LimeWire blessed my teen years
LimeWire was a digital native's machete through the digital Amazon. Kids today won't develop weapons against the foliage.
Despite the presence of all the things that send the olds howling up a moral panic — but free porn, mostly really — there wasn’t much wrong with LimeWire. It was a pillar of my generation’s cultural discovery. It gave my fellow Middle Millennials™, the power to find culture when we, and the internet, were still young and un-commodified.
Users of the now-defunct peer-to-peer file sharing program were by all means stealing from an industry that hemorrhaged millions of dollars in the late aughts, but that was easy to justify if we could just get away with it. The rules were simple, and as follows:
1) Never download the first file atop the list of your search — ever; it was always Bill Clinton, or his voice at least, delivering a parody of his fated “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” monologue.
2) Become the family mail gatherer to intercept the resultant stern letter from the ISP asking that your household never engage in criminal piracy again, or risk lawsuit.
3) As for viruses … trust McAfee.
4) If you are a righteous pirate, conscious of your juvenile delinquency, then, you must, as humankind does best, rationalize rationalize rationalize. Ex. “Bands that have airplanes don’t need any more money.”
Growing up in a family parented by immigrant accountants, there was no time or money to buy more noises to divert my father’s attention, which he poured wholly into the pragmatism of bettering our social economic status. (Thank you, Dad). The depth of his music appreciation only went as far as replaying the same 1994 Sinatra album, Duets II, where Luis Miguel sings one with Frank. LimeWire was my cool big brother that lived in New York or maybe LA and showed me Guns N’ Roses by leaving the record out for me to find. By forcing us so-called digital natives to navigate through unregulated trash files to sift for gold, LimeWire led us to develop specific interests and an appreciation for the labor of searching, a practice Spotify cannot replicate nor foment in the newer generation.
When time isn’t money, failure is encouraging. The feeling of discomfort and the hours committed made the promise of a discovery tantalizing. It was no different in 70s and 80s record stores. There was a space, a time and a technique. Trudging through LimeWire was the same experience.
Select all; hit download. After hours of waiting for the GB’s to process, green bars to fill and that satisfying ping that meant the batch downloaded, the job was half done. It was time to clean up. You had to remove the lemons. That meant listening to all of it. Yes, every song. With no indication of where the hits were. There were no numbers or top 5 lists to compare.
The raw files often came misspelled or attributed to the wrong artist. Taking LimeWire’s uploaders at their word, the Ramones spanned every sub-genre of punk even covering Mrs. Robinson — it was actually The Lemonheads in 92’ –, the Animals and the Kinks cannibalized every British invasion single outside the Lennon-McCartney canon. For years I thought Dylan’s 1988, Silvio, was as relevant to his career as Just Like A Woman, All Along the Watchtower was a Hendrix original and that there was no Bobby McFerrin, just Marley a cappella.
Next, hours had to be spent scouring Wikipedia and downloading and uploading the right album artworks into iTunes as to not let the default eighth note design stain every track in grey. Then, regardless of the legality of the means, the music was ours, through.
When time is money, Spotify is the solution to the time devouring scenes I romanticize: a perfectly legal, categorized, UX designed and virtually infinite collection in, as most media is today, the palm of your hand. Now that I can pay for it and Dad is not around to turn the volume dial counter-clockwise mid Slash solo, it’s a dream come true. But the problem exists for music fans that don’t even know they are music fans yet. Like all other big media tech, Spotify feeds its users content (*barfs*), in this case music, algorithmically and so music discovery happens almost exclusively in a commoditized space.
The young, unaware discovereé loses agency of choice without their knowledge.
Corporations are at work. If the user has a Spotify subscription they’re spared the mid-album commercials, yes, but the chances of popularity and findability affecting choice on the service increases dramatically for artists with label backing who pitch them to Spotify editors to place in playlists. A new music fan will be inclined to stick to what they’re pushed. It’s right in front of them. This is not to say they are lazy or less committed. Environments nurture. They are signaled importance by numbers and presence, just like on social media platforms.
Panda has more than 886 million listens. The top Beatles song on Spotify, Here Comes the Sun, is dwarfed, at 447 million listens. I’ll let you fight in comments about who is more relevant … McCartney just put out a new album. He calls it ‘raunchy’, I call it trash. But he’s still around. Listen at your own risk.
One argument for Spotify is that at least the artist is paid. But not so much. A musician makes $0.0084 per stream, that is, if they own the rights to the song. George Santayana was more into philosophy than music, but your 9th grade history teacher’s favorite quote holds true: music history repeats. In the same way that Albert Grossman stole millions from the artists he represented, the industry supports a platform that sustains it and their mission of selling to listeners while the artists is kicked a sliver of a buck here and there for their work.
After the humans do their work, the algorithms wait on the user, serving delicious ear candy, delivered with whatever utensils a bunch of code prefers. Probably sporks? Sporkfuls. Hours of listening creates the data the user feeds telling Spotify what will be sweet to their ears. Ezra Klein, head of Vox, likes black licorice. He loves to say that his Spotify Discover thinks “the only thing I like is sad ambient electronica”.
In the app, there is no way to “meta shape”, as techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci puts it, or talk back to the algorithms other than breaking out of what you’re given and reteaching the algorithms by force of time and will. How is that possible for a new music fan that doesn’t have knowledge to grab a thread and follow it?
So, like every old before me, I worry for the youth. Part of appreciating music is working to understand it, putting in time to make it part of your identity. Nobody liked the Velvet Underground the first time they heard them, or even for the next 10 years. It took David Bowie to convince us that Lou Reed was cool.
Like Spotify Discover, Instagram has the audacity to have a so-called explore page. Exploring is about scouring uncharted territory, wading through, expending time, feeling the whole range — calm, patience, a frustration, desperation, full fledged aggravation and the final ecstasy and glory of finding something truly worthy *chefs kiss* of your ears.
Don’t like Spotify? Ok. You can try Youtube, if you don’t want to pay for it and you don’t want to lock your phone and you’re ok with the two-fold data suck. Soundcloud provided a route of discovery, which meant fair exposure for the new unsigned artist. Now it means a $10 monthly subscription. Pandora forces you into their algorithmic playlists, too. Bandcamp is like walking through the Amazon without a malaria vaccine.
Limewire was that bane of the music industry, but the boon of my generation of music fans.
With this in mind, is the hipster’s fascinations for the record store any surprise?
