Fat-chance motel finding My Bloody Valentine’s limited-release Tremolo teaser EP 10 years ago. Pigs a’flying when an unsigned unknown from Perry, GA can release an album covered by every major music magazine without ever playing even one gig. And remember when Madonna was pissed that her single “Music” leaked back in 2001? Those were the days. From $1 bins to dustbins, somewhere among old Darin’s Dance Moves VHSs and Pepsi Blue bottles leveling pics of Justin Timberlake with frosted tips are those stale narratives, when rarities were actually rare, when artists like Washed Out were impossible, and when every album wasn’t expected to leak at least a week in advance. We’ve had 10 years to draw out the implications of music that exists as files and code first, and we have record label tombstones and gluttonous iTunes folders to prove it. And again, it goes that technology has impressed another hyperreality: streaming presents a world where music is instantaneous; ecommerce, a world where music is omnipresent; piracy, a world where music is free; and with an encyclopedic access to information, the music fan is omniscient. Of course, none of this is really true. Noise-isolated in white earbuds—iPoded—this decade has fundamentally altered expectations of how listeners view and interact with their music. This has more to do with how the medium of music distribution has changed in that timeframe than anything else. And boy, it’s been a wild ride.

Much has already been said about the tragic fall of the record industry. A great place to start is Steve Knopper’s book, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Recording Industry in the Digital Age, which goes from elaborate coke parties full of lowly A&R reps to the industry’s current state with the big four at 90 percent layoffs, compared to year 2000 levels. Mainstream rappers and boy band pop acts may have attempted to bring the record labels’ '90s excesses into the early millennium, but it lasted for about three years. Let’s look at a few figures that bookend the decade. In 2000, N’Sync’s No Strings Attached broke sales records, selling 2.4 million records in its first week, eventually going diamond (that’s 10 million copies folks!) that year. This year’s best selling album will either be Taylor Swift’s Fearless, which came out in 2008, or Michael Jackson’s 2003 compilation Number Ones—which has sold almost 1.8 million copies this year. As for the highest selling new album of 2009, that goes to U2’s No Line on the Horizon, which has only gone platinum in America. Naturally, this year is worst than last, when the best-selling record was Lil’ Wayne’s Tha Carter 3, which has yet to go triple platinum.

Call It Piracy or Previewing

Obviously, the old music model imploded with the arrival of an unassuming white anthropomorphic kitty rocking blue headphones—the bigwigs just didn’t know it yet. The story of Napster is well-told: in 1999, Northeastern University student Shawn Fanning creates Napster, Metallica finds unreleased demos of theirs on the service, and the record labels come to town to sue. At its height, the service boasted 26.4 million users before being shut down. Napster wasn’t all legal grey-area doom and gloom. In Flagpole’s 2001 "Business" section (now called Threats and Promises), we announced: "Dave Matthews Band issues its single "I Did It" on Napster. It's the first song by a major label band officially distributed via controversial file-sharing program with its label's permission.” Or look to Radiohead, whose Kid A is considered the first album to be helped by illegal downloading. Despite no promotion, Kid A confounded listeners who were unsure if the experimental record was really Radiohead when it leaked months early on Napster. Regardless of the technology’s possible benefits, the music industry wasn’t having any of it. In the end, the whole “Metallica, EMI, etc. v. Napster” affair allegorized the attitude the music industry would permanently assume when it came to new technology—be reactionary, overact and speak loudly carrying a big stick of litigation.

The Napster disruption opened a Pandora’s box where users began to see music as a free commodity, but with its demise came replacements. More peer-to-peer-based clients like Bearshare, Morpheus and Kazaa cropped up, only to be shut down or transformed into legal download stores. BitTorrent was the next major innovation in illegal music distribution. Instead of downloading individual songs, users could download entire discographies. And while the technology was around in 2001, torrents really gained traction as high-speed Internet became more accessible mid-decade. To be sure, in 2006 the torrent tracker site Mininova became the ninth most searched word in Google. Currently, it is estimated that torrents account for almost half of all Internet traffic.

