Re: [microsound] Where Music Will Be Coming From

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:13 AM -0800 3/17/02, anechoic wrote:
> a very interesting read by Kevin Kelly who is Editor at Large at Wired Mag:
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nyt/20020316/tc_nyt/where_music_w
> ill_be_coming_from

An interesting read, yes, but the writer seems to couch his quite 
valid reflections and predictions in a commercial-consumer model of 
music which I find limited and backward in its struggle - mirroring 
that of the MP3 and Napster litigations - to retroactively 
recontextualize some of the most revolutionary aspects of digital 
cultural creation and dissemination by way of a strained antique 
economic model.  His analysis is right on the mark until he 
lemming-trots into a wool-over-eyes future in which the current model 
of musicians financially enslaved to a centralized system of 
distribution and patronage is magically metamorphosized into what a 
marketing consultant would surely name a "net-savvy" version of the 
same arrangement (see:  SDMI and subscription downloads).  For me 
this analysis - like those of the entertainment industry plaintiffs 
in soft-music legal actions - misses (or deliberately hides) an 
entirely different future of music in which the laws of musical 
economics are not simply retooled or upturned (remember the New 
Economy?) but completely discredited down to the validity of their 
component terms and concepts.  This other future is one in which 
profit and music are not likely to be mentioned in the same sentence, 
in which music is made by those who now only buy it, and in which the 
source of the audio data is less important than the experience of 
finding and hearing and using it - one in which labels and stars lose 
their centrality and priority and become mere nodes in a system they 
no longer control.  And organs of the ever more loudly creaking 
centralized system - like Yahoo or NTY or Wired - cannot be happy to 
consider such implications of their own irrelevance.  I would retitle 
the article:  Where Corporate Music Will Be Bought From.  I imagine 
few here will be shopping at that mall, except for the occasional and 
covert girl-/boy-band fix.

np - "Vertical Forms" compilation
--
Joshua Maremont / Thermal - mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Boxman Studies Label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/