Musically inclined Samizdata readers will be familiar with the reportage we’ve had over the months, from Dale Amon especially, about what computers, the internet, etc., are doing to the orthodox music business. Basically, the orthodox music business is finding it harder to do business. I found this reportage strangely unsatisfying. Okay, this is the kind of music-making that computers, the internet, etc., are making more difficult to do, and more difficult to profit from. I didn’t doubt the truth of this, but something was missing from the story.
Then I read an article in NY Times by Kevin Kelly (to make this link work you have first to register with NYTimes.com, but this worked fine when I did it), which contained sentiments like this:
If this … power of the digital copy were to play out in full, the world would be full of people messing around with sound and music much as they dabble in taking snapshots and shaping Web pages. The typical skepticism toward a scenario of ubiquitous creation and recreation of music is that it is always easier to read than to write, to listen than to play, to see than to make. That is true. Yet 10 years ago, anyone claiming that ordinary people would flock to expensive computers to take time from watching TV in order to create three billion or more Web pages — well, that person would have been laughed out of the room as idealistic, utopian. People just aren’t that creative or willing to take time to create, went the argument. Yet, against all odds, three billion Web pages exist. The growth of the Web is probably the largest creative spell that civilization has witnessed. Music could experience a similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur spirit.
This was more like it. Dale and his ilk had been telling me what the music business would not be like any more. But Kelly was telling me what it would be like.
I mention this because Instapundit, which has always been strong with the “impact of technology on the music business” stuff, is now also onto this, the creative rather than the destructive side of the story. Glenn Reynolds, himself a musician, links to another musician/blogger, Eric Olsen, who makes a similar point to Kelly’s:
The parallels between music-creation software and blogging are unmistakable: both enable “ordinary people” to enter into areas of creativity and, equally important, distribution, that were only previously available to select professionals: those who were allowed to pass through the portals of either the press or the record labels by the guardians at the gates. By enabling a large number of people to engage in these activities, both technologies are democratizing their respective fields and battering the barriers between “creator” and “consumer” in both directions.
Maybe, Tom Burroughes, this is where the next bit of British popular musical excitement will come from.
Britpop now is as musically dead as it has ever been, at any time since the arrival of the Beatles. Mostly, it’s just an excuse to dress up and have a bop around, led from the stage by a lipsyncing group of formation dancers who have abandoned all pretence of being able to play any instruments. Does anybody remember an old TV show called “Come Dancing”. That’s what Top of the Pops is subsiding into: elaborately dressed young(er) people dancing about for the entertainment of dewy eyed oldies. Half the tunes in the hit parade now were written before the current performers of them were born. Kylie Minogue’s music is mostly just an excuse for us all to gaze at her cute smile and state-of-the-art bottom. Rap, which is often offered as the answer to where interesting pop music is going these days, is all about words and rhythms. It doesn’t actually need music to be attached to it at all.
There’s nothing wrong about any of this. There’s nothing wrong with boy and/or girl groups spending five hours rehearsing dance moves to every hour they give to rehearsing music. There’s nothing wrong with pre-teen girls caring what pop stars look like and move like, rather than what they sound like. There’s nothing wrong with black versifyers versifying, accompanied only by drum machines. Kylie Minogue’s smile is delightful and her bottom is one of the great glories of contemporary British culture. It’s all very entertaining. It just isn’t very fascinating musically.
Will a new generation of Britbloggers change all that, by putting the music back into music?
First the print media. Now music. For the next big-media green bottle to fall (when our computers have all got big enough to accommodate the results), see David Carr‘s Libertarian Alliance Cultural Notes No. 44. This is called “DIY Hollywood“!
