What Are You Buying When You Buy Music?

MARCH 12, 2009

What Are You Buying When You Buy Music?

By Jeff Price

What is it you are buying when you buy music?  It used to be much easier to think about when music was being bought on a 12” piece of vinyl in a big cardboard sleeve or a 5” circular piece of plastic in a “jewel box”.  It felt tangible, no matter the fact that what you were really buying was something that when used with a turntable, CD player, amplifier and speakers created in tangible sound waves – the rest was packaging and a way to deliver those sound waves to your ears.   It somehow just made sense.

With a download, things changed; no more physical packaging, just zeroes and ones downloading to a flash or hard drive that also came with virtual images. So when you buy music via download what is it you just actually bought?  Is it those specific zeros and ones that when played on you computer creates the sound of the song or is it something greater?  Have you actually bought the “song” itself no matter how it is delivered to you?

Or to take it a step further, if in 1967 you bought Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues, do you have right to get it for free in another format, lets say CD or MP3s? 

If you already own the complete works of U2 on CD, are you actually doing anything illegal if you download all of the same music via a peer to peer or bit-torrent networking or are you simply saving your self the trouble of having to “rip” your CDs to your computer?

To get even more complicated, different digital stores sell the music in different formats – i.e.–  Amazon sells music as MP3s, iTunes sells music as AACs, Napster sells music in the WMA format etc. You can even buy music in one format and change it into another.  For example, you can purchase an iTunes AAC file and convert it into an MP3. 

Whereas previously there was difference between what you could do with, let’s say, a CD vs. vinyl, this difference does not exist despite a song being in a different format - songs can still be: started and stopped with a single click, be fast forwarded to a later section, be included in playlists, burnt onto CDs, put in customized song orders etc.

So again, what is it you exactly bought?

I honestly do not have a complete answer.  I do think that if you buy a song via download, you own that “song”, not the song in a particular format.  And if you already own a song via paid download, and then download the song again via a peer to peer network, you have done nothing wrong.  I am not sure yet what I think if you own the music on CD, after all, a CD is “digital” music.  Does the fact that its burned onto a CD as opposed to downloaded onto your hard drive really make a difference?

And even more important, should we even care?  

Let us know what you think….