel and Citadel radio stations nationwide, and they played to patrons of the 2000 Democratic National Convention in support of the party. I once had a business associate who looked at all of this and had a hard time figuring out against just what machine they were raging. I don't mean to sway your preconceived notions. In fact, if you're truly anti-establishment and anti-capitalism, the last place you want to be is the traditional media industry. Six global companies with more power than the governments of nations have established an environment that can now sustain itself from the inside. You are useless to it and it should be useless to you. I think one thing that strains the resolve of young people interested in changing the world is that the world already looks so established. It seems these days that a behemoth like the entertainment industry doesn't need to extend any effort to make sweeping changes to the world. That is true. But the companies that make up this industry were no different from any other company or individual in their infancy. History shows us that people who want something bad enough can move mountains. Enter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the subsequent Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, or CARP. All of a sudden, those six big companies want compensation for the artists whom they represent. Let's be honest for a second. That's perfectly all right. And it's all perfectly legal. Whether we like it or not is a far cry from some other things that have been alleged by people who are not fans of this turn of events. The price of goods has changed, and it has changed in an unacceptable way. The only real thing we can do is refuse to purchase these goods. That being said, it's curious to me that the first thing people do is to run to the government. Deluged by hundreds of thousands of e-mails, Senators from both sides of the aisle rushed to write band-aid legislation they really don't understand to quash the outcry from the last big piece of relevant legislation they wrote that they didn't really understand. Let's face it, even musicians don't fully understand digital media just yet, and kids downloading MP3s with their parents' cable modem have a lot more free time than a Congressperson. In the grand scheme of things, it's terribly unimportant to them. And maybe it should be. After all, haven't musicians and music lovers alike pretty much aligned themselves with the political party that our current President is not? Didn't everyone at the 2000 MTV Video Music awards cheer when the one-word-name techno artist above stuck his opponent's campaign sticker on the podium, claiming he just couldn't continue his segment without doing so? A lot of people believe that the government can and should do everything for us, solve every problem for us, because we are powerless to do anything about it ourselves (this isn't a political website, so I won't connect this fact to the story about the bumper sticker above). So many people connect government with the same corrupt practices of big business, I don't understand why anybody wrote their representatives to begin with. This is, after all, an issue of capitalism, and it should be dealt with as such.
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