Music Zero

One of my out-of-country travel habits that seem to annoy my sister is the requisite record store exploration. She was with me in Hong Kong when I dragged her tired feet to an HMV a couple of hours after we just landed. She was also with me in Amsterdam when I blew like 20 Euros for a couple of CDs I bought after staring at them for 30 solid minutes, with my shoes still wet and freezing from the brutal winter rain.

"So you came all the way here to buy CDs," she says, shaking her head.

"No," I reply, "But what am I supposed to do after seeing a Radio Dept. CD? Ignore it? Plus, I've already seen Van Gogh's paintings and been to Anne Frank's crib. I'd say this pretty much completes the sweep."

Of course, a day later, while walking literally penniless around the Schipol Airport shopping center, I had to borrow five Euros from my sister just to buy some pasalubong for my officemates. That's right, I was a cancelled flight away from being a bum in Europe.

But buying CDs, or at least looking for CDs, is something I absolutely have to do whenever I'm in some place not the Philippines. Why? Because this country's audio retail industry SUCKS.

This is Globalization. We have a dozen Starbucks for every five mile radius and a new Crispy Kreme props up every minute, but good luck finding an Elliot Smith CD at your local CD outlet.

And oh, make sure you hold on to those Music One plastic bags, because they'll soon join Shambu and Pepsodent in the "Remember When...?" lost-relic-of-the-decade-all-stars. In the last half-year or so, two Music One branches have already disappeared; the one in SM North Edsa and the one in Megamall. The latter's demise was especially hard to take. That got me through some pretty tough times back when I was working at Ortigas six years ago. I leave the office fucked-up, then go there to find a "Best of Fairground Attraction" CD, and all was well.

Whenever I visit the Glorietta branch these days, I pace around slowly like a resigned relative visiting his grandfather in the hospital, somewhat relieved that he hasn't flatlined yet. The 2nd floor, which used to be their Movies/Soundtracks/Jazz section, is now a slightly decorated book storage room passing-off as a Powerbooks. The main floor is just depressing. The Tower Records in Glorietta was my favorite branch - it was teeming with listening stations vacated by what seemed like hipsters or aspiring hipsters, it had the most comprehensive indie section, and even a separate listening section for indie music. You can even catch them playing a Blueboy CD on occassion (I'm having a hard time believing this actually happened, as I type this). Now, the entire front side facing the counter is lined by repetitive "New Releases" and you'll end up walking around there with a couple of other sad people.

You could actually see this coming a few years ago as this country was slowly shaping up to be a major piracy superpower. It was just a matter of time. Now, I'm not one to rail against the evils of piracy (I plan on blogging about this subject someday, but let me give you an early preview: I'm not against it). I actually love this whole Limewire, Torrent, pirated CD/DVD phenomenon; but I've always thought of them as just a convenient sideshow. As cool as this mp3/I-pod revolution is, I never EVER wanted the entire CD-buying experience to go away. I'm not being sentimental, I just find music already abstract as it is, so why take away the one concrete experience I get out of it? (besides watching concerts and gigs, of course)

I used to download music whenever I'm too lazy or too poor to buy it. Now I mostly do it out of necessity. I really feel sorry for kids born after 1995 or 1996. Not only were they born in a world where Kurt Cobain's dead and the whole alternative music scene reduced to one drunken night the music world suddenly was trying to collectively forget, they will also never experience the thrill of finally finding a record, tape or CD you've been obsessing over for years. They wouldn't care of course, because downloading is way more easy and stress-free, but it's not the same. And it's not even that amazing as it has been built up to be.

With the paradigm shifting more deliberately over the last few years, we can now look at this digital age in its proper perspective, hundreds and thousands of gigabytes later. There is one huge myth about music in the digital age that has just been shattered in my own personal world this recent year:

EVERYTHING is available online.

Not even close. And I'm not just talking about downloadable music; this includes CDs you can buy online. God knows how many times I've searched for the BMX Bandits on Limewire and on torrent sites, after which I end up downloading a whopping 2 songs. I look up their albums at Amazon and MusicDirect, and sure enough they don't have stocks of their earlier albums. Luckily, a friend of a friend of a friend of mine knew how I could get a hold of ten BMX Bandits CDs (woohoo!), so now I've stopped.

The thing about file-sharing is that it's ultimately a populist exercise. Imagine you were back in school and you were in a class largely populated by kids who like to listen to hip-hop, emo, and the latest top 10 fare. Naturally, any CD-borrowing that would transpire would likely involve albums of those genre. If you asked a random classmate if he has any of Broken Social Scene's early stuff, there is a high probability that he'll just stare at you as if you just spoke in tongues.

That class happens to be a lot like the real world in general. What cyberspace has done is to free people from the traditional manner in which we used to obtain music. When this whole thing began, that just meant not having to pay for it. But now it means getting to decide what's out there in the first place. Because file-sharing exists outside the realms of commercialism, it doesn't function based on markets; it's just a bunch of classmates sharing the same kind of music they like. Recod companies (thankfully) don't think that way. For them to make money, they have to exhaust every market, not just the one made up of emo-listening high school kids. That kind of dynamic made it possible for the BMX Bandits' "C86" CD to be available at Tower Records Glorietta seven years ago, whereas the entire file-sharing community doesn't even acknowledge its existence today.

So fast-forward to the age of free music, I have to spend thousands of pesos for Visa application just to see a decent record store. But of course, you can't put a price on good music. In the words of the now defunct Tower Records:

"No Music. No Life."

They should know.