Elton John Says Internet is Destroying Music

Jared writes "Elton John says that the internet is destroying good music and "stopping people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff." He laments the way that the internet and the emerging industry of digital music has created a cold and impersonal world for artists to create new music in."

Comments

Exposure

[Tykho]

There's so many bands I wouldn't have started listening to if I hadn't heard samples or web broadcasts of them on the net. It's certainly broadened my musical taste having digital distribution of music so easily available.

I suggest

[Oddster]

Elton John check out The Foreign Exchange's album Connected. Take note:

North Carolina-raised MC Phonte, one-third of Little Brother, and Dutch producer Nicolay formed the duo and crafted the ethereally lush hip-hop album without ever meeting face-to-face. Using the marvels of modern technology, the group traded verses and tracks over the Internet.

Your move, Elton.

Ticket prices

[timmarhy]

Right Sir Elton, i'd love to be able to afford to see my bands live, but most of them are assholes like you and charge $150 a ticket, hence it's not possible to see more then a couple a year at best.

Re:Ticket prices

[jez9999]

Come on, have some sympathy. First Slashdotters say that big artists should make most of their money from live performances. Then why they try to make millions that way, you deny them that too!

The Internet is helping me make it as a musician

[MichaelCrawford]

I've been a software engineer for twenty years, and I'm sick to death of it. But I have always had a great love of music - I taught myself to play piano by ear starting back in 1984, and learned to improvise. I composed several songs by improvising, and with the help of a pro audio friend, recorded them back in '94.

But at the time all I could do to distribute my music was to manually duplicate cassette tapes. I just gave a few to friends and family. CD burners were still horrendously expensive, as were CD-R blanks.

When I got my own website, I offered some free downloads in Sun's old .AU format. I think it's 8-bit, so it didn't sound that good, and the downloads were quite large. But MP3 and psychoacoustic compression was still a ways off.

The copyright on my music said "All rights reserved" at first, and I specifically forbid sharing my songs over the Internet, but instead requested that those who wanted to share my music direct others to my website.

But I had always been a big fan of Richard Stallman and Free Software, and I knew that the right thing to do would be to copyleft my music.

I'm not signed with any record label, not even an indie one. I'm completely on my own. But my music gets downloaded by hundreds of people each month, with the downloads growing over time.

By learning to play by ear, I didn't learn to read sheet music. But for several years now I've been taking piano lessons and learning to read music, with the aim that when I can pass the entrance audition, I will enroll in music school to major in musical composition. I want to compose symphonies someday.

The Internet is, frankly, a miracle to me as it is enabling people throughout the world to get to know me and my music. When the time comes that I play professionally - or hopefully, symphony orchestras play myy compositions - I expect that there will already be a base of fans who will buy tickets to my performances.

Please download, share and enjoy:

• Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft

I call it "The Rough Draft" because I always intended to compose more pieces for at, and when the time came, to re-record it and to have a "glass master" CD pressed.

The lot of it is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license. There are various formats as well as sheet music in PDF and Lilypond (source code) format. (I would be honored if any of you learned to play my music.)

I've been playing at Open Mics for a couple years now. I recently moved to Silicon Valley, and often visit Santa Cruz on the weekends. If you'd like to hear me live, check my live performance schedule. (It presently says I'm in Vancouver, but I'll update that in the next day or so.)

I'm also planning to buy an amp so I can play my keyboard on the street. When I do, I'm going to have a sign hanging off of it advertising "Free Music Downloads", and will have a box of my free music download handbills.

Last weekend I spent four hours walking up and down Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall passing out the handbills. I got many reactions - most people think it's too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, but most who accept the handbill are quite delighted.

You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.

Re:Sucks to be you, Elton

[polar red]

today's Britney crowd
In my opinion, the new music world should be about choice The internet creates choice. And if that internet destroys the musicindustry(I'm talking about formatted music like britney's) GOOD: bring on all the new types of music!

