Free MP3 Downloads and The Curbing of Touring Bands

Do you know what I mean by most of this. Sit and contemplate it for an instant: you sat on the couch up late one night, watching E! or perhaps a similar channel, and wondering how it was that bands with such huge cult followings have all seemed to disappear. (You were watching that documentary on the Grateful Dead-weren't you?)

Or perhaps you're in the boat with people who still do follow some band or other-but we'll talk about you in a moment. See, free mp3 downloads have changed the cult approach to bands and simply how much people follow them.

Think of how expensive it is for bands to tour without a major label and the whole weight of the music business machine footing the bill. Let's think about how that reflects in everything else: how expensive have concert tickets become for consumers? It's sort of ridiculous, all made so by free mp3 downloads. It's especially ridiculous in the concert scene whenever you realize you may get all the highlights on YouTube for alongside nothing. Gone are the days of arriving to the show days early to park your VW bus, camp out, connect and tune out. Arrived are the days of downloading everything fast and furiously, free mp3 downloads blotting out every other option.

Let's talk specifics. For bands like Phish, Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, and others, the Internet doesn't make in-person attendance a requirement to be the main scene. Blogs and RSS feeds let people climb directly on the bandwagon without anybody looking at top to toss of the freeloaders. As a result, there's less of a communal vibe in general because of those artificial and virtual communities. Newer music fans aren't as concerned about virtuoso music performances-they don't care if musicians even actually PLAY instruments at all-and, in fact, parody is okay, too.

Free mp3 downloads and other new technology have brought lots of this about. Let's take, for example, the fact that anybody with a webcam and a Casio can be an Internet rock star-I'm thinking of that band (maybe called GO!...?) who made that video that had every one of the band members singing the song on treadmills doing a hilarious routine (all extremely well-executed), choreographed by the lead singer's sister. The lead singer's sister! Not even a band member-but she was like captain of her senior school drill team or something. Next thing you knew, they were on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Now, granted, it was actually an extremely cute song and the video did basically rock-but it was the visuals that literally sold the band.

So free mp3 downloads and the remaining portion of the Internet have completely changed the facial skin of what it means to follow a band or to be youtube to mp3 converter always a music junkie, but there still are those diehards available who head to the concerts, choose the t-shirts, get up to mischief in trailers and behind concert halls and on the hills overlooking the venue and everything else-they just aren't too common. In fact, it seems more and more that the ones that are the hard-core followers of certain group aren't the ones that are old enough to be active in the whole music traveler scene anyway. Why?

It's as the bands that have those kinds of followings are groups like the Jonas Brothers or soloists like Miley Cyrus-and their followers are typical thirteen! So maybe it's better to express, then, not that free mp3 downloads have killed the music industry; they've just changed it.