The Alchemist

Digital piracy didn’t just bring down the music industry as we knew it, it also caused the collapse of Release Day.

For so many years, to so many music lovers, Tuesdays were just as anticipated as Fridays. Tuesday was Release Day. The punks, audiophiles and jazz heads waited with bated breath for their favorite new releases, be it on vinyl, cassette or CD. Rancid, Dream Theater or Miles. But the mp3 changed all of this– it erased Release Day from the calendar. It stripped Tuesday’s only reason for existing.

As we all know, with the digitization of music came the proliferation of music piracy. These pirates live by their own rules; they weren’t about to be beholden to a release date set by some corporate marketing schmuck. Driven by the thrill of causing upheaval in the over-political recording industry, pirates buried their “treasure” in the open, making sure everyone had access to whatever music they wanted, whenever they wanted it. Yes, even before the release date.

But, in the middle of July, many Americans got their Release Day back. Spotify, the Swedish music-streaming service, launched in the U.S. To many, Spotify signaled a real victory in the fight against the recording industry, eradicating, in many respects, the need for music piracy.

Along with the unfettered access that Spotify provides to (almost) any song by any artist on any album came an unexpected surprise– anticipation for Tuesday. No longer the worst day of the week, Tuesday finally stands for something again. Tuesday has become a day for experimentation, a day for sharing new discoveries, a day for finding diamonds in the rough. Welcome back Release Day, it’s nice to see you again.

Written by Ben Cheney

P.S. If you feel like celebrating Release Day with us this week, I suggest:

La Dispute’s Wildlife

Dan Mangan’s Oh Fortune

Mutemath’s Odd Soul

So, Whitney premiered last Thursday. As NBC’s shining new sitcom. It naturally premiered at the end of their hottest comedy lineup– Community, Parks & Recreation and The Office.

To be completely honest, I have no idea what the ratings for the show’s debut were, I only know that the minute the show came on, something was off. It took me a second to figure out what was wrong, but as soon as I did I couldn’t ignore it. Although Whitney is “filmed in front of a live studio audience,” the show has obvious, shall we say, “laughter enhancements.” ”Laugh augmentation?” OK, it has a laugh track.

Now, in the TV sitcom world laugh tracks aren’t foreign. Many successful shows have had laugh tracks. Friends. Saved by the Bell. Hogan’s Heroes. And so on. But none of those shows premiered after an hour and a half of laugh trackless TV. Thus, Whitney stood out like a sore thumb. After spending most of my evening laughing when I felt like it, when I truly found something to be funny, I was suddenly being told what was funny and when to laugh.

It could be argued that in many ways NBC innovated the traditional American sitcom template with shows like 30 Rock, The Office, Community and Parks and Rec. The question is, when you’ve seen the future, how do you revert back to the past? We likely wouldn’t return to using cars without catalytic converters, computers without wi-fi or phones without text messages. We’ve moved on. So, how can we be expected to follow a laugh track?

We, as a whole, are actively (not to mention very flippantly) creating heaps and heaps of digital garbage. Many years ago, we did the same thing with physical trash – mindlessly tossing it out the back door for the garbage man to collect. We paid little mind to where it all went, much to the chagrin of Mother Nature. This was before overflowing dumps and toxic landfill runoff, of course – the Toxic Avengers taught us that lesson. Now, we are being groomed as a culture to recycle when it’s convenient and to try to think about the consequences of dumping our soda cans and Big Mac wrappers in the trash.

But digitally, this has never been an issue. We can cmd+shift+delete (i.e., empty the trash for all you non geeks) all we want, because those text and music files just, poof!, disappear. But, what happens when we move to cloud-based computing systems, where will it all go? Will we have a Garbage Island “the size of Texas” made of discarded .mov clips and .doc files somewhere out in the middle of the cyberocean? And what’s going to happen to all the Rick Springfield GeoCities fan pages, inactive Foursquare places, abandoned MySpace profiles and the entirety of Second Life? We can’t really be sure. But we do know that, while it may not take up physical space, digital trash is still out there creating clutter as it waits for a Google Bot to pick it up and serve it to an unsuspecting netizen.

Based on this, do we, as law abiding netizens, have a responsibility to clean up after our digital selves? It seems, just as we have a responsibility to keep our physical trash out of other’s (and nature’s) way, that the same should apply digitally. So, please, if you get married and no longer need your dating profile or you’re just so over twitter, do us all a favor and take care of your business. We all have a responsibility to keep the internet clean.

Written by Ben Cheney
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