He's not even right

[abb3w]

Check the Sun article

"In the early Seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic. [...] Now you're lucky to find ten albums a year of that quality."

Now, where did I hear something like that before? Oh, yes: Spider Robinson's 1983 Hugo Winning Short Story, "The Melancholy Elephants"—

"I do not know the figure for the maximum number of discretely appreciable melodies, and again I'm certain it is quite high, and again I am certain that it is not infinity. There are sixteen billion of us alive, Senator, more than all the people that have ever lived. Thanks to our technology, better than half of us have no meaningful work to do; fifty-four percent of our population is entered on the tax rolls as artists. Because the synthesizer is so cheap and versatile, a majority of those artists are musicians, and a great many are composers. Do you know what it is like to be a composer these days, Senator?"
"I know a few composers."
"Who are still working?"
"Well . . . three of 'em."
"How often do they bring out a new piece?"
Pause. "I would say once every five years on the average. Hmmm. Never thought of it before, but--"
" Did you know that at present two out of every five copyright submissions to the Music Division are rejected on the first computer search?"
The old man's face had stopped registering surprise, other than for histrionic purposes, more than a century before; nonetheless, she knew she had rocked him. "No, I did not."
"Why would you know? Who would talk about it? But it is a fact nonetheless. Another fact is that, when the increase in number of working composers is taken into account, the rate of submissions to the Copyright Office is decreasing significantly. There are more composers than ever, but their individual productivity is declining. Who is the most popular composer alive?"
"Uh . . . I suppose that Vachandra fellow."
"Correct. He has been working for a little over fifty years. If you began now to play every note he ever wrote, in succession, you would be done in twelve hours. Wagner wrote well over sixty hours of music--the Ring alone runs twenty-one hours. The Beatles--essentially two composers--produced over twelve hours of original music in less than ten years. Why were the greats of yesteryear so much more prolific?
"There were more enjoyable permutations of eighty-eight notes for them to find."

Sir Elton John's musical talent may be argued either way, but it doesn't change that he still is an Ignorant Idiot.

Re:Sure, Elton, sure.

[kripkenstein]

Elton at least admits he is a Luddite. He's entitled to his opinions, I guess. Anyhow, not all artists are like him; for example, Therapy? bandmembers live in different countries, and much of their collaboration is done by utilizing the internet: sending each other MP3s of song ideas. Then they meet physically for a few weeks and record the stuff (see interview here).

Considering that "One Cure Fits All" (2006) was among their better albums ever IMHO (and I have been listening to them since they got started around 1990), apparently this 'interweb' thing isn't necessarily as detrimental as Sir Elton believes.

Re:Sucks to be you, Elton

[asuffield]

I think the biggest problem in music, at least in the US, is the end of independent ownership and management of radio stations.

I'd say it's more than just that. The biggest problem in music is the end of independent ownership and management of everything related to music on any kind of large scale. You name it, it's either owned or controlled by the RIAA mob, or it's basically irrelevant to the majority of the industry. Plenty of small-scale stuff happens, all the way down to people just talking to each other about it, but none of it reaches the necessary critical mass for any of the ideas generated to travel far beyond the (social) vicinity of the place where they started.

The root cause of all this is obvious: whenever anything significant starts to happen, people start thinking about how they can make money from it, and then they start thinking about how to maximise their profits from it, and then the RIAA mob makes them an offer.

Re:Sure, Elton, sure.

[TheRaven64]

When I was at school, a few of my friends were in various bands. Most evenings they would be involved in online jamming sessions, where they would make music with other musicians in different parts of the world (since this was the modem era, I presume they were streaming MIDI commands). They were feeding off the creativity of other musicians who they would never have had a chance to meet in the real world.

Band web site with forums and even (*shudder*) MySpace provide a great way for bands to get feedback. If you play in a club, you have a very limited potential audience; the subset of people in a specific area who like your style of music. If you publish your music online then the potential audience is much larger, and so is the number of people who will provide feedback.

Re:Sure, Elton, sure.