Savvy Internet users have found even easier ways to steal music now. It’s as simple as using Google: first, access Google’s “blog” search function and type the title and artist of the album in question. Then type “.zip,” “.rar,” “Mediafire” or “Rapidshare.” And viola! It is not hyperbole to say you have the entire history of music at your fingertips via Google search and, of course, for free. It works like this: the new paradigm for stealing music uses file upload sites, like Megaupload and Mediafire. These websites aren’t designed to store copyrighted material; they are used to upload documents and pictures into the virtual cloud. Most importantly to the file-sharer, you can also upload MP3s. Uploads to these sites are given web addresses. Blogs post these web addresses as links. Some blogs exist only to point to such web address links, where the MP3 can be found. These are called MP3 blogs. And all you have to do is click “download.” Naturally, there is an even newer mutation of this model: the mysterious searchable databases that only serve to link to upload site web addresses. I only know of two such databases, which probably shouldn’t be mentioned here.

But the operator of one such database offered this explanation to Flagpole: “MP3 blogs are where people go to try and discover the next big thing. It's where new and interesting music first surfaces, and [we databases] aggregate all that, so everything's easier to find—almost to the point where it makes MP3 blogs redundant. I used to use [another database] for keeping up with new releases, and eventually I stopped visiting other MP3 blogs altogether.

"We definitely serve as the set of sites where new content breaks first, and then it trickles down to torrents and eventually old P2P networks.”

Continuing, “A lot of smaller bands nowadays are embracing pirating or free online distribution as a way to get their name out there. If they're interested in making money or getting signed, they have to be heard first, and free distribution is the way to do it.”

With so much free music at one’s disposal and so many obscure new acts to discover, many downloaders find it hard to listen to it all. File-sharing and music ubiquity may have fashioned more music nerds, but how many unfamiliar artists are in their constantly growing libraries? For that I say, thank God for iTunes’ “Recently Added” smart playlist.

iTunes Rising

"New Apple jukebox software, iTunes, allows you to compress CDs into MP3 formats."—Flagpole, February 2001

Back then, iTunes was just a means to put one’s own CD collection on an iPod. Since 2004 with the debut of the iTunes Music Store, Apple has provided the model for legal downloading, often at odds with the intentions of major record labels. As of 2008, the iTunes Music Store is the number-one music retailer in America, besting the big box retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart that had gained popularity in the first half of the decade. Since January 2009, iTunes has sold over 6 billion songs worldwide with a 70 percent market share for online music stores. With eight million songs, iTunes has the largest online music catalog. Factor in the 220 million iPods sold as of Sept. 9, 2009 and Apple’s iPod ecosystem has been a smashing success. But beneath iTunes’ pristine-clean veneer is another story: 27 songs are sold via iTunes for every iPod sold. Assuming people aren’t walking around with near-empty iPods, it appears that most iPods are filled either with personal CD collections or, more realistically, pirated tunes.

iTunes has also trained listeners to think of music as piecemeal singles instead of cohesive artistic visions. Music isolated from context only tells a partial story, and this shift in listener habits may be permanent. Especially as recently rock figureheads like Thom Yorke (who famously held off from adding the Radiohead catalog to iTunes because of its single format) and Sufjan Stevens (the decade’s master of the concept album) have publicly questioned the relevance of the album in today’s cultural climate. It seems, then, that the iTunes model has changed the musician, too.

Make It Special

Beyond the well-publicized closure of dedicated CD chains like Tower Records and CD Warehouse this decade, local mom and pop record stores have struggled, too. In the trailer for the new documentary I Need That Record, director Brendan Toller ominously overstates in his approximation of a Gwar voice: “Global warming is ravaging the Earth. The Mayan calendar predicts the world will end in 2012. And over 3,000 record stores have closed in the past decade.” Locally, at least two record shops have shuttered this decade—Lo Yo Yo and Bert’s Discount Records, not including national franchises like Disc Go Round and Blockbuster Music. Now, two remain.

