(By Eric Harvey, Pitchfork.com, posted August 24,
2009)
Considering all
the new music we have to sort through so far in the 21st century, we've sure
been focusing an awful lot lately on two of the biggest stars of the 20th. Decades
after their respective popular peaks, recent events reminded us, neither the
Beatles nor Michael Jackson have loosened their grip on our imagination. Yet
one particular thing I noticed amidst the nostalgia surrounding the latest (and
likely last) Beatles CD reissues, and Jackson
The latest
chapters of these two long-running pop narratives not only celebrated their art
and pop-culture impact, but also-- with MJ posthumously topping the Billboard
charts and millions preparing to shell out again for new copies of Revolver
and more-- commemorated the ritual of paying for it. It's a way of
framing these events that could only happen now, at a time when mp3s and
file-sharing networks have allowed millions of disparate global collaborators
to create the largest shadow economy in history, which has eaten away at the
music industry like termites on the foundation of an old house. In its place,
an unstable infrastructure that has created infinite new demands for our
attention, yet is far too unstable to support world-conquering superstars.
We've all read the trend pieces and editorials lamenting the record industry's
poor decisions and crumbling business model, the fact that kids don't value
music anymore, and the outmoded strategies used to try to win back paying
customers. So omnipresent have these discussions become, in fact, that it's
possible the past 10 years could become the first decade of pop music to be
remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual
music itself.
This is a
chastening thought, but at the same time we have to be careful not to overlook
how the technologies we invent to deliver music also work to shape our
perception of it. When radio came along, its broadcasts created communities of
music-listening strangers, physically distant from each other but connected
through the knowledge that they were listening to the same song at the same time.
Where radio brought listeners together as a listening public, the LP started
splitting them apart. The LP and 45 rpm formats took the phonograph, which had
been in existence for over half a century, to the masses, right as the American
middle-class was going suburban and privatizing their lives. We could then use
musical objects like we'd been using literature and art for centuries prior: as
collectibles, and signifiers of personal taste. The emergence of the
cassette--the first sturdy, re-writeable music technology-- allowed us to
"manufacture" our own music in the privacy of our own homes and
recirculate it at our will, through mixtape trading and full-album dubbing. By
the early 1980s, home taping had become the latest fall guy for an industry
trying to blame consumer delinquency for its slipping fortunes, rather than its
own overspending.
The cassette
"crisis" seems quaint when compared to the rise of the mp3. The first
widespread music delivery technology to emanate from outside industry control,
mp3s, flowing through peer-to-peer networks and other pathways hidden in plain
sight, have performed the radical task of separating music from the music
industry for the first time in a century. They have facilitated the rise of an
enormous pirate infrastructure; ideologically separate from the established
one, but feeding off its products, multiplying and distributing them freely,
without following the century-old rules of capitalist exchange. Capitalism
hasn't gone away, of course, but mp3s have severely threatened its habits and
rituals within music culture. There is nothing inherent or natural about paying
for music, and the circulation of mp3s > through unsanctioned networks
reaffirms music as a social process driven by passion, not market logic or copyright.
Yet at the same time the Internet largely freed music from its packaged-good
status and opened a realm of free-exchange, it also rendered those exciting new
rituals very trackable. In the same way that Facebook visually represents
"having friends," the mp3s coursing through file-sharing networks
quantify the online social life of music by charting its path. The social
routines that take place around online music are visible data-- which makes
them much more susceptible to intellectual property statutes than was the case
with cassettes or CDs.
These changes
are part of a social and economic shift that is both revolutionary in scope and
potential but also reliant on very traditional ideas of interaction and
production. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution upended Western
societies from their agrarian ways of life, distancing the average person from
the means of production, and introduced what would later be called
"modernity." In the late 20th century, the Internet quickly made this
phase of communication and economics look quaint and distant. This latest
shift-- you can tell your grandkids you lived through it-- opens the
possibility to freely create and distribute culture, with the idea of reaching
a global audience. Compared to the one-to-many model of last century, the
current one, which is still coming into shape, gives us the capacity-- maybe
even necessity-- to cheaply and easily collaborate, create, organize, and speak
truth to power. Technologically, it's futuristic. In terms of what it might
hold for social organization, the roots are pre-modern, even ancient.
