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The Golden Age of Infinite Music
Over at the BBC, music journalist John Harris speculates on what may become of the music business now that we have entered the golden age of infinite music. "I've just poured the music-related contents of my brain into a book, and I would imagine that 30-ish years worth of knowledge about everyone from Funkadelic to The Smiths has probably cost me a five-figure sum, a stupid amount spent on music publications, and endless embarrassed moments spent trying to have a conversation with those arrogant blokes who tend to work in record shops. Last weekend, by contrast, I had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled. At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer. Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity..."
MADONNA IS THE BEST!
MADONNA FANS DO IT BETTER
Now go fuck off while I listen to Madonna - Celebration. =)
This is exactly why 'piracy' is such a good thing. Before, when there were tollbooths before all the artists of the world, we could only really sample the delights of a few. Now, there's no where on earth most of us could afford to pay for all the content we consume. How can we be convinced that it is GOOD to be able to only taste a tiny fraction of what is out there? The Big Music enforced tollbooths are a plague of this planet, and it is PIRACY, resolving the contradictions of digital content in the age of private property, that is the cure.
This is the age of infinite access to music that is considered popularly or culturally relevant. In times before recording, music was played constantly, but to see the critical acclaimed required one to buy a fairly expensive ticket. In the age since recording, the popular and acclaimed required purchase of a fairly expensive to make medium. Recently, the price of access to popular or acclaimed music has been some technical savvy. While DRM and legislative action may eventually curtail access to popular or acclaimed music, it will do no such thing to indy, modern or any un-acclaimed pieces or groups, because in such an environment enforcement will be expensive.
That kid is likely destined to become an "arrogant bloke who tends to work in record shops".
I'd rather put my money in a tip jar of garage bands in Japan, South Africa, Germany or elsewhere rather than spend another dime funding the RIAA's accusations that pretty much everyone who uses the Internet is a criminal. And funnily enough, every time I say this on Slashdot there always seem to be several replies telling me to check out some dudes and I end up doing just that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
When you get down to it, it is quite surprising the kinds of music my generation will listen to when given the chance. As was stated in another comment, in the past it was limited to what they wanted you to hear. You would be limited to the selection on the radio and nothing more. Now, with piracy galore and plenty of music services, such as Pandora, you get a taste of other varieties and artists you would never have heard before. I can go from listening to Heavy Metal to Techno to Country and then into Classical. My taste is open, simply because of piracy and the free services available. As time progresses, it'll be interesting to see how this shapes. Mainly because of how much the various MAFIAAs are trying to kill piracy in its whole, without an alternative, and yet refuse to decrease the price of a media that costs 1/50th to produce and distribute as they charge for it in a retail store. They continue to push and shove for people who pirate music to pay hugely outrageous fines, and yet they dont make it available at a reasonable price. Imagine having to go to a store and pay $15 for a loaf of bread, simply because they can charge that much and get away for it. It's a matter of time until fat people galore go running out of the store with 8 loaves stuffed in their pants. It stuns many of the people I talk to when they ask how I can go from one genre to another without being phased, and enjoy it all just the same, and I answer that without being forced to listen to only popular media and having the ability to open my horizons more then most, I can find more music and movies to enjoy then most people would ever dream... well, except everyone here. Not that any of us would ever pirate anything in our lives... of course not. Yayyyy Piracy! I mean ... ehh, heck with it
Disagree. I have downloaded, and paid for, several full albums that are great - for example Polvo's new album "In Prism". What I think is about to change is live performances. Bands will tape high quality audio and video of live performances for easy purchase. This is not as widespread as it could be, and for indie bands is often relegated to audience tapings.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Which indicates that either the domain is rather small or the semantics of 'expert' has changed dramatically.
With regard to "all kinds of artists" (which probably should read 'various kinds of musicians' — but probably it takes longer to become an 'expert' writer) I suspect the former, the latter otherwise.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
From Funkadelic to The Smiths?
From Nick Drake and John Martyn to Pavement and Dinosaur Jr.??
Your point may be good, but christ, these examples of infinity and endless appetite for music cover a really, really small range of what music is.
No wonder you were always so embarrased in the shop.
On second thought, I'm not sure point is so good.
On the evidence, the interwebz really just provide an opportunity to imagine one's broadened oneself by becoming even more deeply enmeshed in one little thing.
