An Island In The Stream

Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, Deezer – never used any of 'em. And, for once, it's not (strictly) because I'm slowly sliding into an age bracket where I'm teetering on the edge of irrelevancy.

For starters, most of the above only launched in Australia right around the time I started working out of a home office with the world's shoddiest Internet connection. Bandwidth is valuable, and Redtube won't stream itself.

Secondly, I still like to hold music in my hands, get the complete package, and occasionally even pore over liner notes like a teenager – not so much to learn lyrics (which are, for the most part, extraneous to my enjoyment anyway), but to play six degrees of separation and see if this piece of plastic/wax links up with anything else in my collection.

And finally, in irrefutable proof that I have something in common with Thom Yorke other than terrible hair and mad whining skills, I think the streaming revenue sharing model from is just another way for the 'business' arm of the music business to stitch up the 'music' arm.

Confession time, guys. I've stolen music. Made cassette dubs of my uncle's cassette dubs of NWA and Run-DMC when Guns N' Roses weren't badass enough for me anymore. (Unsuccessfully) shoplifted cassingles from K-Mart. Grudgingly accepted CD burns from friends who just wanted to share their hot find.

And yes, I've downloaded music illegally. Not thousands of time, not hundreds, maybe tens, certainly not dozens. Sometimes, when you just need that out of print/not available digitally old-skool bomb in your DJ set, there's nowhere else to turn but Kim Dotcom and his cronies.

But as someone who for the past decade has been fortunate enough to be sent more free music than I can ever possibly listen to, and claim as a work expense anything I've paid for, I'm not in a position where having to stream/rip the music I want to hear due to financial/whatever constraints is an issue.

So the admirable decision by Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich to remove their solo and collaborative work from Spotify, in a show of solidarity to a revenue sharing model that they claim is skewed against new artists, will have absolutely no impact on my life.

Hasn't it just stirred up the hornet's nest, though? Arguments, counter-arguments, assertions that it was Thom and his buddies in Radiohead who set this whole juggernaut a-rolling with their 'pay what you want' download model for In Rainbows, cheapshots at how half-arsed The King Of Limbs sounded.

Yep, the Internet has been flaming away for days now, and it'll no doubt blaze on ad infinitum as punters, producers, performers, pundits and multinational conglomerates grapple with the greatest ethical dilemma of our time (that doesn't involve asylum seekers, climate change, cheating English cricketers not walking when they're clearly out, or any number of other great ethical dilemmas).

Taking the moral high ground seems the easiest option – hell, some writers base entire careers on it. But the longer I tried to stand on that lonely island, the more it seemed to crumble beneath me.

When Yorke and Godrich dropped their bombshell, David Lowery's recent revelation on The Trichordist (a blog with “the protection of Artists Rights in the Digital Age” on its charter) immediately sprang to mind. Of how his band Cracker's cracking mid-'90s alt-rock hit Low racked up over a million plays on Pandora and they pocketed a combined total of $42.25 for their content provision.

Revisiting that link only deepened the rabbit hole. Another Lowery piece addressed a confession by an NPR intern that much of her music collection had been accrued by foul means rather than fair, or at the very least not paid for. Lowery wrote kindly and candidly about ways she could readjust the karmic imbalance of depriving artists of income, and the arguments and counter-arguments again raged on below.

In the midst of all this torrid Internetting, I continued to digitise the box of cardboard sleeve promos that I briefly mentioned while fighting a losing battle with my CD collection a month or so back.

The First World Problem I'm now grappling with is what to do with these several hundred discs once I've got them all converted to 1s and 0s.

Donate them to charity? No one buys promo CDs from Vinnies, not even hopeless addicts like me.

Give them away as lucky dip packs to my friends? Perhaps, but that's technically file-sharing.

Bin them? Music doesn't deserve to be landfill, and our planet doesn't need any more anyway.

Fuck you, conscience. Fuck you very much.