Are bought gifts the better gifts?

My favorite essay so far in Sound Unbound is Jonathan Lethem’s, particularly his take on illegal music downloads and the act of gift giving. I love that he picks up on “You wouldn’t steal a handbag” type campaigns, which I find just as ridiculous as he does. When I download a musical track, I am not depriving anyone else of that same track. I almost want to say: music should always be a gift; we don’t have many things we can give away without losing; why not make use of that ability? I’m sounding pretty cheesy here, but I’m just following in Lethem’s footsteps.
Here’s an interesting thought: music cannot be stolen, because a gift cannot be stolen. Yet I was just talking to somebody about the gifting values of CDs versus mp3s, and we agreed that a CD seems to have more inherent “value” - through its being material as well as through all the extras that come with the purchase: the case, the art, the liner notes. When I say “gifting value,” I mean that we agreed that a CD makes a much, much better gift than, say, an mp3 download coupon. Because, we found, it’s the liner notes and the art, the artists’ thank-yous and the ability to actually hold something in your hands (and protect it in a case) that makes a CD have a greater emotional and affective value. To continue with the cheesiness: we feel a CD is more of a gift, not just from a friend who buys it for us, but also from the artist. However, we are about as unlikely to steak a CD as we are a handbag. An mp3, we have no problem stealing, but the invisibility makes it not a very good present. We don’t feel as connected to the musician; we don’t feel the “value” of the music as much as we do with the CD. Even though a CD is as reproducible as an mp3, the CD feels a little more “ours.”
I also have to say, I love the term “disnial,” the kind of source hypocrisy committed by Disney. On some deep, idealistic level, doesn’t it make you want to question the legality of operating this way, taking sources for free while not letting others do the same with your material? I think that might be my copyright utopia: if you let people use your stuff for free, you automatically earn the right to use other people’s stuff. If you make people pay, you pay. Of course, we wouldn’t have a way to control the quality of artistic output any longer…. But what is quality anyway, right?

Sterling’s rant about dead media causing dead art also made me think…. Is that really a bad thing? The fact that technology evolves so fast brings it closer to oral traditions. If enough people are interested in your work, it will be translated into other languages. Again, this could serve as a quality filter…. But since I don’t like the label quality, let’s call it a popularity filter. Just like in oral traditions, popular “songs” will move on with the ever-changing technology, and it will ultimately change with it and be changed by it. And that, in my opinion, is a good thing. Of course, as Rothenberg demonstrated, you can’t ever really translate something completely. The same can be said for different media: even putting online art on a screen with a different size or resolution, or play an mp3 through a medium of lower or higher sound quality output will inevitably change the art itself. And I want to move away from the concept of the “original” version: no matter how high a bitrate your mp3 is, if you only ever listen to it on a cheap mp3 player and through an fm transmitter in your car, that resulting song will be “your” original, because that’s what you hear. Don’t refer back, only experience what is happening now.