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I dunno about some of these ideas, but someone made a list, so maybe it's worth a look. he talks about "liquid music": after it's been digitized, "it becomes a liquid that can be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked. You can filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it, mess with it." these may not be original thoughts. a lot of the discussion sounds like a reply of the discussions of what digital media mean for writers of text. ----- Forwarded message from text warez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- From: text warez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 03:34:47 +0100 (MET) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: text warez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: <nettime> Where Music Will Be Coming From - Kevin Kelly Where Music Will Be Coming From Sat Mar 16, 2:56 PM ET By KEVIN KELLY The New York Times [..] As phonographs spread throughout the world, they had a surprising effect: folk tunes, which had always been malleable, changing with each performer and in each performance, were transformed by the advent of recording into fixed songs that could be endlessly and exactly repeated. Music became shorter, more melodic and more precise. Early equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians truncated old works to fit and created new music abbreviated to adapt to the phonograph. [..] In the domain of the plentifully free, music will do the only thing it can do: charge for things that can't be copied easily. A friend of a friend may eventually pass on to you the concert recording of a band you like, but if you pay, the band itself will email it to you seconds after the performance. Sure, you can find a copy of that hit dance track, but if you want the mix approved by the legendary D.J., then you'll want to pay for it. Anyone can grab a free copy of Beethoven's Ninth, but if you want it customized for the audio parameters of your room or car, you'll pay for it. You may have downloaded that Cuban-Chinese rock band from the Morpheus site without paying, but the only way to get all that cool meta-information about each track, which lets you search for chords and lyrics, is to establish a relationship with the band by paying. The quality least plentiful in a world of rampant free copies is attention. Each year more than 30,000 new music titles are released (or rereleased) into a very cluttered head space of new movies, new TV shows, new books, new games, new Web sites. No matter what your musical appetite, there are not enough hours in a lifetime to listen to but a tiny fraction of the global supply. People will pay simply to have someone edit the music and recommend and present selected material to them in an easy and fun manner. That is why producers, labels and the related ecology of reviewers, cata- logers and guides will continue to make a living: they counter our natural lack of attention for the 10 million albums we can expect to see in another 50 years. In the end, an awful lot of music will be sold in the territory of the free because it will be easier to buy music you really like than to find it for free. Free is overrated as a destiny. It is only the second phase of the three stages of copydom. The first phase -- perfection -- is experienced in both analog and digital. Perfect duplication made the modern world and modern music. The second stage is freeness. Costless duplication made Napster possible and a music revolution thinkable. Yet it is in the third level of digital copy-ness that the real revolution lies. This third power is liquidity, and it will take music beyond Napster. Digital copies are not only perfect and free, they are also fluid. Once music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked. You can filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it, mess with it. And you can do this to music that you write, or music that you listen to, or music that you borrow. At first glance it seems audiences were drawn to online music because of the power of the free, but in reality the rush to online music came from digitized sound's ever- expanding power of liquidity. Once music could swirl around one's life unencumbered, the millions of people who downloaded peer-to-peer file-sharing software suddenly and simultaneously imagined a thousand ways to conjure with music's liquidity. It wasn't only that it was free; it was all the things you could do with it. Once music is digitized, new behaviors emerge. With liquid music you have the power to reorder the sequence of tunes on an album, or among albums. To surgically morph a sound until it is suitable for a new use. To precisely extract from someone else's music a sample of notes to use oneself. To X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it. To substitute new lyrics. To rearrange a piece so that its parts yield a different voice. To re-engineer a piece so that it sounds better on a car woofer. To meld and marry music together into hybrid breeds. To shorten a piece, or to draw it out so that it takes twice as long to play. With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. [..] The arrival of perfect, free and liquid copies of music means that new economic models of making music will be forced upon musicians. Will the model of the future be to give away copies in order to sell out a perfor- mance? Or to rapidly issue new work from the studio faster than it can spread online? Or to release music in such wonderful packaging that it is cheaper to buy it than to copy it? The probable answer: all of the above and more. If there is any lesson that should be taken from the online world, it is that options multiply. I am willing to bet that within the next 10 years a young band will come along that will be primarily and generously suppor- ted by a commercial sponsor. The band will write and play whatever music it feels like, but it will grant first option to the sponsor to use the sponsor's materials in commercials. The sponsor gets cool, hip music, and the band gets its stuff heard by millions, and anything the company doesn't use is the company's to pass out, free of charge. [..] The future of music is unknown. But whatever it is, it will be swayed, as usual, by technology. Carver Mead, a computer-chip pioneer, advises us to ''listen to the technology'' to see where it is headed. If we listen to the technology of music, we might hear these possibilities: -- Songs are cheap; what's expensive are the indexable, searchable, official lyrics. -- On auction sites, music lovers buy and sell active playlists, which arrange hundreds of songs in creative sequences. The lists are templates that reorder songs on your own disc. -- You subscribe to a private record label whose agents troll the bars, filtering out the garbage, and send you the best underground music based on your own preferences. -- The most popular band in the world produces only very good ''jingles,'' just as some of the best directors today produce only very good commercials. -- The catalog of all musical titles makes more money than any of the record companies. -- A generator box breeds background music tailored to your personal tastes; the music is supplied by third-party companies that buy the original songs from the artists. -- Because you like to remix dance tunes, you buy the versions of songs that are remix-ready in all 24 tracks. -- You'll pay your favorite band to stream you its concert as it is playing it, even though you could wait and copy it at no cost later. -- The varieties of musical styles explode. They increase faster than we can name them, so a musical Dewey Decimal System is applied to each work to aid in categorizing it. -- For a small fee, the producers of your favorite musician will tweak her performance to exquisitely match the acoustics of your living room. -- So many amateur remixed versions of a hit tune are circulating on the Net that it's worth $5 to you to buy an authenticated official version. -- For bands that tour, giving away their music becomes a form of cheap advertising. The more free copies that are passed around, the more tickets they sell. -- Musicians with the highest status are those who have a 24-hour Net channel devoted to streaming only their music. -- Royalty-free stock music (like stock photography), available for any use, takes off with the invention of a great music search engine, which makes it possible to find music ''similar to this music'' in mood, tempo and sound. -- The best-selling item for most musicians is the ''whole package deal,'' which contains video clips, liner notes, segregated musical tracks, reviews, ads and artwork -- all stored on a well-designed artifact in limited editions. -- Despite the fact that with some effort you can freely download the song you think you want in a format you think will work for your system, most people choose to go to a reliable retailer online and use the retailer's wonderful search tools and expert testimonials to purchase what they want because it is simply easier and a better experience all around. In the end, the future of music is simple: more choices. As the possibilities of music expand, so do our own. -- GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet. http://www.gmx.net # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
