The other day I came across another amazing example of how the web enables a kind of extreme networked fandom that leaves the product economy sucking fumes. See if you aren’t as amazed as I was…

Doing some musical surfing I happened on a forum for Morrissey’s many dedicated fans. The thread I landed on began with a fan posting an idea:

“I’ve just made a post…suggesting that the bootleggers on this site recreate each Smiths album as live versions…No idea if my suggestion could go anywhere, but I thought I’d post the link here to see if any active filesharers / bootleggers would be interested.”

I scrolled down through the thread and watched the idea take hold. Eventually came this follow-up post:

“This site is brilliant. I post a suggestion at 9.50pm (in UK) with an idea that I thought would take months to see to fruition. I log on at work to find that the box set has been completed!

I work in community development, we say a lot that process is as important as product - meaning that sometimes the way that we do a task (consultative, value based etc) is as important as the end result (achieving social good). But it goes out of the window with this site. Don’t hang about just post up the albums. Brilliant!”

You can find it all here (or you could a couple days ago, though as I write this I note that the site is down, hopefully not permanently)

It is indeed an amazing feat. The entire Smiths catalogue of studio albums recreated by fans from live bootlegs, song by song. Ironically, this sort of intense file-sharing dedication by fans is also quite illegal. If the French authorities were to determine, for example, that someone from France had uploaded a bootleg mp3 to this collective task, then that fan would be punished with the legal suspension of their right to access the Internet! (Yes, the new French copyright law is extraordinarily harsh and misguided, just like the one that is to be proposed for Canada.)

But apart from the remarkable networked achievement, and apart from the weird illegality of the process, something else stands out here: Morrisey makes not a cent from all this intense engagement with his music. Why? Not because it decreases his commercial CD sales, for few of these mostly fan-produced live recordings were ever even commercially available. Rather, because Morrisey has no way to monetize all of this dedication from his networked fans.

Of course if he was on 76fanclubs, he could make all of his live recordings freely available for fans to play with and still make lots of money by monetizing their dedication via an online fanclub.

I’m not sure that I’d join it – Morrisey is an odd cat – but my wife is a big fan of his and would certainly be among the first to sign up. I will say that seeing The Smiths in ’82 was utterly thrilling. An amazing band and an amazing artist. No wonder his fans are so busy…