EMPTYING THE ASHTRY: Hey music industry! Welcome to the 21st Century! Would you care for a beverage?

The influence and importance of rock and roll and the music industry on modern culture is often understated.

Even in a nation dominated by media-driven technological advances, the influence of the music industry is a difficult thing to grasp. It has been virtually impossible to escape technology’s advances in the world of mp3’s and digital music. iPods, iPhones, Chocolates, various mp3-capable megacellphones emulating the BlackBerry and iPhone are now cultural forces.

But are these cultural forces doing more to set music listeners free or imprison them in a digital system with its own rules and boundaries?

On Showtime’s new series “Californication,” (a show I believe is marketed directly at me) main character Hank Moody, played fantastically by David Duchovny, was asked about his job as a blogger for Hell-A magazine by Henry Rollins on his radio show. Moody responded “…we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People...they don't write anymore - they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King's English.”

Writer-producer Tom Kapinos makes an excellent, if not depressing point in Hank’s mini-monologue. However, this is not the case when it comes to the world of music, where freedom and democracy isI growing exponentially since the birth of digital music and file sharing.

It was Napster that first set us free.

I was introduced to Napster as a high school freshman. This was not my most critically acclaimed period of music fandom, as I regularly downloaded tracks by Limp Bizkit, Blink 182 and Green Day. (Of course, I was also downloading Hendrix and Nirvana and the Beatles and introducing myself to the world of rock and roll so I guess it all evens out).

Despite my poor taste in tunes at the time, I was not the only one divulging into this new software. More and more people in my sleepy little suburban hometown decided to download Napster and subsequently began downloading their own music, my classmates, friends and I no longer had to beg our parents for money to buy new music on CD. We could just download it ourselves and hope they don’t check for irrelevant parental advisories.

Napster became a cultural force for the young generation who would ultimately prove to be unwilling to go look for and purchase music in Sam Goody and Tower Records, opting to search the internet and make use of Napster’s ever-expanding database of free music instead.

And that, in its essence, is why music fans are now freer than ever before, and record companies are more fucked than ever before.

Now, Napster has been essentially shut down and marginalized to being just another pay-to-download service. Like the Bobby Fuller Four (and eventually The Clash and Green Day), they fought the law and the law famously won.

But by no means has that stopped anyone from downloading copious amounts of free music online. For every music site that's been shut down, more have popped up in its place and free downloads haven't slowed down in the least. And free downloads are now what my generation, and all generations after me are used to.

The kids these days, they are used to hyper-accelerated technological developments, and this has affected the music industry greatly. In all reality, most people of my age (22) have grown up downloading music illegally as a primary way of listening to their music.

The internet now holds widespread influence and ability for people to connect in strange ways that can occasionally become cultural relevant, and if they’re lucky, forces of brilliance. Because of this, those in my generation and just about every generation after mine will have this mentality of ‘music is free, and I can listen to whatever I want, wherever I go, all of the time.’

So all of the traditional venues for music consumption – the RIAA, record companies, CD stores – they can all fuck off because this generation of music fans is already free and are ready to move forward with this freedom.

So, welcome to the 21^st century, where it is now useless to fight the digital music revolution. Welcome to the 21^st century, where bands drop major record labels because they’re better off working independently. Welcome the 21^st century, where anybody has access to millions of mp3’s sitting at home on their computers. Welcome to the 21^st century, where the music industry is changing, and people are finding a new glimmer of hope in a time where we so desperately need it.