So I was driving around listening to Studio 360 today and came upon a story that R had already heard and told me about.
If you’re interested in matters of technology, community and the generation gap, listen to it here, under “Suffering for Sufjan.”
Sufjan Stevens had a contest in which the winner would receive an original, never-before-heard Stevens song. The winner also received all rights to the song and could do with it as he or she wished. The winner, a guy living in New York named Alec Duffy, has decided not to do the obvious thing, which is to upload it to the Internet for the whole world to hear. Instead he is having weekly listening parties. Anyone can sign up. He serves food and drink, and gives each person a pair of headphones (to prevent recording). Then they all listen to it together.
I think this rocks.
I highly recommend listening to the audio of the story. They quote some 20-somethings, Stevens fans who are just INCENSED that there is a Sufjan Stevens song at there that they haven’t heard. I have to agree with Alec Duffy, the song’s owner, a little, that these people sound incredibly entitled. They’re also pretty disgusted by Duffy, an “old guy” at the age of 36 who doesn’t even know how to use Bit Torrent. [raising hand]
R wondered how I would feel, knowing there were a song out there by a favorite band or singer that I would, practically speaking, never be able to hear. I guess I’m not as big a fan as these Stevens-fanatics. It wouldn’t bother me that much. I find the whole thing utterly charming.
There are lots of interesting angles here. One woman who’d been to the listening party talked about the experience of listening to the song with full and complete awareness—something she doesn’t often do in life. There’s also the hospitality aspect of inviting complete strangers into one’s home for the purposes of sharing in an experience of art. There’s a church connection there, I think.
And there is also the recognition that 20-somethings and 30-somethings are really NOT of the same generation when it comes to technology.
7 Responses to “another church metaphor, maybe”
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Asides
» There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. -Wendell Berry
» “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.” -Barbara Kingsolver
» It’s National Procrastination Week (who comes up with these things?), and in honor of people like me who like to celebrate NPW all year long, here’s a good article.
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Everything I’ve ever downloaded using BitTorrent was completely mangled. It sucks.
Spoken like a grumpy old crank like me!
Get offa my lawn!!!
I’ve only downloaded one thing from BitTorrent and it was only after I couldn’t find it to buy anywhere else. It was a 1993 Murphy Brown episode and it took like 14 hours to download the 20 minutes episode but it was a clean, clear copy of it.
As far as being bugged by not being able to hear a song by my favorite band, I wouldn’t be.
is BitTtorrent rock, country, easy listening?
Bit torrent: What is that?
Not hearing a song by a favorite band: cool. Kind of like not being able to see everything that a painter has ever painted.
Even if fans were able to hear every song performed by a particular artist, it is not as if they would have complete knowledge of said artist. The entitlement among the incensed fans is intriguing. And how much of an artist “belongs” to the fans anyway?
I’ve been trying to figure out Twitter (but am not quite there). I do like the idea that celebrities can be somewhat more in control of the information about them that they want the public to have. May not have anything to do with your post, but that appears to be how my mind is flowing today.
Thanks for sharing the story. Very cool.
Peace.
I think I have one foot in both worlds. I’m pretty hugely into Over the Rhine, and over the years have collected a ton of bootlegs - enough that I could listen to them straight for well over 24 hours without repeating a track. (I have as many as ten different versions of some songs!) That said, all my bootlegs stop around 2005ish, when the mode of distributing them amongst the fans transitioned from mailing hard copies of CDs down the list of people who’d signed up to that whole Bit Torrent thing. At the time, we still had dial-up, and I reckon it would take roughly 4 years to download a BitTorrent file via dial-up. I never got back on the bandwagon. So I know that there are covers and possibly even original songs out there that I haven’t heard, and it does bug me, but I’m too near my 30s to be up for learning how to swing BitTorrent.
I do think what that guy is doing with the Sufjan Stevens song is cool!