Let's not get
carried away, though. A lot of forces would have to coalesce for any
sort of revolution to happen. More likely, it will take a while, as it did with
radio and the phonograph, for mp3s to stabilize and reach a point where the old
ways of doing things learn from the new tools. The mess left by free digital
music-- a collapsed industry, a rising generation of kids with a vastly
different notion of musical "value" than their parents, a subset of
that set with more eclectic tastes than a teenager should be capable of, and a
wave of lawsuits that are going to appear increasingly surreal and ridiculous
as they fall into history-- is going to take a while to sort out and clean up.
This is our
attempt to survey the damage, assess the gains, and try to put the mp3's first
full decade in perspective. Keep in mind that while the mp3 is a radically new
technology, it's not a different musical medium: The mp3 is still
"recorded music"-- that's not going to change until Apple unveils the
iBrain-- but it's recorded music that moves around very differently than ever
before. As a result, mp3s have opened up vast new musical horizons over the
past 10 years-- how we discover it, the value we give to it, and how we see
ourselves connected to other people through it-- that both depart from and
build upon the innovations that came before it. Everything's still messy at the
moment, but it's not going to be this way forever-- a few decades from now, we'll
most likely find ourselves nostalgic for the mp3 decade.
The MP3
Story Begins
The mp3 story
begins, appropriately enough, in the same subversive, bottom-up way that so
many of the files wind up on the Internet today: as a leak. In 1988, The Moving
Picture Coding Experts Group, a collection of about 25 geeks from industry and
academia, was tasked by the International Organization for Standardization--
which sets codes for everything from railroad engineering to rubber and
plastic-- with crafting a workable standard to move movies digitally (and, it
was anticipated, cheaply). By July 1989, they'd come up with "MPEG-1 Audio
and Video," which was in use by 1992. Soon after this, a hacker called
"SoloH" swiped the codec off an unprotected server, extracted the
layer devoted to audio encoding, and shipped it around the globe. Within a few
years the dam had burst. Instantly, it seemed, fans started ripping music from
CDs to trade with unseen others, and small-time artists and entrepreneurs
started figuring out how to turn a profit from mp3s. The recording industry
actually saw mp3s as an opportunity, too, at least initially. Geffen Records'
"director of technology" told USA Today in 1997 that Geffen
"doesn't see MPEG as a problem. We like anything that increases the
ability of consumers to listen to high-quality music, and if that means on
their computer, that's fine, too. We're actually working on ways to program for
it and to provide material in this format because consumers are making it clear
that this is a format they like."
Needless to
say, they failed. By 2003, things had risen to the level that Orrin Hatch was
grilling technology firms at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings about the
possibility of "warning" copyright infringers, and then-- I'm not
making this up-- destroying their computers. "If that's the only
way," Hatch said, "then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you
have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize the
seriousness of their actions." In 1997, mp3s were disorganized and hard to
find online, let alone download through a phone-line connection. By 2003, they
were everywhere, and impossible to stop. In an ironic twist, the peer-to-peer
networks that mp3s started flowing through were a basic re-engineering of a model
developed for a radically different reason, if not a similar function.
Originating during World War II to streamline workflow and evade bureaucratic
slowdowns between research universities and government agencies, the Internet
gradually grew to facilitate discussion-driven communities, finally going
overground in the 90s. By the end of that decade, these same ideas found their
way into online music, via a tech-savvy, class-skipping Northeastern freshman.
Shawn Fanning was a hard guy to root for, but it still holds that what he
instigated with Napster at the turn of the century-- and more importantly what
others have done with his idea since-- is the most important innovation in
musical distribution since the 45 rpm record.