Choice under these conditions has been studied. The stndard example is something like, someone goes into a store to buy a new tv - is confronted by 50 models, can't choose and walks out again. Whereas going into a tv store where there's only 5 models available, quickly makes a choice and walks out with a tv. The point is, more choice does not neccessarily mean easier choices. I have this problem myself - I want to listen to some new music, refresh what's on my iPod, but confronted by this vast ocean of music, almost limitless possibilities, I get exasperated and end up either not bothering or downloading another album from someone I know. Now, however, I have a new name to explore - Pavement - I don't have any of thier music. Anyhow - the point of this story was to say that infinite music is not neccessarily a good thing. I personally find I listen to the radio more and more... leaving the music choices to someone else.
Certainly I can't argue with anything in the parent post: the youth of today are, often amazingly, and always re-assuredly, listening to music and learning about music that is "not of their direct experience" (which is, admittedly, a clumsy construct ... I'm not sure I really know how to describe what I mean by that; I'm hoping most people just get it).
I remember going to the "record store" when I was a young pup. Here I was, amongst a seemingly limitless array of music, and I was, I thought, emperor of all that was before me. All I needed was $9.98 and I was there. It was much better than a library, and much more interesting than a class.
Today, you need much less than ten bucks. You can sample what it took my money, or a friend's money, or an older brother's money, or a hip station to throw out there, today it costs what could be essentially described as "nothing but time". And time invested is not without cost, by any means.
I sense a hint of failure, or resignation: something along the lines of "I invested all that and kids get it today by investing much less."
But, that's what I enjoyed too, and so did the author of the parent. It's how he came about to know enough to write the book in the first place, a book his older brothers or his parents probably could not have written.
And the kids still need you; they still help to find what they enjoy in a similar way. What's different is they listen to what their parents like, whereas I thought my parents were musically bankrupt. They value the music, and from that they put a higher value on the investment in time to explore the music, whereas we still had to figure in a larger investment in earnings balanced by that time.
It is, in so many words, and example of what limited distribution cost us all; what the RIAA cost us by it's business model of days gone by, and what the music industry needs to learn to exploit, if it's to survive, rather than rail against.
It's a good thing.
And I love Madonna!
I'm finding new music I like at a far faster rate than I was ten years ago. The biggest difference is that now, I have Rhapsody. (Just like the guy who wrote TFA mentioned that he has Spotify.)
I can find an artist I like, and there are links on the page. Hey, you like Genesis? Check out Steve Hackett, Brand X, and Mike + the Mechanics, and Alan Parsons Project and Yes; check out "Art & Progressive Rock"; check out playlists that other users made that relate to Genesis; in short there are literally dozens of links. Some of the links are tenuous and unlikely, yet I have used them to branch over to music I really like: Genesis to Peter Gabriel to Synergy (Larry Fast) to Zero 7 and Infected Mushroom.
Even if you don't sign up for a music service, you can do something similar with a large online store such as Amazon. You can only hear short samples, not the full song, but you can still navigate a web of connections.
It used to be that to even hear about obscure music, you had to subscribe to music newsletters or hang out in non-mainstream record shops or at least have a friend who did those things. Now you can click around from song to song, and if it takes you nine songs you don't like to find one you do like, you are still only out a couple of minutes. And if you are like me, and you listen to albums many times if you like them, it's totally worth spending a little time branching out. Add in a little bit of time looking bands up on Wikipedia and other sources, and you too can be as much of a music expert as someone who writes for a magazine.
The RIAA and the big labels fear this new world. They want to keep charging for music as if it were a scarce commodity. I read an interview with a guy from a studio, and he defended the high price of CDs: the price is fair because it's really hard to be a studio; you have to try to find new acts, and when you guess wrong, a whole bunch of CDs go into a landfill. Well, guess what: on the Internet, you can just provide the music, and if nobody likes it, it will just sit there; and if people do like it, you make pure profit. No CDs need be produced and then landfilled. The costs go way, way down with digital distribution. They want their costs to drop, while still charging the same inflated prices they try to justify on CDs; that won't work.
The future of music is: everything available on the Internet, at lower prices than if you buy CDs. Most artists will not bother to sign their fortunes over to big record studios; they will retain control of their music, and deal more directly with the customers. There will still be middle-men, but fewer of them, and they will make less money (which doesn't sound good if you are a middle-man but sounds pretty darn good to me). And absolutely nothing will go out of print. If an album sells two copies a year, it has paid back the costs of letting it sit on a server and it is already slightly in the black.
