AI and file sharing: unhelpful remarks

The debates on AI and streaming have very familiar contours for anyone that remembers file sharing. Tech drives a change in consumer behaviour and mechanisms of distribution. Governments are slow to legislate (if at all). Debates rage about the nature of theft, artistic ownership, freedom of access, and fan/artist relationships.

The jury’s out on whether AI will generate the same mass uptake that other previously disruptive technology enjoyed. But there’s no doubt that streaming models prepared the ground for a wider acceptance of AI’s extractive practices in a categorically different way to file sharing. Streaming – via playlist curation and recommendation algorithms – pivots on the user’s relationship to a platform, the artist being almost incidental to this, a process that AI threatens to complete by removing the artist entirely. But file sharing in the early 2000s was not only more anarchic than this, it was more intimate.

When I was a teenager, CDs were still the dominant format, but file sharing was in its lawless heyday. Unlike Spotify or iTunes, Napster, Soulseek, and LimeWire were rogue agents, offering users completely free access to music. When Metallica sued Napster, it was not framed as a noble artist fighting against a corporation. It was a group of rich older men greedily attacking their fans and denying access to their music. Metallica’s reputation never fully recovered.

More broadly, for a brief moment the music industry had no way of capturing this technology for profit. As soon as one file sharing site was taken down another popped up to replace it. Fans were in the driver’s seat and forced the pace of change.

Of course the ethics of this were highly contested at the time. Did people have an inalienable right to music? Wasn’t this just theft? If there’s no financial incentive to create music won’t people just stop making it? (People genuinely believed this to be a possibility).

Depending on who you ask and where you look, contradictory predictions made in the early 2000s have all been vindicated. Vinyl survived, but only in zombie form. Artists can now enjoy instant, global exposure, but must endure financial precarity. People still make music. But many lament the demise of professionalism and the overwhelmingly homogenous prospect that contemporary music has become as a result.

But the real takeaway from the file sharing episode was that for a moment, traditional gatekeepers (major labels, commercial radio, MTV) lost control of the relationship between fan and artist.

Although it’s tempting to frame this as the heady utopian ideals of the early internet made flesh, it enjoys little more than a kind of half-life today. Capital is forever inserting its interests into the transaction, leveraging the convenience that only big tech can offer via platforms extracting wealth from each fan/artist transaction.

In this context, streaming platforms – the most obvious example of this – are arguably a last ditch attempt by the traditional music industry to manage the flow of capital. But regardless of how low the pay per stream is, the long term financial viability of subscription based streaming services is far from certain. One hike in subscription fees could spell disaster for a platform if others manage to undercut.

Regardless of this, whether intentionally or not, the file sharing “moment” certainly squeezed toothpaste everywhere. But the fight to control each new disruptive technology let loose into the ecosystem rests on the premise that we can go back, that we can get that toothpaste back in its tube. So maybe we should try reframing the question.

Stock arguments against exploitative practices in the music industry, justified as they are, are a product of a very new (in historical terms) and very limited understanding of what musical exchange and creativity could look like. The idea of artistic ownership, or even a distinction between artist and audience, are products of early capitalism and its framing of intellectual property as a legal category. This was completely alien to folk traditions that predate the institutionalisation of secular music in the early modern period.

Prior to the origins of the creator/audience separation in the early capitalist era, the idea that one could be a musician by profession was only vaguely understood outside of organised religion and royal courts. Folk art saw no such separation between art and audience, there was no particular concept of ownership over songs. Music was made and shared freely. Whilst some individuals may have displayed a natural talent for music, everyone was free to participate. As early capitalism opened the door to secular patronage of the arts, the dynamic fundamentally shifted, making rockstars out of gifted musicians and deities out of composers. Music was no longer a malleable, negotiable activity, it was a sacred (read profitable) category. Creating definitive versions of pieces via printed manuscripts (and later recorded music) facilitated the commodification process.

The second half of the 20th Century reheated the early modern idea that the artist constituted a special category separate from the general population in the form of the pop and rock star. They are seen as uniquely talented individuals producing commodities that are highly valued by society, imbued with godlike significance.

The purpose of highlighting this is to encourage more radical, broad ranging possibilities for how music creation and consumption could be conceptualised, given the dramatic changes forced on the industry by big tech and global events.

AI music – in harvesting the internet for content to create chimerical and uncanny “new” songs – is an act of theft. True. But this framing accepts the premise of capitalism: art is a product and creativity a career. AI is disrupting an idealised free market of art. As a result, the idea that creative “products” should even be owned in the traditional, capitalist sense of the word goes unexamined.  

I fully acknowledge that this line of interrogation looks deeply unhelpful in a climate where artists are embroiled in a near constant, uphill battle to gain recognition, fiscal or otherwise. But this is because we are still fighting yesterday’s battle. The tech is here. Our governments have done next to nothing to regulate it. And yet again, the response is to desperately preserve a rose tinted version of an old order where copyright law protects the creator, the playing field is always level, and the arts are a valued cornerstone of a healthy society.

Attempting to force disinterested governments to get a grip on disruptive tech is still vitally important, but what’s required goes deeper. A radical realignment of our attitude to music. One that I’d argue has been quietly evolving organically ever since early file sharing, if not before (tape trading in the 80s being an ancestor of this).

What we are now witnessing is a return of sorts to a historical norm. As music creation and transmission becomes ever more nebulous, defining it as a commodity becomes increasingly difficult. Overproduction is in overdrive. As things stand, we cannot contrive scarcity as a way to drive up prices. Financial models designed to determine the value of finite resources do not map neatly on to a commodity enjoying near limitless abundance.

None of this is to say that we should simply let events unfold. We still value the individuals that make music, the communities we form around it, and the thing in itself, all of which remain under threat.

But underlying each growing pain is an emerging sense that our relationship to music is shifting at a fundamental level. Each new crisis brings an opportunity for social reengineering. Music’s status as the sacred preserve of a chosen few is degrading. And this is driven not just by technology, but an increasing demand for accountability within the industry itself. The rockstar is now a problematic category thanks to #MeToo. Home studios, cheaper technology, and of course the internet have demystified the mechanics of music making. And fans have proven more than willing to part with cash to support artists even if music is made available to them for free.

These informal networks probably won’t generate anyone enough income to quit the day job, but there is still potential for this ecosystem to become self sustaining if fans are empowered to support creators directly, unshackled from big tech’s go-betweens extracting their commission.

But what of music specialism in this new world order? To state the obvious, music, in every way imaginable, is more complex than it was in 1700. A vast amount of knowledge, technology, and institutional memory has collected in that time. To become a classical conductor, for example, takes years of training, money, and dedication within esteemed institutions. This, and many other spheres of music, are simply not compatible with the mass participatory amateurism advocated for here. We don’t even need to go that far. A plethora of post war contemporary music we enjoy today was the product not just of musical ability, but a whole ecosystem of technical and creative knowledge. Won’t this be lost to time the more music devolves into a homebrew of Bandcamp drops?

To that I’d say that if institutional knowledge is being degraded it’s the work of successive governments starving the arts of resources, not mass participation. However, only the most naïve would argue that this mass participation model would generate enough capital to fund spaces for forms of music that just do require more resources to produce and understand. Nor would it compensate for this loss. This is the point at which shifting social attitudes run out of road, and lobbyimg for macro state intervention becomes the only viable option.

But looking at the current landscape, despite every cynical step to cut down the last financially equitable platforms within the music industry, despite every new technology syphoning off what little money remains, two things are certain. Fans will seek out and pay for music made by humans, and people will never stop creating music for its own sake.