Rethinking music

Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer, founders of the Piratbyran in Sweden, have published an interesting mini-essay on music, technology and participation, which attempts to recast the stale debate about copyright. I belatedly discovered it through a interesting commentary on the Swarming Media blog.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from a text which is worth reading in full:

What does technology do with participation? Today, it should be obvious that such a question is wrongly put. Different technologies affect musical cultures and habits in different ways. But during large parts of the 20th century, many music professionals and especially their unionist representatives assumed the opposite: that all sound recording, editing and transmission technologies basically were parts of one singular tendency, usually named “mechanization”. Thus technology was understood as the opposite of performance, in a very pessimistic way. Synthesizer players and discjockeys were initially not allowed into the narrow definition of musical performers, but were rather seen as something external, threatening to displace genuine musicianship altogether. We can exemplify with the following words, written by a music sociologist as late as 1989:

“As the rationalization of technique continues to its logical conclusion, a specific musician is no longer necessary. Technology can create a simulated musical world without performers. /…/ Through technology, music can be removed from the web of human relationships in which it has been traditionally rooted”

We must remember that live performances were though of as the way to make money as an artist, up until the CD came into the picture. Then, during the golden age of the CD – which in retrospect looks like a short historical parenthesis – record companies in their reasoning reduced live performances to marketing spectacles, which did only exist in order to sell more recordings.

Thinking of reproduced recordings as the core product fitted well with the discourse about so-called creative industries, popularized around Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997. Creative industries were defined as businesses “which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. Clearly, what that politics favoured in the area of music was not live performances, but end products. Relegating real-time experience to such a secondary position, as was increasingly the trend during the end of the 20th century, was something unique in the history of music.

But since year 2000, when the file-sharing explosion began, the pendulum has turned the other way. Turnover for concerts and festivals have went up to the same extent that record sales has gone down; as has been demonstrated with hard data from Danish copyright collectives. And more and more managers and artists are confirming that the pendulum is swinging back; many has already started to regard recorded music as mainly a way to market performances, where the real money are. Beyond doubt, we witness an economic shift, to some extent, from reproduced objects to real-time experiences. Such a shift inevitably brings a move of resources from the hits towards the long tail, as each artist can only be at one place at a time.

To us, this is great news. It promises greater diversity and less conformity. To the record industry it’s obviously bad news, and when this topic is brought up, they typically start arguing on behalf of all the poor songwriters who supposedly do not perform at all. However, we shouldn’t spend too much energy trying to prove that the changes are benefiting a majority of all musical artists (if only because it’s impossible to quantifty the abstracted group of “the artists”). A more interesting question regards what we mean with “live”.

Why is it so hard to discuss live music’s role in the music economy, without always falling back at the image of an rock band standing on a stage in front of an audience, with someone selling ugly t-shirts in the back of the room? According to rock ideology, live music authenticates the recorded object, and the recording is imagined as a document of something that once happened live. But the recorded object may not be re-performed, according to this ideology. (Just think about the silly character of the air guitar player…)”

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