Stop Giving Things Away!

If you’ve ever strolled through Central London in the late afternoon you will know that there are now two free evening papers to compete with the Standard. I don’t remember their names, but you will always find the vendors in pairs – one after the other, thrusting their worthless coloured rag into your hand. In the morning you can also get a free paper “The Metro” although that tends to be left around in strategic piles rather than actively thrown at you which renders it slightly less offensive.

Music is free now too I see, Prince bundled his latest record with the Sunday Mail of all papers, while Radiohead’s latest can be downloaded for nothing from their website. If a band does have the temerity to actually charge you for their labours you can probably find it on the net somewhere anyway, or download it from someone else’s iPod. You can build an enormous collection of music for the price of a hard drive, rather than actually invest in it and you don’t have to listen to a whole album – heaven forbid – just pick out the songs you like and ditch the rest, whether or not they might actually grow on you if you gave them the chance.

Idiots talk about ‘democratising’ music, as though it’s somehow shameful to charge for something so intangible. The medium means nothing anymore, where once the book was a source of power and a signifier of wealth in itself, now great works of literature can be downloaded with the click of a mouse. We live in a world where the young generation expects these things to be free, as though rewarding someone for their efforts were in someway akin to theft.

Personally, I hate anything free. By its very nature, free means worthless, free requires no investment. As a child, if I spent my pocket money on a new LP and it was crap I had a right to complain, to engage in discussion about it and to ‘vote with my feet’ when their next album hit the shops. Now I simply delete it from my hard drive, it has cost me nothing and hence it means nothing. The same is true of today’s free newspapers, riddled with poor journalism and crammed to the gills with adverts, it hardly matters, as they are free, if we don’t like them we know what we can do – and judging by the amount of copies littering the tube network in London we’re quite happy to as well.

Free media prevents discourse, it prohibits opinions, it pushes people down the path of least resistance. If I’d paid for the latest album by the latest band I was going to damn well play it until I did like it – it had cost me money after all. But now quality is crushed by convenience and ownership means nothing. Radiohead’s new record may be their best (it isn't by the way - see KidA for that accolade), but it will never be acclaimed as such, because it will not be valued. When OK Computer appeared to great fanfare, people paid money and invested in listening to and growing with an album that required some commitment. It pushed a more ‘arty’ proposition into the mainstream. The days of such excitement are behind us, as bands preach to the converted while the rest of us try it once and throw it away if it doesn’t make an immediate connection.

Free is fashionable but it is wrong, and it will kill the media. People may wish to appear brave by embracing these new models, but it will return to destroy them, and people will grow less adventurous and less willing to explore, not more so as may be hoped by these exercises in media democracy. Bands like Radiohead have already made their money, they can sit back and relax, but new artists will fail because of this folly.