When you play the first YouTube video that comes up in a search for the Arcade Fire’s “My Body Is a Cage,” the opening syllables of Win Butler’s reverbed vocals are accompanied only by blackness. A moment later the drums and organ kick in and the screen lights up with a desert scene—the climactic shoot-out from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, with Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson staring each other down across a dusty courtyard.
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People have been taking their favorite songs into their own hands for ages, and the especially devoted go so far as to remix them or make videos for them. But until the rise of the Internet, these labors of love couldn’t reach more than a niche audience of dedicated music geeks, in large part due to the dim view artists and rights holders have historically taken of unlicensed releases. Of course, sometimes artists gave their blessing, tacitly or explicitly—the Grateful Dead fostered a huge community of tape traders, for instance, and in the 80s many hip-hop and club acts started pressing singles with remix-ready instrumental or vocal tracks on the B sides. But even sanctioned tapes and remixes still got distributed mostly hand to hand, copy by copy, if they were distributed at all—what little of the material was salable had such a small and scattered market that paying to manufacture and ship a whole run would’ve been insane.
Now that the Internet has removed those physical barriers, though, unofficial works can go aboveground. “Bodycage,” as Chicago designer J. Tyler Helms calls his Arcade Fire video, has racked up more than 680,000 views on YouTube since he posted it there in February 2007—an awful lot of exposure that Merge Records didn’t have to spend a penny for. The majors still routinely make the mistake of squelching fan-generated videos and remixes, but many other rights holders—especially indies like Merge—have seen the light. Fans who are so into a song that their urge to be creatively involved with it takes them past, say, learning to pick it out on acoustic guitar or videotaping themselves dancing to it are a precious resource, and no label with a lick of sense should treat them like pirates.
Most of the discussion about the evolution of music into purely digital formats has focused on just one aspect of the transition—the way it makes sharing songs for free so easy. But file sharing isn’t the only thing that’s easier now that music has been set free from physical media. It’s also easier for fans to release their own versions of their favorite music back into the wild. Artists who are prepared to see unofficial remixers and video makers as collaborators rather than parasites have the opportunity not only to build online communities but also to nourish their own work with fresh ideas from dedicated people—and more of them, in fact, than ever before.v
