I won a new phone recently in a competition on Twitter, which was quite nice.
What made it really properly exciting though was the fact that said phone "Comes With Music" - essentially a 12 month long completely free, all-you-can-eat download fest of music, limited apparently only by the constraints of the Nokia store (which seems pretty far reaching at the moment...my split album with Jim Lockey & Ben Marwood is on there for starters) and the 32gb of memory that's crammed into the phone itself (though you can also download to the pc as well).
What's more, when the 12 months runs out I'll still be able to listen to this music on my phone (if I haven't lost/destroyed/eaten it by then) on my computer or, get this, on any cd copies that I've burned of the music that I have downloaded.
If you don't have the magic free music download thing then you can still download music from Nokia's website, at what looks like the same sort of price (79p per track) as you would get on iTunes.
My brain is melting with delight and confusion: I can legally download as much music as I want........and keep it forever.............and somehow the bands still get paid royalties for this?
But how much do they actually get? As I understand it, a chunk of the retail price of the phone itself goes towards paying for the music that people download...but I can't imagine these "purchases" count in the same way towards paying royalties to artists as someone paying in full would, that would be madness.
So would it be wrong of me to spend the next 12 months downloading every past album I could possibly ever want from this service, and then never spending any money on albums again (aside from ones that come out from 2011 onwards)?
It feels wrong, but then again I still haven't truly "got" the idea of paying to download music anyway - I do it, occasionally, but I don't feel like I actually "own" anything until I've got a physical item in my hands.......that I then immediately rip to my mp3 player and leave on the shelf to gather dust until I need to drive somewhere and realise my battery is flat so nab it for the journey and my girlfriend puts it back in the wrong case and I end up scouring through all my cds trying to find it. Grr.
I'm guessing that I'll end up using it in the same way I've used illegal downloads over the past few years* - to check out something I've been recommended, which I'll then go out and buy later on. And go to a gig. And buy t-shirts and hats and posters and badges and stickers and records.
Which brings me to wondering whether this would be a viable plan for the future - eliminate piracy by making all music completely free to download, and limit the licence so that you can only play the songs on one pc/one portable device...or possibly have it as a time-limited licence which you will then have to pay to extend to being permenant, or to be able to copy to different devices. Or you could be proper old fashioned and buy a cd :)
Maybe it's just a nice dream, but already in the 24 hours I've had this subscription I've downloaded & listened to albums by The Melvins, Them Crooked Vultures' album, Fantomas, & Kyus...all of which have been on my "to do" list for varying amounts of time, but that I've not had the spare cash to buy...but will probably be doing so now at some point this year.
Right, I'm off to eat tinned peaches, download some Peaches, and probably Peaches and Peaches as well.
OT
*yeah I know, I'm a prick and I'm killing music. But stop reading this footnote and you'll see that I have an explanation ready that I think more than justifies any nefarious activities.
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