MP3 and me
Please use your iPod.
IMAGINE BEING STUCK
on the road with a faulty memory:
"Damn, can't remember how that song went ..." –Somewhere in the past 21 years of being in Camper Van Beethoven off and on, I forgot how to play the fourth of the four chords. In a haze of sleeplessness, I reach for my trusty 10-gigabyte iPod, which contains an MP3 of every song I've recorded in the extended Camper family.
Think about that for a second. Every Camper song, Cracker song, Monks of Doom song, every cover we've ever done, solo songs for European compilations, Eugene Chadbourne improvisations from Basel, Switzerland, in 1991 ... It's all in there – my own handy reference device.
Plus there's plenty of room to download new stuff to keep my hardening eardrums somewhat hip – some Yeah Yeah Yeahs, just to check it out so I don't sound like the jaded old fuck I feel like. I found some cool rare John Fahey recently ...
So yes, trusty reader, you can gather that I'm pro-iPod. (I should disclose I own some Mac stock too, not that it's earned me a penny in the last few years.) I'm one of the faithful. Camper Van Beethoven would play MacWorld (are you reading this, Steve Jobs?). Camper would probably sign to Apple if it were a label. Maybe it is.
The iPod streamlines and monitors the accounting process. At least now the "industry" is attempting to deal with digital in a real way rather than pretending it doesn't exist or trying to legislate it out of existence.
Not that I'm all that concerned about what the industry does. Those who know Camper Van Beethoven know we put up songs in progress on our various (and not always easy to find) Web sites all the time; there's always a sample from the newest CD in progress. So go ahead, take our work. There are burn trees for our shows at Yahoo! group CamperVan-Etc. all the time. We encourage it. Tape it, trade it, but please don't sell it.
At least now I get some reflection of online sales in my royalty statements. I know it can be hard to understand for some of you, but I've worked really hard for a long time in the music game. Royalty checks have helped me stay afloat from time to time. It's been a big deal for me. But I haven't seen a check for mechanical royalties (compensation paid to each person with a legal claim to the composition of a song that has been recorded) in some time – in part because much of Camper's profitable catalog was out of print for a while, surely being digitally reproduced and downloaded for free by the folks who really wanted it. Even when sales are good, it can take a year for your record company to get back to your publisher. And when every penny helps, well, downloading can kind of suck.
But still I'm kind of for downloading. Digital delivery is changing everything. Technology changes, baby, and you better change too. Things don't stand still. And that's fine by me. I could rail about how bad MP3 encoding is, how it destroys stereo field, but who really cares when the real argument is this: the old order of music sucks. Record labels don't groom talent these days. With few exceptions, they don't put out great artists they want to grow. They take you to a stylist, put the right-looking instrument in your hand and the right jeans on your ass, and if you don't turn an 18 percent net profit on your first release, well, you've had it, and it's back to Burger King for you. So anything that subverts that system is fine by me.
I'm a socialist at heart. But I live in a society that doesn't believe in a social safety net and am forced to embrace capitalism for economic survival. I would love to give it away if you would give me food, housing, and health insurance in return. But that's not happening; we're all on our own in the big bad cold world. If you gotta download, I can understand. I've been broke too. It'd be nice if you paid for it, and I don't support the Recording Industry Association of America knocking on your door like John Ashcroft – that's not cool. But I would encourage you to think about how the system works, and trying, in your copious spare time, to understand the marketplace.