In the broadest
sense, mp3s filled a similar distribution function for the Internet era that
the convergence of 45s, jukeboxes, and radio did in the 1940s and 50s. That
earlier process was set into motion in 1939, when the ASCAP licensing
organization failed to come to a royalty agreement with radio networks. As a
result, radio executives banded together to form the rival BMI, and set about
scouring the country for new talent. The hillbillies and juke-joint bluesmen
they found were recorded in storefront studios using new and affordable means
of putting music on tape, pressed on the cheap, sturdy discs RCA had just
patented, and delivered around the country to fly-by-night radio stations and
jukeboxes. Oh, and along the way, they invented rock'n'roll.
The likeness
between the two technologies, and their effects on the industries, are clear:
45s were also individual pieces of recorded music made to flow through a
network more quickly than their predecessors (the 78s they replaced were
expensive and brittle). Those small discs also relied on independent music for
the creation of an expansive new music market easily affordable by young
people, which put a serious dent in the existing major label market share. When
we think about what mp3s have done to the current version of the recording
industry, we should compare it to what indies and 45s did a half-century ago:
In 1948, the majors controlled a whopping 81% of the market. By 1959, that was
down to 34%. Part of the reason the Beatles had the top five songs on the
Billboard chart in April 1964? Those singles were released in the U.S.
There are
plenty of similarities between 45s and mp3s, but of course, in terms of power
relationships, monetary investments, and the sheer quantity of music available
as a result, mp3s are a very different thing. While 45s threatened the
dominance of the major labels, they were also created within the same
industry (out of a patent race between RCA and Columbia
Hoarding,
Sharing, and The Recording Angel
In his
wonderful 1987 book The Recording Angel, Evan Eisenberg asks the
question, "What exactly happened when music became a thing?"
He starts answering it by introducing us to Clarence, an eccentric music lover
who has packed every nook and cranny of his suburban home with records. Though
he obsessively amasses records, Clarence does not view himself as a
"collector." He explains: "My idea originally…was to share my
collection with everybody. You see, collectors-- take collectors of oil
paintings-- they don't do that; they only share with themselves. Share it with
everybody!" To prove this, he finds Shall We Dance and A Damsel
in Distress on top of the Frigidaire, and forces an initially reluctant
Eisenberg-- who had mentioned earlier that he was an Astaire/Rogers fan-- to to
take the records home with him. Clarence wouldn't have it any other way. He was
a hoarder, sure, but above all Clarence was a sharer. Eisenberg opens
his book with Clarence because he represents the social possibilities of
music-as-a-thing as much as the acquisitive ones.
Man, remember
when people like Clarence were different? He kept stacks of records in
his oven, because the physical space in which he lived couldn't come close to
accommodating his passion for music. He made less than $300 a month, and still
bought records. A couple of decades later, 10 times as much music as Clarence
could ever imagine not only don't take up entire suburban homes, but fit on
devices smaller than transistor radios. Not only are people with this much
music not weird, but the devices they use for storage double as status symbols.
This might be the most profound social shift of the mp3 era: hoarding and
sharing music changed from an activity for eccentrics to the default mode of
musical enjoyment for millions. People like Clarence existed because records
fixed the intangible, ephemeral sound of music to objects, allowing for that
music to be sold, bought, and hoarded. Mp3s removed music from objects, freeing
it to move and reproduce itself in ways that physical objects, and the industry
they supported, would never allow.
If we let them,
new technologies can alter our taken-for-granted assumptions to the point that
the replaced ways look quaint quickly. Radiohead's announcement of a new album
in October 2007 made it seem, for a few days at least, like the greatest band
of the decade had found a way to mix nostalgia for the old days of the unified
market (the 90s) with an innovative economic model that totally skirted the
market altogether. Their In Rainbows "tip-jar" stunt was one
of the few moments over the past 10 years where it honestly felt like everyone
got amped for a new release-- one that no one had heard, that most didn't even
know was coming-- at exactly the same time. It was such a shock because mp3s
had long since ripped a temporal wormhole in the musical time-space continuum.
