Ribot doesn’t agree with anything Albini has to say and said so in an open letter posted on the Facebook page of the Content Creators Coalition, an artist-run organization “dedicated to economic justice in the digital domain.” Ribot invites Albini to place everything he’s written in the public domain, saying that Albini, if he doesn’t do that, will simply be “another lousy hypocrite shilling for Google and other huge tech corporations.” Here’s Ribot’s letter: Marc Ribot is another underground-music staple, an adventurous New York guitarist who’s done a lot of work with people like Tom Waits, John Zorn, and Elvis Costello. I think equating somebody downloading something on his iPhone with that is preposterous. Actually, piracy is people boarding a slip with violence and killing people and physically stealing material goods that are then no longer available to people who used to own them. And people who are trying to defend that model are like people on horseback trying to fight against the automobile… I think the term “piracy” is absurd. That old copyright model of the person who wrote something down owns it and anyone else who wants to use it or see it has to pay him, I think that model has expired. I think that the idea of intellectual property will naturally have to be modified to accommodate the way that people naturally exchange ideas and music and information. And music once expressed becomes part of the common environment. Ideas once expressed become part of the common mentality.

I think we’re seeing that the intellectual construct of copyright and intellectual property ownership is not realistic. As Billboard reported, Albini talked about the idea of copyright as an “expired concept,” comparing it to the way smoking in bars used to be completely accepted. He made some of those same points again a week and a half ago, when he gave a talk at Barcelona’s Primavera Pro conference.

Lately, Steve Albini - the veteran producer, Shellac frontman, and longtime underground-rock gadfly - has been saying things about how streaming services are the inevitable next development in the way we listen to music, even going so far as to claim that those services have solved “the problem with music,” making labels irrelevant and removing music from the realm of commodity.

Steve albini dinosaur jr