[Andrewkov]

I play guitar in a gigging rock band. The Internet has been great for us. People can find out when we are playing from our website, and it's also our main promotional tool when we are looking for gigs.

For me personally, over the years I've spent a lot of time on various guitar related forums (when not surfing Slashdot), I was able to learn a lot from other (better) players all over the world who I would never have had access to otherwise. I've collaborated with other musicians over the Internet by sending MP3's back and forth and mixing everyone's parts into one song. Hell, I even met my current band mates on an Internet classifieds site.

However, there is no substitute for playing with other people in a real live situation, that's where you really learn very quickly from other players, but to say the Internet is hurting musicians is pretty stupid. It kind of reminds me of the old days when they said BBS's and the Internet were preventing people from being social, when in fact it was the opposite, people were spending all their time chatting online and emailing.

Finding band members

[Bayoudegradeable]

Funny, Elton... Backpage and Craigslist helped a buddy and me find a bass player, a drummer and a singer. We now have a band with our tunes on MySpace which gives us more exposure than we could ever have without the net. So, find new members, share your music, find the best deals on musical gear, tout your gigs, reach the world, download software to help recording... How is that killing music Sir Platform Heels and Funny Glasses?

Re:Finding band members

[yourlord]

The point he's making is that the internet isn't killing music. It's fostering it's creation and it's dissemination to the world.

It may wind up killing the species of "musician" who get unbelievably filthy rich off a couple of hits and then can sit around the rest of their life commenting on how technology is destroying the vehicle they rode to their destination. But that's a small price to pay for the swell of music now available at humanity's fingertips.

The internet is not killing music.

It's only killing corporate dominance of music.

Re:Finding band members

[Endo13]

You missed what I believe he was trying to imply. With the internet, yes it's easy to find more band members, equipment, etc. Yes it's easy to get your music available for millions of people to listen to. The problem is, it's not in the public eye. It's just on some obscure MySpace page. Yes, anyone with internet access who wants to listen to it could potentially do that, but first they have to find it. And that's what makes radio so effective even now. Anywhere you happen to be, there's only so many stations you can pick up. And if you're the type of person who listens only to FM, where most music is played, that number drops down to only a few dozen. So if your tune gets on the radio, you know that the people interested in hearing the type of tunes you're playing will hear it.

And with so many bands playing and releasing their music on the internet these days, that's never going to change, even if someone made a website to function as a central depository to catalog music. There's just simply way too much of it available. Chances of more than a few hundred people ever hearing your music are pretty much non-existent, unless it's heavily promoted.

So I guess that's why he's saying the internet is killing music. Yes, it gives you a world-wide venue, but it makes it harder for people to find it. Of course, making your stuff available on the internet does not automatically preclude your band also having a local presence, but it often happens by default as it's so much easier to simply upload your music than it is to find local gigs, haul your equipment around, etc.

Re:Sure, Elton, sure.

[Critical Facilities]

However, there is no substitute for playing with other people in a real live situation
100% agree there. I am also primarily a guitar player for the last 20 years. I've since stopped doing the band thing for right now and am composing/writing music on my own. While I definitely agree with you that there is no substitute for playing and collaborating with others, I think you'd probably agree that technology/computers have made the process of CAPTURING those magic moments that occur much easier and thus have contribute hugely to music creation as a whole.

Now, when you're just "jamming" with some people, you can have a laptop there recording everything so that when someone does something "accidentally brilliant" 10 minutes into a jam session, you have it captured in a very clear, editable form. I don't know about you, but for me, this has been invaluable. There's nothing worse than doing something that just works for a song/piece and then never being able to do it again. One of the deciding factors in my buying my workstation keyboard (a Roland Fantom X6 incidentally) was what they call "skip back sampling". That is, it's constantly recording what you're playing, so if you do something great, you hit a button and boom, you've got a perfect digital copy of what you did. Many a great tune has been born out of an odd chord voicing, an interesting poly-rhythm, or the elusive "blue note".