I remember, when I was in high school, how truly huge and popular certain bands were. Whether you liked them or hated them, you recognized Styx or Van Halen when you heard them. In the future, new bands may find it impossible to reach the same level of success and recognition, because everyone will fragment themselves into small sub-markets. It will be hard for any one act to capture everyone's full attention and hold it for more than a very short time.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Music is one way we find our cultural identity, and the information age created a way to reproduce performances and not just the sheet music, but compare this to the history of Bach and Telemann. While the music 'industry' rode a wave of new technology to fame and fortune, as times change there will be another way for another culture to show its own identity. I just hope this is in a way that reinforces individual freedoms of expression rather than conformity to a distant power, and the recent music explosion is doing just that. Pay for Play you say?
He's probably into subject since he was 3 or 4, kind of Mozart phenomenon :).
Seriously, I just hink you were blitzed by trivia-type expertise. To become expert in anything, time's required.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
With so much music to listen to, will such a person bother listening to a whole album from that artist, or will that person just listen to a playlist of singles? I'm inclined to believe that with infinite music available, you'd skim the top of the best hits of each artist, and omit discovering other songs on the album that would be worth investigating. Infinite music doesn't mean you have infinite time available to listen to it all. Wheras when you had limited amounts of music, you probably spent more time with each one of your limited number of cd's, and probably grasped aspects of it that you never picked up on the first or second listen. Even with itunes, will artists bother to make "albums" anymore? Maybe just a single every now and then is the way it's headed. It's too early for me to say whether that will be a good or a bad thing though.
Half of my lifetime is dedicated to listening to music, as well as a significant percentage of my income is spent on LPs, CDs and audio-centered equipment. I can say with certainty that I do not envy today's teenagers that can have it all "for free". In my humble opinion, TFA expresses emotional and pseudo-economical musings, without addressing the key philosophical (and political) issues:
1. What is today (and what was in the past) the relation between quality and quantity? How is society, especially the young ones, to discriminate between trash and masterpieces of music (or books, movies, art, knowledge, "information", at that matter)?
2. Can there be value without scarcity? Can there be wisdom without suffering? If the author had that abundance of free choice when he was growing up, would he be the same person he is today?
3. Isn't the highlighted quote "there's no longer any past - just an endless present" the most frightening of all, signaling the end of history, the end of capitalism and the end of the world as we know it?
The key question today is whether and how an individual can survive the over abundance of "free" without alienating himself. Humanity has changed irreversibly thanks to the Internet and IT, making knowledge accessible to all (mostly for free), but is this really a good thing (TM)? Does free access to libraries make society better? Does (free) radio educate listener's ears? Do free books at school make better students? Or free grades?
I am not a luddite, nor a posthuman condition evangelist, but I firmly believe that Education must reform itself drastically to equip pupils with tools for learning to navigate through and past noise, against thermal death due to overinformation, fostering individual diversity and creativity against consumerism (especially the consumerism of free stuff). Otherwise "there will be no future, just an endless present".
I realized recently that most music I listen to is to keep me focused during coding, or avoid boredom while driving or sitting around at home. The point is that it's utterly irrelevant whether the music that I listen to is popular or not. There are certain milieux in which it's important not just to listen to music, but also to listen to the same music your friends are listening to, as a point of common reference. I just wonder how often that matters these days. In my case it matters not at all, so even though my musical tastes are a bit fussy, I can just about completely satisfy my listening appetites with free downloads from archive.org, magnatune, and so forth. Those sites don't have the popular big-label stuff, but they have other stuff of similar style and quality, so it works out fine.
Is that it attempts to capitalize on something that is based on an emotional response, perhaps even an emotion need, some may argue. There is something about music gets us moving, or thinking, or crying or something. It's just uncanny how it works out sometimes. But music just gets whored out to the masses these days and no one even thinks twice about it. No one questions lyrics that don't even begin to make sense. No one questions why melodies haven't evolved much in the past 100 or so years of mainstream music. It's just something that inexplicably fills some emotional void that they probably were not even aware existed because music has always been here for us to listen to.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
i love my music and have far more available to me now than at any time growing up and it takes a toll just keeping it all in my head! I once would seek out and purchase an album and then listen to it over and over for weeks before I was able to get something new. now i get new tunes daily and it is a different experience - which i think is great. electronic acoustic and amplified all available practically on demand :)
how much information can any of us take in and absorb before the internet eats our brains
Thou Shalt Ignite That Which Burns.
