Ethics take a hike in the Wild West web

SO poor old HMV.

Since the collapse of the chain, there’s been many a sad word written about how the social aspect of music buying is all but dead. The idea of browsing, of chatting with the people in the shop or taking a punt on the musical unknown, is nearly extinguished. And of course it’s all the fault of the internet: not just because of illegal downloading, but because the worldwide web has eroded all the mystery.

Without even getting out of bed you can now get access almost instantaneously to what the record shop used to provide: the size of the stock is vast, there are links to other people who like particular forms of music and there’s no such thing as an “unknown” band anymore. In one sense this is more egalitarian: in the digital record store everyone is equally cool. But it also makes the process more remote and passionless: all the social and cultural encoding which used to be connected to popular music is rinsed away. There’s an old story about when Johnny Marr and Morrissey of The Smiths first met, they checked out each others’ shoes and spoke about what bands they liked. And this conversation wasn’t just to establish if they could work together in a band, but to discover if they were from similar tribes. The music and the shoes were signifiers of the kinds of people they were; of the way they viewed the world.