Music, Software, and Video Piracy

In the late 70s and early 80s, I was a teenager and a great fan of the rock group, KISS. This was a time in my life when music was very important to me and I spent a great deal of money on records and much time listening to them.

Since KISS was very popular back then, a lot of my friends also bought their records. Cassette recorders were pretty common so we could have copied the records for each other rather than buy them. After all, most of us did not have much spare cash and that would have been the cheapest way to own all of their records.

Despite having the opportunity to copy, I never did so. One of the reasons was that the experience of owning a KISS record was a treat in and of itself. It wasn’t the quality of vinyl sound as compared to the hiss-filled messiness of a cassette; It was the record itself and how it was packaged.

If KISS knew one thing, they knew the prize in the Cracker Jack box was often more appealing than the candy itself. For several albums, starting with Alive!, KISS included special goodies with each record. Booklets, stickers, rub-on tattoos, certificates, paper masks, and posters were among these items.

When you’re young, such things are not only just plain neat but also ways of attaching your identity to something seemingly greater than yourself. Displaying such items was a proclamation of the type of person you were through association with the bands to which you listened.

It also didn’t hurt that the albums were large and had creative and artistic covers. They were interesting to look at and beautiful to display. Albums had size, heft, and a tactile sense, something CDs -- lightweight, small, and slick -- lack.

It’s not my intent to pine for the days of vinyl but to point out the appeal of packaging. KISS knew how to make you want to buy an album. A copy couldn’t compare to the physical experience and delight of actually owning one of their records.

The satisfaction I used to feel with buying and owning a record is not something that made the transition to the change in format from vinyl to CD. The tiny little covers are too small to regard as art and, and to be honest, a lot of them are banal digital images which are more about smooth marketing than art. Additionally, the discs are insubstantial and disappear into the player, removing the user from connecting the content to the physical media.

Article Author: Shari

Shari has been disrupting the placid waters of Japanese life with her western ideas for the last 17 years. She's written textbooks and been a teacher and remains ever vigilant for her own tendency to view the world through the eyes of ethnocentrism.

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