We’re in the ‘McDonalds Drive-Thru’ model of the information age

When is the last time you heard music that shook you viscerally? Not a dandle, but a jolt. Something that saturated every crease in your barren soul and made it efflorescent. I’m talking about music that made you lose all inhibitions.

Music that made you unabashedly ebullient, music that marched into your life like a special operations unit and subverted the jaded preconceptions about the state of the music industry, that you didn’t even know you had.

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

That’s it, that’s one of the biggest problems with the music industry and the reason why piracy is so prevalent. With a post adolescent internet serving as catalyst, there’s this distinct miasma emanating from a river of musical mediocrity that’s turning us all into Jabba the Hutt. We’re in the McDonalds Drive-Thru model of the Information age, and it’s unhealthy.

I’m calling on the music industry to commit a mea culpa and admit that piracy is not the main problem. It’s an egregious symptom, yes, but it’s simply an issue of quality.

I Mediafire’d an album over the weekend, and what I heard injected into my brain a panoply of sounds that triggered an inevitable causality. I loaded up iTunes and paid US$9.99 for an album of music that has had my heart rate elevated for the last three days, beating in a dithyrambic adrenaline fueled fashion.

I experienced a sense of gratitude. The kind where you’re reminded of how a kind act begets another. The type of experience that touches you deeply, and you feel absolutely driven to express your gratitude.

Paying for music is just that. It’s expressing your gratitude, for something that made your synapses rapid fire, for something that unlocked those good neurochemical reactions in your brain that set in motion inadvertent and intangible feelings of happiness.

Sure, there will be those that never feel gratitude, those that feel a sense of false entitlement, but it’s an always-present subsection of society that despite having the means, have never intended to and never will pay for music.

Mostly, pirates are hoarders, insatiable consumers, jaded and blasé with their their mouths firmly fixed to the fire house of content available on the internet. The panacea is to shake the foundations of the digital music McDonalds Drive-Thru generation. The music industry has to inspire change by continuing to dig deep, and produce soul reaching, gut-wrenching masterpieces that inspire change and a sense of gratitude.