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The Limits of Our Lives by Dan Allison  I was a freshman in high school when Metallica sued Napster. As a fan of both, the case grabbed my attention. It got me thinking about how musicians actually earn a living and whether Napster was a threat to that. A couple years later, when the federal government started arresting people for downloading copyrighted music, I was still undecided on the issue. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software, which allows music and other media to be shared between users on the Internet, seemed like such a wonderful, culturally-enriching technology. But I didn't want to give musicians the shaft by "stealing" their music. As a simple fan of music, I was trying to resolve, for my own peace of mind, how to cultivate the fruits of this new technology without robbing the artists of anything they rightly deserved. When I first heard about Napster, the first mainstream P2P software, it didn't really interest me much as a user. I was content with my own collection of CDs and didn't feel the need to download music online. But over a short period of time, the impact it made on the youth culture created a sort of undertow that seemed to suck me in. The possibility of getting any music I wanted, for free — without even leaving the house! — was too enticing a prospect to pass up. That the music was shared became a new angle for appreciation of it. Also around that time, my old band and I decide to record a demo. We recorded it on my parents' PC using a few mics, a cheap mixer, and (importantly) free multi-tracking software we found online. The recording process was, at times, frustrating and painful. None of us really knew much about recording, so we trial-and-error'ed our way through it, learning a lot about what not to do in the process. But in the end, we had a decent recording that we were happy with. We put some of the songs on our website, which we threw together using free Yahoo! website software, and burned a few CDs for our friends. It was mostly just an experiment to see what we could do with the resources we had. Yet, essentially, what gave us Napster gave my band the chance to make and distribute music — computers and the internet. Want to read more? Subscribe to POLYSEMY. Click here to preview more articles. ©2006 POLYSEMY. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. |