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technology and the future of music
This Kevin Kelly article, "Where Music Will Be Coming From," is interesting and mostly well-reasoned. (It's a New York Times article, so if you don't have an account with them, use member ID invisible-city, password reader.)
I think this is accurate:
"Digital copies are not only perfect and free, they are also fluid. Once music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked. You can filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it, mess with it. And you can do this to music that you write, or music that you listen to, or music that you borrow.
At first glance it seems audiences were drawn to online music because of the power of the free, but in reality the rush to online music came from digitized sound's ever-expanding power of liquidity. Once music could swirl around one's life unencumbered, the millions of people who downloaded peer-to-peer file-sharing software suddenly and simultaneously imagined a thousand ways to conjure with music's liquidity. It wasn't only that it was free; it was all the things you could do with it.
Once music is digitized, new behaviors emerge. With liquid music you have the power to reorder the sequence of tunes on an album, or among albums. To surgically morph a sound until it is suitable for a new use. To precisely extract from someone else's music a sample of notes to use oneself. To X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it. To substitute new lyrics. To rearrange a piece so that its parts yield a different voice. To re-engineer a piece so that it sounds better on a car woofer. To meld and marry music together into hybrid breeds. ... With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again."
And I think his conclusion is accurate:
"Music could experience a similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur spirit.
Part of the reason people have been inspired to create text, graphics and action in the digital realm has been the arrival of new tools. Fans of music are already ... making music in the way that a camera makes an image -- by starting with what is there and adding a unique view to it. Just as the introduction of the Brownie camera changed photography from an expert's art to a ubiquitous public expression, with the right tools in hand it is not a very long hop from now to a time when everyone makes music in a small, amateur way."
But I disagree with his thoughts about how people will sift through the ensuing mountian of music. These thoughts (which appear at least three separate times on this bullet-pointed list) don't go beyond "people will pay others to sift for them," an unsubtle hint to people looking to make money off the future. (Unsurprising, given Kelly's long-running tendency to operate as a corporate-friendly visionary.) But there has always been more music than people can possibly listen to; this is not new. And, yes, people have made money by providing accessible guides to that music, and, yes, this will continue to be true into the future. But I think that the real trend here, which Kelly misses, is the increase in noncommercial fan networks.
Mailing lists, suggested discography pages, weblogs, Amazon collaborative filtering systems and Listmania lists, submonitions pages: these things are proliferating wildly right now, and they all serve to amplify basic word-of-mouth. As a result, it is easier than ever to find music you will like, not harder than ever, and this makes it less likely that recommending music will be lucrative in the future.
Think of MP3 swap networks, which have all the benefits of the old underground cassette networks, only without the expense of postage. And, like the cassette swap networks, MP3 swap networks are participated in by both fans of obscure music and obscure musicians seeking kindred souls. And it's easier than ever to find kindred souls right now. I see the amateur musicians out there finding other musicians, who are pursuing similar experiments, and then swapping tracks with them, eventually perhaps bonding together as an identifiable unit. Anticon and Elephant 6 are perhaps recent successful examples of this phenomenon...
I am indebted to Dirk Hine for the original link to the Kelly article. Labels: music_commentary, networks, technology |
Thursday, March 21, 2002
11:23 AM
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