By 2007, most of us were long used to a state of affairs in which intangible
music acquires value before it's even pressed to CD or LP-- that is, before it
would have even existed a decade prior.
Weirdly enough,
this particular effect of mp3s and peer-to-peer networks-- that information
travels much faster than physical goods-- most closely resembles that of the
telegraph on the 19th century commodity markets. Before that innovation-- the
Internet's great-grandfather-- individual markets based in major cities were
separated by hundreds of miles, and goods could only travel as fast as
railroads could take them. Yet because information about crop conditions could
travel via telegraph exponentially faster than the actual crops, the exchange
of money for physical commodities was largely replaced by a futures market,
based on what would happen. In other words, space was eliminated in favor of
time by a swift new network. The stakes may be much lower in the way mp3s and
peer-to-peer have reorganized the music market, but the basic idea is the same.
Within the musical futures market leaks are traded as mp3s through peer-to-peer
networks and blogs, often acquiring over-inflated value before their physical
counterparts reach store shelves. They're aggregated on Hype Machine, the Dow
Jones for this new realm of musical value in which the primary forms of capital
are cultural and social, not monetary.
This new system
of digital music commerce most directly threatened the old one by eliminating
its middlemen-- brick and mortar CD retailers, print-based music critics, indie
distribution outlets like Touch & Go, radio-- and replacing them with
cheap, flexible new ones such as peer-to-peer networks, bloggers, Rapidshare,
MySpace, Last.fm, and Pandora. The old industry model was a closed system,
impossible to infiltrate and designed to feed profits right back into itself
(for more detail, check Chapter Two of Greg Kot's Ripped, or all of
Steve Knopper's excellent Appetite for Self-Destruction). Aside from
official outposts like iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon, the new networked model is
nearly the opposite: It's radically decentralized, has few barriers to entry,
and it disperses whatever small monetary profits there are to people and
entities who largely have no interest in continuing the current record-industry
model.
At the same
time, however, the global circulation of mp3s is one of the most crowded
culture markets ever to exist. The mp3 may have atomized music into millions of
little pieces, but each piece, it seems, found a publicist. The average music
fan now has the built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor in an
ever-expanding arena that's making and eliminating rules every minute,
including the need for new critical middlemen (and too rarely, women) to step
in and make sense of things. It's no coincidence, of course, that Pitchfork's
own rise coincided with the mp3 market glut, or that mp3 blogs would emerge as
an eclectic network of music fans as the decade opened.
Indeed, one of
the most underappreciated effects of mp3s is their ostensible democratization
of the critic function. Before every album started leaking out of pressing
plants or being ripped from online storage accounts, accredited music reviewers
were the only folks outside the industry with the privilege of hearing
completed albums well in advance of their official release dates-- a necessity
to account for print's long-lead times and the lengthy promotional schedules of
the labels. Leaks suck, let's make that clear. But they're going to happen
whether we like them or not, so, the idea went, so why not try to turn them
into something productive? One of the promises of leak culture was the
possibility of a thousand new Greil Marcuses and Robert Christgaus blooming--
hundreds of new fan-critics, or critic-fans, starting conversations about music
that were accessible to anyone, arousing reader-listeners enough to buy music
the same way radio and print used to. To a degree this happened, and is still
happening: Careful searching and curious clicking through blogrolls will reveal
plenty of wonderful music blogs, with styles ranging from affective to
academic, with writers penning more poignant, sophisticated, and funny things
than many "professional" scribes.
