Disposable Creations
As many of you readers know, I am a huge fan of Tiffany. Yes, that Tiffany, the red-haired teen singer from the 80's who hit big with her covers of "I Think We're Alone Now" and "I Saw Him Standing There," as well as her own song "Could've Been." 
I fell in love with her way back at the tender age of 10 (yes, she will be featured in my "How I Fell in Love With:" blog series eventually) and I have followed her career through the ups and downs. In 2000, she released an amazing and critically-acclaimed album called "The Color of Silence" which revitalized many of her life-long fans (many of us belong to the "True To Tiffany" Yahoo Group) and won many new ones. She began touring constantly and I have been lucky enough to see her live many times now. Following that album and the many hurdles that came with it, she released a dance album most recently called "Dust Off and Dance" and is now set to release two albums this year - one which is to be new material similar to "The Color of Silence Album" and a sort of compilation album of her singing her 80's hits as well as covers of other hits. Through all of this excitement, the digital music revolution and the advent of the internet has had quite an impact on Tiffany's career. This has been felt deeply by me personally, as it's because of the internet that I rekindled my love of Tiffany and found out so much about her and other fans - allowing me to follow her career much easier, stay up-t0-date with shows and appearances, and even bringing together a group of fans who have been lucky enough to spend time hanging out, eating and even going to the beach with our favorite singer.
However, with the glorious internet has also come a new problem: leeches who insist on constantly begging for free Tiffany tracks on the Yahoo Group.
Some of them only rear their ugly heads occasionally, while other pop up each time a new track appears on iTunes or is released on some compilation album. I think in this day and age, everyone is used to sharing songs with their friends. In my personal group of friends, I know people who almost exclusively buy their music in retail stores, some who steal all their music for free off the internet, and everything in between. Personally, I love having iTunes available for several specific uses. First, I like to purchase songs that I like when I don't want to buy the whole album. Often these songs were hits at one point and I know I could easily find them for free on a file sharing site, but for 99 cents I think it's worth it to the artist to purchase the one track I want from them legally; it's the least I can do. Sometimes I'll buy a song from an artist I'm interested in so that I can get to know them better and decide if I want to buy the album. I also like to purchase singles that are released before the album comes out, and b-sides that may only be released digitally. However, in most cases, if I like an artist, I will ultimately purchase their album in a retail store. Call me old fashioned, but there's something about holding a CD or record in your hands, looking at the photos and/or artwork, reading the liner notes, and keeping the CD near me while it's still new.
It's sad for me to think that in the future, kids might just be content to download a song here or there, rarely if ever bothering to consume an album in it's entirety, or to read the song credits, album thank-you's or admiring any other packaging aspect of an album. I'd like to believe that CD's will still be around, but it's not looking good.
What's even sadder though is the realization that some people who consider themselves a "fan" of a particular band or artist have no problem downloading their songs for free. The most daunting part of this is that, in my experience with the leeches on the True To Tiffany group, they honestly have no qualms about this, or even any understanding of the implications. Excuses like "I don't have a credit card" or "I'm in a bad situation" amount to nothing more than half-hearted defense mechanisms kicking in; these people really don't see anything wrong with their actions from what I can tell. If someone has the time and resources to belong to an internet message board for a musician, then I'm sure they can swing a ninety-nine cent download from iTunes somehow. No, they'd much rather send an e-mail out to 1500 members of the yahoo group and hope that one of us fans who has actually bothered to monetarily support the object of our affections will just e-mail it to them for free, no strings attached.
I've been called a hypocrite (among many other names) on the board, by the leeches, because of my passionate and sometimes aggressive stance against pirating music. As a musician myself, I think it's only natural that I have strong opinions on the matter. It's true that as a musician, when it comes down to it, I'd rather have people more people listening to my music for free than worrying about who's paying for it and who isn't. As a consumer and a fan, I'm also very concerned for the well-being and success of those artists who I admire. Perhaps I'm just grasping to hold on to the last dying breaths of a by-gone era - a time when kids actually went out to the record stores and bought the products put out by the bands and singers they felt a connection with.
I remember in 5th grade, at my small rural
However, looking around today, the situation seems bleak. Yes, there are and probably always will be pop stars, but nowadays the stars are less often musicians, writers or actors and more often reality TV stars, heiresses, or just famous for being famous (or psychotic and famous, concurrently).
I think that's why I get so troubled when I see people illegally downloading music, yet paying for DVD's of "The Simple Life." Do we really want the future of pop culture to belong to those who can do the least, while those who have studied and perfected their craft to wither away, having their output compressed and traded freely on the web, ultimately as disposable as rich teenagers' incomes?
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