Two excellent new pieces on the changing landscape around music and digital media.
First up, Tom Coates with recent thoughts on music:
"If music companies can weather the intermediate period between the limited, cable-utilising bandwidth of today and the potential multiple-computer + networked appliance households of the future (indeed if they can help facilitate such a world) then they could still survive and develop brand-new channels which could facilitate a faster and more immersive use of music generally."
Tom then goes on to outline a potential model, concluding:
"What I am attempting to outline is a way in which record companies might be able to approach making money by giving people real incentives to buy from them by improving the functionality, accessibility and utility of the music-listening experience rather than by trying to shut down technology that they don’t approve of."
Plasticbag.org: Observations and Speculations on Music
Well worth a read. But the model described by Tom still provides for money to frequently change hands around music. Clay Shirky’s latest piece, building on his ‘mass amateurisation of publishing’ ideas and applying to music, suggests that the efficiences of the Internet effectively undermine much of the economics around music. As with most things Shirky writes, he gets right to the crux of it.
"Digital changes in music have given us amateur production and distribution, but left intact professional control of fame. It used to be hard to record music, but no longer. It used to be hard to reproduce and distribute music, but no longer. It is still hard to find and publicize good new music. We have created a number of tools that make filtering and publicizing both easy and effective in other domains. The application of those tools to new music could change the musical landscape."
Shirky.com: The Music Business and the Big Flip
Oh, and rather more concisely, Matt Interconnected with a few salient observations on the industry’s current position.
The current issue of Wired is all about the impending total collapse of the music industry. One of the most interesting things in it was an article that talks about something that never occurred to me: the internal competition at places like Sony, where innovations in the huge consumer electronics division are hampered by copyright concerns from the smaller music division. They’re even opposing sides in several lawsuits.
Not much to say on the Coates at the moment but on the Shirky, I agree with his conclusion but have some issues with applying “publish than filter” to music…here’s what I wrote over on my blog this morning:
A system that works for writing/blogging won’t necessarily work for music since the kind of agreement that pushes interesting stories to the top of the Blogdex (for instance) or even Slashdot doesn’t exist when it comes to music or art except for the most mainstream of practises. Shirkey assumes that bad writing is more painful than bad music – I’m not sure I agree but it’s possible to reach consensus about poorly constructed or boring writing – however one person’s unlistenable CD is another’s masterpiece (the works of artists like John Cage come immediately to mind)….Collective taste tends to screen out that which is challenging and experimental.
Listening is an idiosyncratic practise….the challenge is to build a system that allows for the fringe to also rise to the top.
BTW – Thanks for the link to plasticbag.org – will have to check that one out.