Now he should try asking that kid about The Beatles. He may well find that the infinite music is not a continuum.
Infinite music? Great! Who's paying?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I'm 54 yrs old. I have dozens of albums/cds, collected over the years of my life. I spend a LOT of time listening to public radio as well as music borrowed from the public library.
I've not pirated a piece of music. I have downloaded music from the internet - but each piece is something free that groups I have found have made available for free. Sometimes, the group makes it available on their web sites. Sometimes, they make it available to someone doing reviews, or their labels make it available.
Do I hear every piece of music being made in the world? Nope. I don't _have_ to. Would I like too? Sure - but I'd like to taste dishes from every dining establishment in town, but I wouldn't walk in and steal their food because of something I wanted. I'll either buy a meal there, or I'll wait for someone to invite me out to dinner.
There is no need - or justification - for stealing music that an artist does not wish to make available for free.
I would, however, love to see sites being used by artists to make their music available for free be better known. "In the old days", I could rely on visiting myspace to pick up free downloads from groups. These days, that doesn't seem to be as common, but facebook iLike's app does provide some free downloads. Other sites, like download.com, as well as other genre specific sites, also regularly do so. And of course there are occasionaly singles available on itunes for free.
It would be great if there was one site which was sort of a 'clearing house' for any legit free music download on the internet. That would be a great invention! And of course, the legit internet radio sites are another wonderful source to at least hear the music (even if I can't put it on a personal machine for later enjoyment).
Like with Coal in the UK, every business model has its day. Before the records existed artists earned their fare by e.g. performing or from a rich patron.
Nowadays, kids and adults spend more money then ever on music. Only not for records. Mostly for performances, but also for subscriptions, etc. Just a technology that led to a boom, and disappeared. Artists earn not only from performances, but also by e.g. working with radio or tv stations.
.
and so is the opportunity... to screw another generation of consumers..( and perhaps the last )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Its just common sense.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For works published prior to 1978, and for works made for hire, "life" under United States copyright law is estimated as 25 years. But for works published prior to 1964, a maintenance fee was due in the 28th year, and this was not paid for a lot of works. "Unrenewed copyright" is the main source of relatively recent works in the United States public domain.
Here's what it will do. It'll force new individual musicians, or bands to become the record company, they'll have crappy websites, and always on the road playing venues, always rushed, and underhanded. (you try moving giant ass drumsets and amps and crap on and off a stage) Real record companies won't be going away, they have the resources to make the most kick ass art there is! It's what's on your radio, it's what's on your TV. Real people who go to shows will buy their cd, dvds, and other swag, who freaking wouldn't?! It's some of the most kick ass art there is. While it is a golden age of finding free music, it is not illegal. Lot's of bands give their music away and sell it as well. And regardless of if you think Real Record companies are going to disappear, there will always be a need for large volume publishers. And if you have kick ass product, people still will buy it, even if they are doin illegal shit on the web. Real people who go to real shows, buy real items they can hold in their hand, some even want them signed. Some don't! hehe some just go to have a place hang out and get buzzed a slam a mustard dog. That article in the BBC has some truths but don't go saying record companies are dead, that's just as stupid as saying email is dead, it's having trouble, but it ain't dead. Also note I didn't say record companies are not effected by the crap going on in our monetary system. I've seen record companies disappear. I've seen their three phase steam powered stamper equipment for sale on ebay! Not everything is all about big record companies either. Some small bands or individuals would never need so much overhead, muscle and resources as a big label can provide them, their feng shui would be off and they can't begin to handle such forces like success, planning, acting and such. There's a reason some make it big. They kick ass. They work hard. Don't forget that. I ain't even judging the Article writer at the BBC, but just don't forget that. The Article writer at the BBC said stuff mostly about bands I don't even care about for one thing. Does he even consider Labels like Century Media, Magnatune? Kind of opposite ends of the spectrum, but come on, this is trash. I will admit some of his article has merit, but not the "Hoot-ing hoot hoot dying die die big label" crap again.
Go put on some pants and protest soda or something fuck..
Copyright covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
Melodies are expressions.
That's why recordings of songs get copyright protection, but not the songs themselves.
In the language of U.S. copyright statute, your statement is written "That's why sound recordings are subject to copyright, but not musical works." The letter of the law contradicts you.