As the decade
carried on, though, the sheer number of mp3 blogs started outpacing the amount
of writing and conversation about music. If they began by merging zines with
pirate radio, by early 2005 the coverage in major newspapers and music
magazines led to that bane of every subculture: widespread exposure. As a
result, thousands of new blogs started up over the next few years, including
those that mimicked gossip and news blogs by posting a dozen updates per day
and selling ad space. As the old guard of critical and promotional outlets
dried up, labels and PR firms quickly developed strategies to repurpose them by
exchanging access to pre-chosen tracks for free promotion. As a result, mp3
blogs have become one of the key examples of small-scale, curated promotional
model, reflecting individual bloggers' tastes and the incredibly fast turnover
of the indie attention economy. An argument can be made that the first industrial
era of rock lasted almost exactly for 50 years; from 1955 to roughly 2005, the
tipping point of the Internet's impact, five years after TRL and the last
pop(ped) bubble.
If, as so many
newspaper trend pieces assert, the number of "tastemakers" has exponentially
proliferated through unmitigated access to music, that means that, on average,
individual tastes are on the upswing as well. It's hard to argue this fact, if
only through anecdotal evidence. While the Internet does not represent
"the world," and there are plenty of folks who are just fine keeping
with their old habits, those who keep up with online music have the capacity to
turn into bona fide musical dilettantes, and occasionally straight-up experts,
in no time flat. But broadening out to the aggregate, this trend looks
different, and less rosy. The ideal would have been that a new network of
independent music lovers would have elevated different types of music, or even
found new ones, the way nascent rock'n'roll, honky tonk, bluegrass, and R&B
benefited thanks to the 45. But online, new genres risk being strangled in the
crib before anyone knows they exist, and people are "done" with new
albums before the cover art has been approved. This time-compressing aspect of
mp3-based music culture does not flow naturally from the technology itself--
it's a result of a lot of people, at the same time, publicly failing to resist
their most basic passions for acquisition. Experiencing music in small,
never-ending bursts is exciting, sure. But it's far from sustainable.
Part of me
wants to weep, as so many critics have, for "what could have been."
Yet a wiser part of me knows that there's no point in crying over a utopian
benchmark. As it stands, the musical public sphere created by mp3 blogs and
filtered through the Hype Machine is more varied and open to taste-based
audience input than the U.S.'s industrial model has been in recent years
(though a far cry from what it was like throughout most of the rock era), and
an increased amount of music from around the world is getting more exposure
than could have been imagined just a decade ago. So I'm not sad that print
magazines, or newspapers, are dying; I'm sad that music criticism and
journalism are endangered. I'm sad that publishers, advertisers, and corporate
owners have lagged behind so incredibly long, holding onto an outdated critical
model out of blind faith, leaving so many talented writers in the lurch. People
expressing their musical taste to an eager audience in the offtime of their day
jobs is one thing, and by all accounts a very good thing. But alongside these
folks, we desperately need people to get paid to listen, discuss,
contextualize, and critique music on a full-time basis. Until someone figures
out how to make this work, a music culture will continue to take a significant
hit. Print is dead: long live criticism.
Digital
Music and Copyright Law
At a time when
everything related to popular music institutions, rituals, and values are in an
unprecedented state of flux as a result of mp3s, any price for digital music is
fair game, right? Apple's more or less emerged as the price point setter--
formerly $0.99, now $1.29-- for digital singles acquired legally, but the
federal court system has taken to fixing value for ill-begotten merch. How's
$22,500 per mp3 sound? That's what Joel Tenenbaum-- a Boston University Minnesota
About nine
years and some 20,000 RIAA-sanctioned lawsuits after the original 2000 Napster
injunction, Tenenbaum's and Thomas-Rasset's trials neatly provide the other
bookend to mp3-related law this decade. The major labels, in the face of
mountains of evidence suggesting that prosecuting listeners doesn't do anything
save stocking their coffers and paying their attorneys, refuse to abandon their
tack of trying to scare downloaders into submission. It's a dumb strategy, and
I'm sure they know this, but they're at least acknowledging one of the basic
tenets of legal logic. In the same way that technology is a social force
created by humans, with the power to expand or restrict what we're able to do,
so goes the law. If copyright law has been able to convince us that music, one
of the most inherently collaborative forms of expression, should be regulated
by a statute based on a romantic ideal of the solitary author; and that one of
these lone individuals can in fact be Universal Music Group, what else can it
make us believe?
