And yet, somehow, despite our sporadic online music buying, we find ourselves needing bigger and bigger MP3 players. First-generation iPods held 1,000 songs, current ones store 20,000, and, no, the huge gap between iTunes purchases and iPod storage capacity is not being filled by legitimately ripped CDs. At this point, even industry professionals are throwing up the white flag and accepting the fact that songs are no longer something you sell—instead, they're merely commercials for T-shirts and concert tickets. "Sales are so down and so off that, as a manager, I look at a CD as part of the marketing of an artist, more than as an income stream," artist manager Jeff Rabhan recently told the Wall Street Journal. "It's the vehicle that drives the tour, the merchandise, building the brand, and that's it. There's no money."
But as the long-anticipated music-fan nirvana of free, instant access to every song ever recorded gets closer and closer to business as usual, shouldn't we at least acknowledge what we're losing in the process? For all its faults and shortcomings, the traditional music industry had worked out a pretty good system. It kept supplies limited, it maximized revenue, and as a result, rockstars were delightfully exotics beasts—wealthy beyond reason, shamelessly self-absorbed, aloof, lazy, decadent. A single hit song could underwrite a lifetime of cocaine abuse and carnal adventure, and in between attempts to discover exactly how many groupies could fit into a tour bus shower, there was always time to figure out new ways to arrange power chords.
Now, however, it's not just the managers who talk about income streams and building the brand. With music both easier to produce and distribute and harder to actually sell, there's a glut of product on the market, and to succeed in this environment, musicians hoping to earn a living from their work must think like MBAs and pimp their songs like Amway reps. Instead of liberating them from corporate bloodsuckers who crushed creative expression in the pursuit of marketability, digital technology has simply turned every would-be rock star into the suits they once mocked.
And it's only going to get worse, as the music-sales pie gets smaller and smaller, and more and more bands struggle to get their share of it. Ten years from now, one suspects, millionaire rock stars will be as rare as millionaire porn stars. A few will exist; the rest will be working stiffs who earn about as much as a mid-level accountant and lead decidedly less glamorous lives. Lead singers who should be snorting heroin off the golden stomachs of 18-year-old blondes now spend their nights inviting bloggers to visit their MySpace pages. Punk-rock guitarists attend seminars that teach them how to license their songs to ad agencies. Not so many years ago, the signature image of rock ‘n' roll was Kurt Cobain smashing a perfectly good Stratocaster into a hundred tiny pieces. Now, it's the top 12 American Idol finalists pleading with cheesy urgency for viewers to vote for them as Ryan Seacrest closes the show. Maybe actually paying for music wasn't such a bad deal after all.