Lets just for simplicity assume that you can only have 100 distinct places to place a node, assume there are only 4 distinct nodes
Bad assumptions. Assuming eight notes of the scale and a general distinction between short and long notes, there are 16 distinct nodes. But more importantly, copyright infringement lawsuits have been won and lost over far fewer than 100 notes, closer to eight notes. See this analysis.
Did he just "think of the children" the pro-piracy side of the copyright debate??? Ok, now that's impressive. :)
...to your "problem" of availability. iTunes has done a pretty damn good job of making ALL kinds of music available to the world. So has the Internet in general, you can likely order any music you want off large portals like Amazon. You're not "smuggling" music across the border here, quit trying to justify the use of piracy like you have to. Lame excuse, regardless of how it affects the artist or not.
I love music. I continually rearrange playlists and certain combinations of songs remind me of evens in my life. I even have a dream where I win the lottery, quit my job, and become a communications major at a local university just to get a three hour slot every week playing music on the college radio station. And I'd be throwing some varied stuff in there too. Love On A Real Train by Tangarine Dream, Man I Hate Your Band by Little Man Tate, Throw Your Arms Around Me by Hunters & Collecters, Out Of The Dark by Hybrid, Big Rock Candy Mountain by Harry McClintock, Bouge De Là by MC Solaar, O Valencia! by The Decemberists... German, British, Australian, American, French, the whole nine yards regardless of genre or decade.
And if it weren't for Lavamus.com or PirateBay or YouTube I wouldn't have access to most of this when I wanted it. My interest in music means I buy more hard copies than I think I usually would (because I wouldn't know about the bands, let alone buy their albums). I go to more events. The musicians get the money from me BECAUSE of piracy, not in spite of it.
Oh, by "infinite music" I thought they meant algorithmically generated music. Like this piece of music from the Metamath Music Page.
A golden age for that? Were there breakthroughs in artificial neural networks I hadn't heard of? Or have musical expectations fallen just that low?
I do wonder what would happen if you took the output from a random number generator to make a valid MP3 file and then played back that MP3 through an Autotuner.
"...Music will become what it should be for most - a part time hobby."
I see. That how you feel? I wonder if others felt the same about IT SysAdmins? I mean, hell, most of the time a good SysAdmin will spend very little time actually working on their environment once it's stable. Should that job be treated as "part-time"? Ready to take a huge pay cut?
For some, music is their life. It's their lifes-blood. It's what they do. I don't see how you can "refuse" to buy an album from an artist, yet drop hundreds to "advertise" them. Irony, anyone? Your rebellious attitude is doing nothing but hurting the artist and the industry. When artists find that the business model is no longer a valid one due to piracy, the world will have very few artists.
Life + 70 means the creator's life + 70 years
So... to give our (great?) grand-children a free world, we should be killing off all the creators now right? :)
"Well you see son, there used to be this thing called a 'rock star', and they made music. But we had to kill them all to set the music free. It was the only way."
I don't think we should bother too much with the rock stars, they usually kill themselves quite quickly in one way or another. Let's focus our attention on the Backstreet Boys, Miley Cyrus, etc. Then again, we should ask ourselves; is this really the kind of music we want in de public domain?
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
I knew loads of people who had rooms *full* of cassette tapes. You could record music off the (freely broadcast) radio and all the car boot sales sold pirate tapes.
The idea that:
a) Every downloaded copy is a lost sale
and
b) P2P has somehow changed the piracy game.
Is ridiculous.
Some people just copy/hoarde, period. They're not going to buy legally no matter what.
No sig today...
This only holds true in a free and fair market: where, given a free choice, people spend their money on Britney Spears, etc.
The reality is a music market where in practice a cartel of music companies limit choice to maximise the money made on certain artists. They prefer, instead of running 10,000 artists, to sell 10-100, advertising 10.
Companies like Sony-BMG, etc. ceased contracts with _profitable_bands_, as they maximize their profits when marketing costs are smaller, concentrated on a small number of "superstars". The chosen artist benefitted, but mostly the record companies benefitted; the consumer lost choice, and the bands they would have purchased from lost big-time.
For this reason, I consider the record companies anti-music, and am happy to see them go. Its only the advent of easy copying that makes them divert from this policy.
Similar arguments hold for professional sports, unfortunately.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
Yep, 10 years ago, 16-year olds would listen and enjoy whatever was on the radio. Now you've got 16-year olds listening to every album by Booker T. & The MG's or The Animals, and enjoying it much more than the Top 40 crap.