Well, lots.
Especially to how we understand ourselves in relation to music. Intellectual
property has been rapidly expanding into every corner of our daily lives for
the past few decades, taking two major steps to get where we are today. First,
the entertainment industries realized under Ronald Reagan that their cultural
commodities, if they could be protected from pirate networks abroad, could be a
huge source of U.S.
Then, there's
the not-so-dearly departed DRM. The DMCA allowed for copyright owners to imbed
code into each mp3, restricting certain ways of listening before the lawful
consumer could even think about them. It also made it illegal to remove these
restrictions. The Constitutionally mandated "balance" between
copyright protection and fair use, in other words, was no longer to be decided
by messy court arguments, but enforced by digital code created by tech
companies. Those harmless little aggregates of ones and zeroes, iconically
representing the creative labor of many people, were staring back at you, with
the full knowledge that you're bound to do something illegal. As such, they
restricted themselves (however lamely) to five other computers, as a result
placing artificial restrictions on the social rituals that have allowed music
to survive and circulate for millennia.
What DRM taught
us during its short life, is that for the law to work, people have to believe
in it. This doesn't necessitate Pirate Bay-level countercultural deviance, but
the simple idea that the rules laid down are based in common sense, not the
frigid logic of corporate balance sheets. The labels and their RIAA lobbying associates
aren't stupid, they're just desperate. They know that when things aren't
logical, the smartest way to get people to sign on is to start young, and mix
the rhetoric of education with a fair bit of passive-aggressive fear-mongering.
I give you "Music Rules," a set of printable worksheets for teachers,
who most certainly don't need more externally-sanctioned frameworks telling
them how to teach, let alone one that draws on a pedagogy built to create
unthinking allegiance to an illogical law. Here's an actual excerpt-- this
isn't a joke-- that draws on Cold War fear-mongering and a strategically-chosen
new word ("songlifting") for its rhetorical effect:
Now find out
if songlifting is a real problem in your community. Use this chart to interview
family members and friends about where they get their music. Bring your
findings back to class and combine them with those of your classmates. Use your
data to figure out how much songlifting occurs among the people you know. See
for yourself by completing the calculation below.
Convergence
Culture and the Next Step
While
witch-hunts are nothing to be wistful about, the mass-media era of popular
music has plenty to be nostalgic for. In retrospect, such a limited musical
menu meant that there was a much higher probability that the song you were
listening to at any moment was being heard by countless others at the same
time. The ideology of community, even an imagined one, is hard to shake--
especially when created by events like Elvis Presley or the Beatles on "Ed
Sullivan", or Michael Jackson at the "Motown 25" celebration.
Equally hard to forget are those images of absolutely frantic young fans
captured on film and video-- separated from their idols by what must have felt
like light years, they were unable to contain themselves at the prospect of
being within hailing distance of them. The star system was an inevitable
product of the 20th century industrial production model that invested millions
in a handful of performers in anticipation of returns that would subsidize
dozens of others.
In place of the
old system is a new one, which has been called "convergence culture."
Encompassing the hybridization of technologies and the collaboration of
corporations on one hand, it also highlights the penetration of the audience
itself into the spheres of production, promotion, and distribution. Many
academics, commentators, and fans themselves see convergence culture as an
ultimate victory for music fandom-- finally, the industries have to
listen to their audiences, because their future financial stability depends on
it. Yet while there's a bit of truth in this outlook, in the end it only
confuses matters more. Fandom has become important in ways many could have
never predicted, but that's also because the word itself means something
different right now, depending upon who's doing the defining.
