Week 10: Ownership and Personal Libraries

When we were discussing piracy in all of its forms in class on Monday, including that commercial about stealing that we all seemed to remember so fondly from our youth, I kept thinking about illegally downloading music because it is, shall we say, the most familiar form of piracy for me. Once I entered undergrad I had very few qualms about illegally downloading music, as I was suddenly a broke student and didn’t want to give up my music collecting habit simply because I couldn’t really afford it anymore. In high school, with no rent or tuition to pay and disposable income from my part time job, I was happy to pay for the music I liked and in fact fiercely argued for making sure the artists I liked made money off of their art. (Alternate title for this post: I was a Teenage Music Snob.) During this time my friends shared my views, and so we bought albums mostly on iTunes.

The aspect of ownership I am thinking about here is that of the audio files we downloaded from iTunes. As music snobs carefully curating our iTunes libraries and competing for the highest number of songs, this collection seemed terrifyingly intangible. Backing up to some kind of external hard drive was necessary lest we lose all that money, or worse yet cred, due to a computer virus or hard drive crash. So possessing a large, valued collection of music that we couldn’t really touch or physically protect was kind of strange aspect of ownership in this case, making ownership seem less stable or secure. I would also relate this music snobbery to collecting books, and the contentment and pride I feel when people visit my home and peruse my bookshelves. It isn’t quite the same with music though, because in my experience people often scroll through your iPod when say, hanging out and putting on music, in the same way they might look through your records on a shelf, but how often do people come over to your house and scroll through your Kindle?

The other ownership issue was sharing music between friends with iTunes. Back in the mid 2000s iTunes allowed you to authorize a limited number of devices (I think five?) to play purchased songs. This turned sharing music with friends into a complicated hierarchy, in which you needed to be careful that you had enough authorizations left for your own future computer, and could not authorize that fifth friend, no matter how much they begged to have access to your impressive music library. iTunes has changed this feature now, perhaps because it was so inconvenient and frustrating to max out authorizations and no longer be able to play an album you had paid for on a new device. When you buy a CD or record you can loan it to as many friends as you like, and for me this is an important and enjoyable aspect of owning music; much like a good book, you want to loan a great album to your friends so that they too can listen and then discuss it with you. Overall, writing this post has made me think about the social aspects of ownership, and the ways on which a personal, private library can be shared for the enjoyment of others, often increasing your own enjoyment in turn.