This will probably have an effect we can't see very clearly yet on music making : anything goes. Think about it, until now you couldn't get a record deal if you wanted to make some kind of music that no one plays on the radio anymore. Now, it's like the whole world jumped in the giant ball pit of all the records ever made, and listening to whatever they like indiscriminately of how popular or how old it is. I think that means that a musician in any genre has now the potential to find his following, even if no one touched the genre in question for the last 40 years.
But it doesn't stop at just a new increased demand in the more obscure genres of music. If today a 16-year old's favourite musician is Miles Davis and the likes, if ten years from now he must become a musician, what are the odds he'll want to join a rock band, and what are the odds he'll want to blow into a trumpet? That's right, he's more likely to grow into the second coming of Miles Davis, and if he's anywhere near that good, a lot of people will listen.
This is what the mysterious future of music holds. You heard it here first!
You just got troll'd!
I like the way this article starts with "Over at the BBC", as if Slashdot is a publication of equal professionalism and reach.
with the completely unknowns actually benefiting because then they get exposure--if you haven't yet proved yourself, who is gonna buy your CD?
How do you get exposure when your music is buried under a snowdrift - smothered by the hundreds - perhaps thousands of files - from other no-name bands competing for attention?
Making music--good music--takes time and resources.
That it does.
Which raises the interesting question of whether piracy hurts some musical genres - and some musicians - more than others.
The obvious example would be the "big band" sound of a classical or jazz ensemble. Is there a place in this brave new world for a young Duke Ellington or a Louis Armstrong?
Making music--good music--takes time and resources. Time that you can't really make money on, and instruments and (nowadays) computer equipment that is not free. Unless you sell the music you're essentially losing money, in most situations. And no matter what some slashdotters CLAIM, yes, many people will not buy albums at all just because they can get them off soulseek or bittorrent or, god forbid, limewire.
A musician is someone who makes music even though they wouldn't be paid for it. I also once heard someone remark that a musician stops making music when they're dead.
Music is made in pubs and jazz clubs. Music is made in churches via choirs. In university auditoriums by a cappella clubs. People make music because they like making music. Albums are convenient, but music was around before the CD and the LP. If you want to support musicians, and not the middle man that is the RIAA and record companies, go to a concert hall.
As Nabikov remarked: I write for love. I publish for money.
If you love music you will go to the musician and support them and not the publisher.
Like every other product of culture, music is not something that materializes out of thin air - not without someone making that air vibrate. It's a finite commodity, produced on the efforts and skills of others, and will in fact dry up as soon as the people who create it can no longer continue to do so.
We already have a form of "infinite music" - DJing. But so far, DJs can't do very much to the music. They can play with timing and mixing, and maybe do some scratching, but that's about it.
Now look at Vocaloid 2. Load up a singer model, a lyrics file, and a MIDI file, and out comes reasonably good music. (It's in Japanese; this was the #1 program for sale on Amazon Japan for a while.)
Currently, building a singer model for Vocaloid requires about a week of work by the singer. Working backwards from existing music to a vocal tract model and a style model isn't yet available. But as machine learning techniques progress, that problem should be solved.
When a DJ has the option to play any song with any musicians, then we'll have infinite music. The day may come when musicianship will be an archaic art like calligraphy and oratory.
(Even better, the RIAA can't stop it. These are "covers", even though they're machine-generated. You have to pay the small statutory royalty to the composer, and you owe the musician and the recording company nothing.)
The ability to easily reproduce and distribute to a global audience.
There are only a few "the best" in any field. If you have access to the global best, why would you want anything your local best? Thus the money chases a limited number of stars, and as the audience expands globally, the stars get richer and richer.
Also, fame attracts fame. Especially when communication and publicity is global, a few acts will start rising and the feedback of fame will shoot them to the stars. This can concentrate attention and money on some acts, even when quality alone isn't enough to justify the focus.
This concentration on stars actually reduces the economic viability for all the smaller artists. It becomes like professional sports. A million kids want to be a star football player. Only a handful of them will ever make money at it, but because the dollar amounts are so huge it drives them all to work at it for free.
How would you solve this in the music industry? If you cut the money across the board, then you cut off the pipeline of struggling artists that produce the stars. If the local artists can't even make a little money moonlighting as musicians, then they'll have a hard time surviving long enough to get good and famous. And if there's not a chance of a big payoff, then they won't even try. Saying that an artist is unjustified in making $10 from an album just because it can be mass produced for less, means that any artist who's not already being mass produced never will.
