Byte Me
An addiction has gripped our nation. The people of Australia have a need for download speed. Both the government and opposition were offering fast broadband as a carrot to entice us before the last election. Fewer people are watching television all the time as that dinosaur lumbers about with arrogance and disdain.
Television stations play series out of sequence and give them the chop half-way through, and want us to stay loyal to them. Would you still frequent a restaurant that begins the meal with dessert and tells you that you can have your main course next year? People are buying the DVD box sets of their favourite series, hiring them from video stores or, heaven forbid, downloading them.
For me, it started with the simple need to Google the capital of France, which innocently led to a popular video of Paris Hilton’s lovemaking prowess. Pretty soon, I was watching a dog with no front legs walk like a human on YouTube, uploading my profile on MySpace and adding friends to my Facebook network.
A shifty-looking character sidled up to me on a street corner and asked if I wanted to ‘get on’.
‘Sorry?’ I replied.
‘Do you want to get on broadband?’
‘I've got broadband, mate,’ I said, and tried to move on.
‘How much are you doing each month?’ he persisted.
‘Five hundred megabytes,’ I offered to his incredulous stare.
‘Five hundred? Mate, I can get you twenty gigabytes per month. Top-quality speed: ADSL 2.’
Before I knew it, I was on the wrong side of the law, downloading music, television and movies, sucking down the gigabytes as I travelled the worldwide web. It’s out there – all you need is a teenager with directionless hair to tell you about bittorrents and there’s no turning back.
Music critics told us all that downloading music doesn't work because you don't have the information on cardboard covered in plastic to hold in your hands; this from a bunch of people who get CDs for nothing. Radio stations now put the cart before the horse, playing a narrow spectrum of music after polling core listener groups for their preferences. So I downloaded music, burnt my own CDs and realised I was paying about fifty cents retail for a blank CD. Retail, folks! The record companies cry poor on the artists’ behalf and want us to pay twenty to thirty dollars for an album, and give the musicians a dollar for each CD sold. The same companies sell the blank CDs. I still pay eighty dollars to go to a concert, thirty dollars for a T-shirt and buy the CDs that I love. I've never heard of a billionaire musician, but there are many billionaire record label owners.
Technology is messing with big corporations’ understanding of where they can milk their profits and it's hard to feel sorry for them after we’ve been treated so poorly. Artists who defy pigeonholing are finding an audience. Some say it's the digital revolution. I say, welcome to the consumer revolution.
This piece originally appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which ‘four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts’. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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