Stop Trying to Pretend This is New — a new rant about new media
A few days ago, an old friend from my early days at Warner Bros. Records came to visit, and as usual for two “veteran” music executives, we got to talking about all of the new things effecting the music business. So lets go through them:
- Streaming killed piracy through near ubiquitous accessibility (car, phone, home) and catalog breadth and depth.
- Streaming also killed the hierarchy of what people should care about. The minimum and maximum viable product for a streaming service is a search box and a catalog. Everything else just gets in the way.
- Music is currently at the bottom of the cycle of artistic adoption. Commodified, undifferentiated, and only unique through adornment.
- Formally, music has been rendered an audio version of the same thing as everything else. The same empty box can take you to video, audio, text, and now unique one of one generated content. It doesn’t carry cultural weight beyond the text.
- In the end, we remade radio, made it one to/of one, and called it innovation. Making the user the DJ just shifted the onus of discretionary taste, it didn’t reinvent it or democratize it.
Right now, debate rages about how generative AI, unique digital assets, VR/AR, live streams, the “creator economy” and short-ish form video will change the music business. But if you go back 15 years, all the debates were the same. The technology was different, the accessbility was different, the players were different; but the debate identicle.
And the result will be the same.
It doesn’t matter if its a fan club, a direct-to-consumer offering or an NFT, the same thing is true:
Most people don’t care about music.
Repeat that:
Most people don’t care about music.
Music is one of the most fundemental forms of expression we have. It’s the least dependent on all the senses, and the most readily available in terms of the means of conveying emotion to someone else. You can bang rocks together, hum, sing, chant or conduct a full orchestra. But music is just the moving of air in an appealing way. The moving of air in a way that conveys something from one person to another, or one to many. Technology let us spread how far that air can move. That’s it.
Music is also the foundation of expression. It enables the emotion in film, both diegetically and non-diegetically. It is the underlayment beneath memory and time. It can cause joy as well as trauma.
It also has such low intrinsic value that it has three different ways of securing rights for those that write, record and perform it. It’s so hard to monetize that in all the years of innovative technology, the biggest differentiator right now is music that sounds like it exists in “real” three dimensional space. Which — you know — prior to Edison, it always did. Music’s latest innovation is quite literally simulating the past using tools of the future.
“Music, for me, is a love bewitched.” — Paul Klee
He’s right. We all love music, we love hearing it, participating in it, experiencing its raw power. But very, very few of us love music more than just listening.
The battle for the future of music, regardless of the technology in front of us remains the same. It’s a battle to create the willingness to care. The ability and room to appreciate. The vocabulary and language necessary to describe what is felt.
“So, when you divide the world into music lovers, music fans and then those people who are just very casual about their music, it’s wallpaper to them, it’s elevator music, it’s just the thing that’s playing in the background that helps them through their day.” — Michael Stipe
What Michael doesn’t say is the latter category is 90% of people, and possibly more now. 10% can’t carry the art forward. The future of music, as always will not be how to apply new technology to enable the creation of value, it’ll be finding the new and dark corners where new language of culture is being created and music will belong.
The scary thing is that music in those dark corners may not resemble what we define as “music” in any way, shape or form. In fact, it may be music without an author, an artwork without an artist. The endpoint of an algorithm so far removed from authorship and humanity that its indistinguishable from noise. And that may be OK.
To wit: the biggest problem facing music isn’t technology.
The biggest problem in music is the same as it's always been: it’s very difficult to get people to care about that “thing” they don’t think about.
Or the thing they don’t care about.