Making music takes an incredible amount of time and effort. There has to be some economic incentive to make it happen or else the potential musicians will be too busy struggling with the other necessities of life. If you want to have thriving small-time musicians around the world, then ban the Internet, television, radio, and records.
I thought from the title "The Golden Age of Infinite Music" was going to be about technology to find and play or even generate music a person would like forever... or something like that. Instead it is basically about consumerism and leads into a tired debate on "property" rights.
So I would like to see something less depressing-- software that removes the need for artists to generate the largely uncreative music that is promoted by the record industry. The death of that industry by AI artistic software. The issues involved when somebody lays claim to the products of their software's random-like output or if it generates something too similar to part of some existing song; having no consciousness to be able to infringe. This could lead into bit streams of data and how silly it is to own one .... or how we decide what is similar etc. leading into the same old tired debates...
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Indie music won't completely take off, until anyone can quickly and efficiently submit MP3s to giant (and reasonable) outlets such as Amazon MP3, and have them for sale that minute. Something like submitting videos to Youtube, but for selling music instead.
It wouldn't be necessary, but a rating system in place such as the type from reddit.com would help to filter out the crud music, though of course, one could still find the crud if one wanted to.
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"The day may come when musicianship will be an archaic art like calligraphy and oratory. "
I don't think that will happen.
It is a little like CGI verses actors in movies. You can spend thousands of hours tweaking a computer animation, or you could just get an actor to read the lines in a couple of minutes.
The same with computer simulations of musicians. In the end it takes a very long time to put any realistic expression into a part by programming, and the result is always a little ersatz.
When recording, I often wish I could just get a string section in to play a part rather than have to deal with the endless twiddling and midi programming people do to get something that still sounds like robots. It's actually often cheaper to use real players, for two reasons: first they can make it sound good by musical interpretation of the part! and second it forces people to write the damn parts *before* they get to the studio!
I have nothing against sequencing and synths and samplers (i love them) but many people who have *only* programmed don't realise that there are sometimes very good reasons for using real players, and it's not necessaryly more expensive.
Calligraphy is a subset skill of good graphic designers.
So the art hasn't died.
Oratory is a subset skill of any influential diplomat or politician.
So there.
Music may become a subset skill of something else greater or higher. But it won't die off.
To be a good musician - you will still have to learn the theory and then practise.
Just like:
To be a good graphic designer - it helps to understand some of the concepts employed in calligraphy / kerning / brush textures .. etc
And I bet many politicians lusting for power : study hours on end - verbal debating skills. Are coached, buy books on the subject and so on (eg Oratory)
One thing that is both true and interesting here is that many people download because they cannot purchase. Not due to lack of funds, but availability. Unless they go to import stores *and* wait several months for said stores to get the latest foreign album, people who enjoy foreign music have no option aside from illegal downloading. Or buying foreign itunes gift cards. Personally I wish places like itunes opened up earlier. The main reason I stopped buying CDs is so many of them would have, at most, 2 songs I enjoyed listening too. And singles always cost *more* than compilation albums, usually became they came bundled with DVDs of the concert or something else I never wanted.
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The original 1790 Copyright Act was saner. 14 years with possibility of renewal, for 28 years max. That's reasonable length of time for a monopoly, and it gives the artist plenty of opportunity to recoup his labor costs via sale of the book/song.
So... Rickrolling should remain illegal in the US until my kids start college, gotcha. And what happens when different countries or localles do not apply the same copyright dates? Do you have to register for renewal in every major country? I could see someone writing a song, renewing at 14 years, but it goes public domain elsewhere.. someone else remixes it. Is the remix illegal to sell or own in the US?
The facts are simple, and the berne convention flouts the facts. Thanks to the internet, all media is globally distributable at condiment cost. More importantly than "how do you globally guarantee a monopoly" is "how do you prevent a globally-protected monopoly from running amok"? Telling big media it only gets to monopolize a slice of global mindshare for 28 or 14 or 2 years is like telling a mugger he can only have your wallet, not your car keys.
Let me ask you this: What value is the public domain? Why enrich it at all? If you're only going to dump 30 year old material into it, it must not be worth very much to you. Once you support copyright for a short period, it is bureaucratic folly not to support it perpetually. Who cares if today's boy band music leaves copyright in 2037 or 2129?
