I seem to be writing a lot about music and music downloading lately. So be it I suppose, those are good topics. Here’s some more.

Victor Krummenacher plays in the band Camper Van Beethoven (sort of the same as Cracker). He wrote an editorial piece for the San Fransico Bay Guardian about his thoughts a professional musician on music downloading. It’s well written and well thought out and about how I expect most musicians to feel (except that they apparently mostly don’t).

But I haven’t seen a check for mechanical royalties (compensation paid to each person with a legal claim to the composition of a song that has been recorded) in some time ? in part because much of Camper’s profitable catalog was out of print for a while, surely being digitally reproduced and downloaded for free by the folks who really wanted it. Even when sales are good, it can take a year for your record company to get back to your publisher. And when every penny helps, well, downloading can kind of suck.

But still I’m kind of for downloading. Digital delivery is changing everything. Technology changes, baby, and you better change too. Things don’t stand still. And that’s fine by me. I could rail about how bad MP3 encoding is, how it destroys stereo field, but who really cares when the real argument is this: the old order of music sucks….So anything that subverts that system is fine by me.

The full article, MP3 and me, is here.