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THE SONGS WE SHARE (AND THE RECORDS WE STEAL): POPULAR MUSIC AND SHOPLIFTING IN AN AGE OF DIGITAL PIRACY A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (c) Copyright by Eric T. Lehman 2014 English (Public Texts) M.A. Program January 2015 ii ABSTRACT The Songs We Share (and the Records We Steal): Popular Music and Shoplifting in an Age of Digital Piracy Eric T. Lehman This thesis explores the rhetoric of theft imposed on online music by comparing file sharing to shoplifting. Since the litigation between the music industry and Napster, file sharing has been perceived, both by the entertainment industry and by a music listening public, as a criminal act. However, file sharing has more in common with home taping and music archives than it does with music shoplifting. It differs from theft in terms of law, motivation and publicness. In reviewing three histories — a history of petty theft, a history of policing online music, and a history of shoplifting narratives in popular music culture — the implications for the cultural production of popular music and popular music identity become apparent. In the end, file sharing links itself more to parody and the concept of fairness than it does to youth rebellion and therefore is unsuitable for sustaining a traditional music industry and the values it has formed with its public. Keywords: Shoplifting, popular music, MP3, file sharing, music publics, Napster, RIAA, copyright law, policing music, Apple, counterculture, cultural production, nerd theory. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to the following people for aiding and abetting in the completion of this thesis: My advisor Hugh Hodges for guidance and encouragement over java and suds. My committee Lewis MacLeod and Liam Mitchell. My mentors and friends in the English and Public Texts department particularly Sally Chivers, Finis Dunaway, Michael Epp, Sara Humphreys and Kelly McGuire. My cohort and the members of TheSix — particularly Marilyn Burns, Sara Gallagher and Deb Luchuk— for their ongoing support by the poolside and over lunch. My dear friend and colleague Michael Morse for our discussions on music and for (trying) to keep me honest. Patricia Heffernan, for going beyond the call of a great administrator, and letting me bounce ideas off of while I distracted her from her important work in the English Department. My neighbour Joe Evelyn who mowed the lawn while I weeded through the research. Mom and Dad. Finally, my loving partner in crime Anne Showalter, and our three kids Alice, Clara and Max for their love, support and patience through this process. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT / ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / iii TABLE OF CONTENTS / iv STEAL THIS THESIS: AN INTRODUCTION / 1 CHAPTER ONE — BAD APPLES: ON MUSICAL THEFT / 11 1.1 Apples and Oranges / 11 1.2 Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden / 12 1.3 Golden Apples in the Garden of Hesperides / 19 1.4 What the Dickens is going on in the Land of Johnny Appleseed? / 25 1.5 Apple Records / 32 1.6 Enter Macintosh / 37 CHAPTER TWO — “PLEASE, DON’T DOWNLOAD THIS SONG”: POLICING THE MP3 / 44 2.1 Beep! Beep! Beep! / 44 2.2 Plugging the Dam / 51 2.3 Locking an Open Door / 56 2.4 Rhetorical Devices as Security Devices / 62 2.5 And Justice for All? / 69 CHAPTER THREE — IF YOU WANT FREE MUSIC, STEAL VINYL OR GO F**K YOURSELF: SHOPLIFTING, POPULAR MUSIC AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION / 77 3.1 Trent Reznor on the Field of Cultural Production / 77 3.2 Sex. Drugs. Shoplifting. Rock’n’Roll. / 83 3.3 Stories: We Stole. / 89 3.4 A Copy of A / 100 ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, RAPIDSHARE: A CONCLUSION / 104 WORKS CITED / 108 1 STEAL THIS THESIS: AN INTRODUCTION I’d like to make a confession. I have never shoplifted anything in my life. The closest I ever came was when I was about ten years old. I was given two bucks to go spend at the local convenience store in my hometown of Orleans, Ontario, which is just outside of Canada’s capital. Instead of using the money I was so generously given to purchase a chocolate bar, an Archie comic and a bag of chips, I thought it would be a good idea to see how much sugar I could get for my bit of coin. As my little hands filled with five and ten cent candy, I stuffed the overflow into my pockets. The sales clerk behind the counter observed this and accused me of ripping off his store. I tried to explain to him that I had the money to buy the candy except I had only run out of space in my hands to hold it all. He did not believe me and then continued by asking me to empty my pockets and to get the hell out of his store. I did not return to that shop for another ten years. This early experience not only prevented me from desiring to return to that particular corner store; it also shaped my behaviour when shopping elsewhere in my pre-teens and adolescence. When in malls and retail stores, I always felt I was being watched. While shopping, I would never stick my hands in my pockets when entering a store and if the salesperson was around I made sure that they could see where my hands were, even if it meant sticking them up over my head like I was already under arrest. My near-shoplifting experience also affected the way I consumed music. Stealing music from the record shop never even occurred to me, but being a teenager and a young adult of limited means, I relied on home taping from my friends’ personal collections or the public library. I also copied music from the radio. As CDs replaced vinyl collections, I found 2 myself scavenging through people’s garbage, visiting rummage sales and flea markets and frequenting the ‘Sally Anne’ to browse stacks of records looking for hidden gems. Entering the new millennium, I only did a short stint of file sharing. I tried using an FTP server in 2001 to download MP3s over a dial-up connection and waiting fifteen to twenty minutes for a single song to appear on my hard drive, which in my estimation, was an utter waste of time. It was another eight years before I tried to download music again, this time via an online file hosting service. I wanted to hear Dark Night of the Soul by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch, which due to a copyright dispute, EMI had refused to release even though the album had leaked over the internet. Danger Mouse responded by releasing Dark Night of the Soul independently without a recording — only a blank CD-R. The packaging included the instructions, “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will” (Sisario). Although Danger Mouse did not own the rights to release his own music, he assumed correctly that the public would be able to easily fill the blank CD with pirated content online. If one wanted to hear Dark Night of the Soul, it could only be heard as a bootleg and the only way to obtain it was though file sharing. So, I downloaded it. Taking under seven minutes to download this album over a high-speed connection, I was amazed by the speed at which I could ‘get my hands on’ the album. This was faster than home taping and even CD-burning —which meant fumbling around with physical media. For me, this began a new habit of downloading free tracks of varying quality, and I zeroed in on albums yet to be released, box sets out of my budget and albums rare and out of circulation. At the same time, I stopped going into record stores which, for the most part, were closing their doors anyway. When I did step inside one, I felt as if I were walking into a museum of the way people used to listen to music. My rampant file 3 sharing did come to an end, however, because after three years of free online music my computer was hacked and I was hit with a computer virus. So, I decided to give up the practice and since then I have returned to my physical collection. Reflecting on my shoplifting vs. file sharing experiences, I noticed a couple of things. When I was mistaken for a shoplifter at ten, I was instantly found guilty as soon as my hands went into my pockets. I was treated as a criminal and banished from the premises which excluded my membership in a pre-teen hangout. By contrast, when I downloaded music, there were no accusations, no one physically looking over my shoulder, and no attention drawn to myself when ‘stealing’ from the “Easy Listening” section. The hand slap came in the form of a Trojan virus carrying along with it not criminality, but victimization and fear. Secondly, out of my vast collection of over a thousand physical recordings, I can remember where, when and how I procured each one. As for the tens of thousands of MP3s I downloaded in three years, I would have to think long and hard to even name ten percent. In both of these observations, the way we engage with recorded music and with its ‘theft,’ online or in the physical world, is very different; not only from the perspective of an embodied experience, but also as a matter of discourse.

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