Abolish copyright. Artists can publish their work and use it's popularity to gain exposure instead of hypodermicly injecting it into the global cultural pantheon and then laying financial claim to everything it touches and charging to licence fleeting control to consumers over and how and when it is replayed. Artists can make money by marketing directly to fans and constructing dominant assurance contracts to have their work financed for original release. Once released, it is free for anyone in possession to share on their own terms. Word spreads about the agreeable material, hooking more fans into ponying up to finance the next album, or go to the next show in their area, buy physical merchandise, etc etc.
Claiming you need copyright to finance costs you incur today is a form of speculative temporal bargaining just as bad debt financing: speculating that enough money will come in to cover todays costs you charge to a credit card or a gambling addiction: speculating that you'll hit the jackpot to cover the quarters you're putting in the machine now. It's equally as habit-forming and dangerous too. Artists must learn to live within their means and finance todays costs today. You should arrange to be paid for completing the work, not for fleecing the global public for chances to share in hearing your canned, now zero-cost to redistribute product.
In the meantime I refuse to co-sign for your bad business model and I'll bittorrent whatever god damned content I see fit, because I and arbitrary third parties on the internet have every right to share whatever generic digital data we choose.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
RE: "And I'm sorry, but I won't stop listening to music or reading books just because I don't have money to buy them."
In the US everyone can read, listen to music, watch movies, etc. for free - at a public or school library if nowhere else. I imagine this is the case in many first world countries, but I acknowledge it may not be the same in Brazil.
On the other hand, there are over 20,000 books available for free on the Internet (Project Gutenberg, etc.) Many are classics. Sure - most are in English, but many have been or are being translated. Your English seems good - perhaps you can translate some into your native language?
Maybe you can't have everything, and exactly what you want - but few of us can you know. Most of us get by with some of our first choices, and then some secondary ones.
In any case the amount of free culture available is astounding. And you can create your own too.
If you want to pirate, then pirate. But don't make up excuses.
What the fuck are you talking about? Musicianship is writing and playing music. Even in your dystopian future where "DJ"s pipe MIDI to crappy sample models and call it music, they're still composing. Which means they're musicians.
Unless they aren't composing, just playing old songs with different models. If that's what you have in mind, then yeah, musicianship is dead, and the future is going to be incredibly dull. Whatever the case, I hope like hell you're wrong.
These days it is very cheap to record or synthesize music in your home. All you need is a desktop computer, nice monitors and some nice mics.
By FAR the hardest and most expensive part of being successful is the publicity end. The little guys need all the help they can get in that department, and giving away music for free is probably the easiest/cheapest way to do that
IAAM and I gladly put my music up for free and seed my own torrents. It's the cheapest way to a sale with zero effort.
So... Rickrolling should remain illegal in the US until my kids start college, gotcha. And what happens when different countries or localles do not apply the same copyright dates?
Some countries, such as the United States, recognize the domestic copyright term for foreign works. Some other countries observe the "rule of the shorter term", in which copyright in a foreign work expires the earlier of when it expires in the home country and when it would have expired had it been a domestic work.
Artists can make money by marketing directly to fans
In practice, until mobile broadband becomes much cheaper, FM radio stations will continue to have all the market power over this sort of promotion.
and constructing dominant assurance contracts
These alternative business models might work for music, but what should artists do who are in fields other than music that have gatekeepers? For example, say I develop video games in genres not ideal for PC (that is, not RTS or an M-rated FPS), and the console makers don't want to deal with me because I'm small potatoes.
go to the next show in their area
Unless the genre of music appeals to kids or teens, and most of the venues that allow indie bands are bars, which in some states don't allow even accompanied minors in the door.
is this because pre-recorded media has to be delivered to me in realtime?
I know several people who live in an area not served by cable or DSL. Almost nobody will stay connected to dial-up for one hour just to download a 30-minute music podcast.
If my car radio or Ipod downloads days or even weeks worth of podcasts of great music for me when docked or near my home wifi, it's just not as enjoyable?
Is the ability to download music standard equipment on recent cars, or is it an expensive aftermarket option? I've seen a lot of car radios with a CD player and a radio and no line in, or a CD player, a radio, and a tape player that ejects all line-in adapters.
if copying is possible then you can use assurance contracts to market to the would-be pirates.
Do you know of any firm that specializes in administering such assurance contracts?