Little more than 10 years ago, TV was in a terrible state. Then something happened. A bunch of new writers who’d grown up getting their kicks from the Simpsons and Seinfeld starting scripting a new wave of TV - the most significant and seminal being Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Suddenly, as the millennium turned, it was okay to make a TV show that was smart, sharp, pop culturally aware and unafraid to flirt with postmodern tropes like mashing up genres and self-referencing.

TV changed irrevocably for the good after Buffy. Series like the Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, and later 24, Lost and its ilk, made a show of being intellectually challenging and taboo-busting. And people loved them - because they were good. It seems like an obvious thing to observe; but we’d put up with a lot of shit on TV for a very long time without complaining, and suddenly this (predominantly American) TV revolution woke us up to the fact that we could actually demand – and receive – quality shows from the big networks. Now, nobody’s going to make a show like Dynasty or Beverly Hills 90210 ever again - they’d get laughed off the screen. (Even trash like the OC had an edge compared to the stuff we had to endure when I was a teenager.)

Now, series like Desperate Housewives get huge audiences, and Anne Sweeney - president of ABC and the woman behind Housewives, Lost and Ugly Betty - is ranked as the 15th most powerful woman in the world (ahead of Hilary Clinton!) The networks, like every other media corp, are feeling the heat from P2P, but Joost looks like it could genuinely provide the solution - TV got lucky because good broadband connections are vital to streaming TV shows on your laptop, and most of us have only just got that power at home, meaning that as Joost arrived they could jump in before the P2P revolution destroyed them like it’s destroying the record business.

Nonetheless, people streaming TV for free from sites like alluc.org is a real problem for the networks. But more importantly, it’s a problem for the viewer too. As networks lose money, the ability for them to make great TV shows like Six Feet Under will diminish, and our screens will be full of shit again. We will seriously pay the price for our illegal activities.

You want proof? It’s already happened to music. Songs are a lot cheaper to make than TV shows, which is why the independent and unsigned musicians in their home studios may yet save music -and may be the only people who can. But as for the big labels - they fucked it up by signing shit, until people didn’t care. Record execs moan about giving away tracks for free because they say it “devalues” the music - but music was devalued already, and it’s those same greedy execs who are to blame.

The musical equivalents of the Sopranos or The Office? Nowhere to be found, because the labels pumped their money into ephemeral shit like Jennifer Lopez and Robbie Williams. There’s been nothing in music in the last five years that matched the cultural impact of Buffy or the first few seasons of Sex and the City.

That’s why music is devalued and why most people think nothing of downloading entire albums for free. The majors only have themselves to blame.

of Montreal - Disconnect the Dots

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