John Fernandes of Circulatory System, who has been at Wuxtry Records for 10 years, says: “Lo Yo Yo closed down. I’m not sure how Schoolkids are doing. We’re definitely not doing as well as we used to, but we’re getting by.”

In the midst of digital music killing brick-and-mortar options, there has been a surprising phenomenon: the rise in vinyl sales. In 2008, vinyl sales were up 90 percent from the year before; 2009 vinyl sales are up 50 percent. Nielson predicts vinyl units to hit 2.8 million this year. Of course, vinyl is a niche market only representing 1 percent of total music sales.

With vinyl, it seems that while listeners demand the instant gratification of downloadable music, audiences also demand more elaborate physical representations of it. Take Of Montreal’s 2008 release Skeletal Lamping. Designed by local artists David and Nina Barnes, the record is available as t-shirts, wall decals, tote bags and a lantern. Each comes with a download card. The idea of merch as music creates an ecosystem where consumers get a tactile product that also buys into the band as a lifestyle brand.

John Fernandes amounts the endurance of special formats like vinyl to its production value: “A lot of times people will go on the Internet to hear records and see what they might be interested in; but then, if they want to get the physical copy, they’ll get the vinyl for the warm sound quality and the artwork… things like this Analog Africa Label compilation have 43-page booklets with a lot of photos and interviews with musicians and a lot more than just the music. Hopefully, things like that will keep people interested in getting something physically over getting it digitally.”

And while vinyl distribution may not be the solution to a sustainable music model, its resilience points to the lack of intimacy that fans feel toward their compressed digital files of 0s and 1s. As fans can access anything any time for free, musicians have to offer more than their art. The physical product has to be value-added. And the fans will buy into experiences that feel special and limited. Unfortunately, scarcity is not the vocabulary of large record labels that prefer to commoditize en masse.

No Solution

Listener habits and the technology that shapes them change rapidly. So fast, in fact, it is difficult to determine the future. But one thing’s for sure: distribution is king. From waiting 30 minutes for a single file while sifting through viruses and poor ID3 tagging to downloading an entire album in a minute through a secret database, the changes in how we obtained music this decade are dazzling. And even simpler and more streamlined channels like “all-you-can-eat” music streaming might be next big thing: especially considering iTunes’ recent purchase of Lala, MySpace’s acquisition of IMEEM, and the imminent U.S. arrival of the much-lauded Spotify application. In the next Rock Band, any artist can upload and profit from their songs. Some acts are releasing “stems” of individual track layers for fans to download and remix in contests. Pay Radiohead’s “honesty box,” or don’t. Subscribe to Billy Corgan's fan club and he’ll send you new Smashing Pumpkins cuts and video exclusives. Or sign up for Beck’s, or Prince’s—who started the whole membership distro strategy in 2001 with his official website NPGMusicClub.com. Buy Mariah Carey’s Memoirs of a Perfect Angel and get an all-Carey edition of Elle Magazine; or alternatively, buy the Sunday paper in England and get Prince’s latest LP Planet Earth for free.

The key is wild experimentation. And locals got the spirit. Bands on the Party Party Partners label spend hours making handmade and one-of-a-kind album artwork, while also recently putting out a limited run of 300 Christmas LPs given away for free with ticket purchase. Post-rock dudes Bambara recently used Bandcamp, which allows users to “pay what you want,” to distribute their latest EP, Dog Ear Days. And local guy Colt Ford has entered into an exclusive distro deal with Wal-Mart for at least one release. Whatever is the future of music distribution, the next 10 years will mark consumers and musicians adjusting to the fundamental shift in how we perceive and relate to music, from the upheaval of the past 10.

Christopher Joshua Benton