crucial

They found music had "lost its aura" and was seen as a commodity. ""The accessibility of music has meant that it is taken for granted and does not require a deep emotional commitment once associated with music appreciation."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4599340.stm

Well that's it, the age of recordings is over. I knew it was going to happen.

When recording technology first appeared the performing musicians of the day only saw it as a new way to promote their performing income. They didn't see what was coming: that the creation of these objects would become iconic, more important and real than the "original".

This brought us into what Attali calls the age of Repetition. We got intensely attached to these recordings. They were our sound track while we drove around, worked, partied, fell in love, fucked and broke up. Emotions got deposited into their textures-- in every nuance, riff, grain, hiss, scratch and mistake.

Now we have super-abundance and the iconic object is getting more and more devalued. Access is instantaneous, search and acquisition is getting trivial, and somehow the objects don't exist anymore--they are just information to be parsed and cataloged. Been feeling it for quite a while, like a loved one slipping gradually away from me.

But just as musicians initially saw recordings as inferior to live, we have to realize that we don't know fully know what modes of expression are coming.

Basically we HAVE moved into it already: releases are signals now, ways to announce your identity or your culture's identity. Ways to differentiate yourself from what came directly before, to comment and flow futuristic with it.

Maybe this is better: rather than being hung up on a fixed icon and an external Rock God, you are alive and use music to express yourself, even as a listener (a DJ is midway between a listener and an artist. a super-listener really). Or in Attali terms: the collective was silenced by the repetitive mass production.

Recombinant music : well (sigh) we have mashups -- hipster consumers playing with old commodities. DJing was supposed to be the ultimate po-mo thing, but it seems to have digressed. DJ software is slowly going in the right direction, but people still grasp at the 2 decks metaphor. Genres like grime and breakcore routinely eat their own samples, chew and regurgitate.

Listeners all become artists: to varying degrees of course. The number of musicians is greater now than its probably ever been (if you can call all these computer operators musicians). Still we have super stars who hold global attention. A lot of musicians I know have just become frustrated over the years, seeing all this production as just making everything futile. But that's old thinking: we have so many little networks and communities going on.

The next music revolution is happening totally online. Musicians have always been networkers. Blogging/myspace/forums are how music is getting connected now.

But what about money ? Licensing -- big streams, big fish. Forget about selling objects, its over man. (Take note: Apple makes money selling iPods, not downloads. That's how the record industry started: Columbia, RCA etc. were all record PLAYER companies).

Oh btw, I have a record coming out soon ! Its on clear vinyl, yes vinyl ! And then we'll sell the digits online because that's what everybody else is doing and we want to look cool. Its ok, you'll just rip it to P2P anyway. Can't wait. March !