At any point in
the past century or so, it's possible, with enough due diligence, to
reconstruct the possibilities for music fandom by examining how the business,
tech, and legal realms work to shape the listening public-- through work that
often takes place at the level of language. When labels say "fandom,"
for instance, they often mean "free labor." Tech companies use the
idea of "interactivity" to mask marketing strategies that invisibly
collect crucial demographic data, while reining in certain fan performances by
simply eliminating options. Lawyers, if they want to be successful, have to
apply the cold rationality of statutes to behaviors that are primarily driven
by passion. To work properly (in other words, to make money), these three
categories have to overlap significantly, with the possibilities for fandom
residing somewhere in the ever-shifting middle.
If we pry away
all the myths that have built up over the years around the Beatles and Michael
Jackson-- for MJ, this is probably a good thing-- and, for the moment at least,
set aside the fact that they were brilliant musicians, we can come to a sharper
idea as to why they still hold so tightly onto our imaginations. After
all, there have always been brilliant musicians-- why have these two stuck
around so long? A large part of the reason lies in the specific historical
moments in which they both emerged, which allowed them to define new advances
in technology, art, and industry in their own images.
Both the
Beatles and Michael Jackson emerged in fallow times for the music industry--
the Beatles in the valley after the first wave of rock'n'roll allowed the
toothless pop it supplanted to rematerialize, and Jackson in the moment between
the death of punk and disco and the rise of hip-hop, new country, and alt-rock.
The Beatles took advantage of this situation by helping define what a rock band
could be, and what the LP and recording studios could become. Jackson came up
when MTV was looking for acts other than Eddie Money and Rod Stewart to
visually showcase, and his work still casts a lengthy shadow over the medium of
music video (which the Beatles, let's not forget, had a hand in creating). He
was so transcendent to watch specifically because he brought dance back into
pop-- out of tap, breakdance, ballet, James Brown, Fred Astaire, and disco, he
constructed the all-in-one pop star model that so many have attempted to
replicate.
Or at least
that's what we remember them for. History is never made by single
actors, or even small groups, but is made to retroactively fit into a
narrative. This is how fandom used to be built. We remember our connections to
popular culture through the moments and people that seemed to alter our
consciousness through sheer will. We allow them to stand in for the much larger
cast of invisible collaborators, influences, technologies, and commercial
alignments that made it possible for them to take on the transcendent image
they did.
These sorts of
nostalgic recollections, to a large degree, are facilitated because the old
industry, built on selling magic, purposefully obscured all the backstage
collaborators that helped superstars to emerge. But now, we find ourselves
within a historical moment that allows us access to all the previously hidden
aspects of music-making. Instead of approaching this situation as if the
"magic" were gone, wouldn't it be much more productive to seize the
opportunity to create an entirely new crop of idols? In other words, if "fan"
is going to continue to have any resonance as a passionate listening strategy
at a time when its definition is up for grabs, it's clear that fans themselves
need to do the defining. The first step in this process-- the establishment of
new infrastructures and technologies-- has already happened.
The second step
is much tougher: using these new tools to push against the illogical
constraints of those who think the old model is still viable, and set about
redefining music's value. We've been conditioned for the past century to
think about music as a commodity. While in good faith ("support the
artists"), this way of thinking only propagates the most fundamental ideal
of capitalism: getting the most stuff for the least money. Otherwise known as
"downloading." Artists need to make money for their music (if they
want to), and they need a set of flexible legal and technological guarantees to
ensure this. But these guarantees need to be flexible enough to allow the fans
themselves to use their collective intelligence and passion to help the artists
themselves, without being exploited, or written into a script fit for retired
actors. If the networked public sphere shaped by mp3s could collaboratively
re-imagine itself not as an audience or a market but as members of a civil society,
who feel that they deserve a stake in its own culture, then the rules going
forward, and our appreciation of music's social and affective values, might
emerge like mp3s themselves: from the bottom up. We've long since figured out
how to grab and recirculate music. Now, let's make something with it.
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