libraries could be the best streaming services

Membership in one of my local libraries includes access to Freegal, a kind of janky, third-tier music streaming service. The selection isn’t fantastic, but my tastes in music aren’t exactly mainstream, and over the past four years, I’ve found a lot of music I like available through the service. In fact, because you can download a limited number of tracks per week, I have Indochine songs, Gérard Lenorman albums, and even the Stranger Things soundtrack all saved to my phone so that I can bypass the jankiness of the service and the official app.

As I’m repeatedly learning while slowly making my way through Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism, music streaming services kind of suck—both for the artists who provide the music and the users who listen to it. I’m sure there’s some deeper suckiness to Freegal behind the obvious jankiness of the website, but as I listen to some Phoenix on Freegal this morning (having just discovered the band this week), and as I think about watching Borgen tonight thanks to some DVDs we checked out from the library, I’m thinking about just how right it feels to be getting access to music and films from my local library instead of from a streaming service.

Wouldn’t it be a great to live in a world where we liberalized IP law—and funded public services—to the point that libraries could provide local streaming services? We could pay for our subscriptions with our taxes! While the selection might not be as great as Netflix, you could make a request at your local library to purchase a particular title. If they went for it, they’d upload it to whatever media server, and you could log in and “check it out” for the time it takes to finish a movie.

I get that there are a lot more hoops to jump through than my idealistic spitballing, but if Giblin and Doctorow are teaching me one thing, a lot of those hoops really only benefit the corporations at the chokepoint between content creators and content creators. I’d like to live in a better world than that one.

• macro
• Communities
• music
• streaming
• libraries
• Freegal
• music streaming
• streaming services
• Indochine
• Phoenix
• Chokepoint Capitalism
• Cory Doctorow
• Rebecca Giblin
• copyright
• intellectual property