Saturday, April 02, 2005
THE DISK
I got my copy of The Disc from a friend at work.
I first heard about The Disc a year before, but I had resisted trying to score a copy. Not so much because I was afraid of being caught (as of yet, there hasn’t been any public acknowledgment by the industry about even the existence of The Disc, much less any specific consequences for possessing it), but rather because I had been pretty faithful throughout the years in going through legitimate channels whenever I could.
But I was headed out traveling on a three month long sabbatical and would be unable to access my home library for most of it. And since I can’t go even a whole day without some random tune getting stuck in my head, I knew that I would enjoy my time off that much more if I had it. So I handed over $25 for the blank to my friend (most people ask for only the cost of the blanks — hearkening back to the cassette bootlegging scene of the jam bands of old), and 24 hours later, I had my own copy of The Disc.
It’s funny — you actually need a pretty sophisticated rig to even use it. The index itself is so large that it has to be partitioned to fit in memory. Even the mainstream applications and media players now support the multi-level index-paging and predictive search mechanisms required to use The Disc. And yet the manufacturers never really say explicitly that’s why those features exist.
I’ll be honest. The Disc is pretty amazing. I legitimately own some 2,000 albums, but you have to understand, that is nothing compared to what is available out there. I had no idea. I mean, I will just go on these musical journeys, picking an artist, listening to one track per album, then jump off to their side project, then over to the drummer’s old band, then off to a rare EP that sold only 18 copies back in the day. The Disc has literally changed the way I think about music, the way I feel about it. Having The Disc is like being a kid and staring up into the sky on a cloudless summer night and contemplating the sheer vastness of space, the infinity of star systems, the unknowable size of it all.
As far as I know, no one is certain who made the original. Some say it was a Russian start-up that hoped to profit by selling it. Others say it was a grassroots pirate community working on a distributed network of small machines. Still others say that it was an inside job, with digital copies of the original CD masters lifted en-masse from the labels virtual vaults. In any case, the genie is definitely out of the bottle — there are too many copies out there and it is far too easy to reproduce. Hell, one copy is too many if you ever wanted to contain it. These are just bits, after all. They are just perfect copies of a perfect copy.
Oh, it’s still underground in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, sort of way. I mean, I’m sure you already know someone who has The Disc. Everyone knows someone who has The Disc. Hell, there is not a single person in the entertainment industry itself that doesn’t have a copy — it’s just an indispensable resource. Almost overnight it has become an integral part of the business, of the entertainment world.
If you put a price tag on The Disc by the conventions of the industry then it would be worth almost $100,000,000. (That’s one hundred million dollars). And yet I got my copy for $25. Looks like I owe someone some back rent. I guess it’s a good thing The Disc doesn’t officially exist….
Obviously, that’s just a short bit of fiction.
I got my copy of The Disc from a friend at work.
I first heard about The Disc a year before, but I had resisted trying to score a copy. Not so much because I was afraid of being caught (as of yet, there hasn’t been any public acknowledgment by the industry about even the existence of The Disc, much less any specific consequences for possessing it), but rather because I had been pretty faithful throughout the years in going through legitimate channels whenever I could.
But I was headed out traveling on a three month long sabbatical and would be unable to access my home library for most of it. And since I can’t go even a whole day without some random tune getting stuck in my head, I knew that I would enjoy my time off that much more if I had it. So I handed over $25 for the blank to my friend (most people ask for only the cost of the blanks — hearkening back to the cassette bootlegging scene of the jam bands of old), and 24 hours later, I had my own copy of The Disc.
It’s funny — you actually need a pretty sophisticated rig to even use it. The index itself is so large that it has to be partitioned to fit in memory. Even the mainstream applications and media players now support the multi-level index-paging and predictive search mechanisms required to use The Disc. And yet the manufacturers never really say explicitly that’s why those features exist.
I’ll be honest. The Disc is pretty amazing. I legitimately own some 2,000 albums, but you have to understand, that is nothing compared to what is available out there. I had no idea. I mean, I will just go on these musical journeys, picking an artist, listening to one track per album, then jump off to their side project, then over to the drummer’s old band, then off to a rare EP that sold only 18 copies back in the day. The Disc has literally changed the way I think about music, the way I feel about it. Having The Disc is like being a kid and staring up into the sky on a cloudless summer night and contemplating the sheer vastness of space, the infinity of star systems, the unknowable size of it all.
As far as I know, no one is certain who made the original. Some say it was a Russian start-up that hoped to profit by selling it. Others say it was a grassroots pirate community working on a distributed network of small machines. Still others say that it was an inside job, with digital copies of the original CD masters lifted en-masse from the labels virtual vaults. In any case, the genie is definitely out of the bottle — there are too many copies out there and it is far too easy to reproduce. Hell, one copy is too many if you ever wanted to contain it. These are just bits, after all. They are just perfect copies of a perfect copy.
Oh, it’s still underground in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, sort of way. I mean, I’m sure you already know someone who has The Disc. Everyone knows someone who has The Disc. Hell, there is not a single person in the entertainment industry itself that doesn’t have a copy — it’s just an indispensable resource. Almost overnight it has become an integral part of the business, of the entertainment world.
If you put a price tag on The Disc by the conventions of the industry then it would be worth almost $100,000,000. (That’s one hundred million dollars). And yet I got my copy for $25. Looks like I owe someone some back rent. I guess it’s a good thing The Disc doesn’t officially exist….
Obviously, that’s just a short bit of fiction.
