Am I a Music Snob?: A Matter of Taste

This post is a response, or a riposte of sorts, to the teacup-sized tempest incited by my piece on Christmas number ones. You see, there were no negative comments on my own original post, but when my friend, JC, over at The Vinyl Villain decided to be hugely kind by re-posting it on his blog, comments flew in quite quickly and the majority of them were of the lambaste persuasion. I was frankly quite surprised and baffled, but JC, being the noble blogger he is, defended me several times before conceding that maybe he and I are in the minority when it comes to X-Factor singles, Christmas number ones and the complacency of the masses. Now, I don't have any particular hard feelings about the negative things that were directed at me (the very nature of public writing is the need for a tough skin), but I feel impelled, at the very least, to defend myself a bit and in the process, hopefully, provide some more clarity about my argument and thoughts. And at the same time, I can address some ideas I've been wanting to write about anyway. Whether this will end up digging me into some deeper chasm or not remains to be seen.

One of the most prevalent charges laid against me was that I was a music snob or elitist. Snobbery and elitism are present in every facet of life, especially in the realm of cultural or artistic objects like visual art, films and books, but perhaps are most rampant and rabid in the area of music. Music snobbery or "hipsterdom" is maybe as visible as it is because music is an omnipresent art that large amounts of the population enjoy, and the more fanatic people get about music, the more in-fighting and one-upping can occur. You can call it the Pitchfork Syndrome: a two-pronged phenomenon that takes in both the über-hipster persona of Ryan Schreiber and friends and the mob-like attitude to run either a critic or artist out of town. Like every other preference in the artistic world, music taste is used for both self-definition and group affiliation. People have a need to identify themselves in relation to the world around them - there wouldn't be so many personal profiles, blogs and widgets on-line if this weren't true. Humans have an innate sense of judgement and binary formation; by judgement, I mean a constant, often subconscious, impulse to classify people and things, and by binary formation, I mean a capacity to see everything in terms of opposites and contrasts. We want to be able to process information and our environment, and in order to do so, we often take shortcuts in pre-judging others and labelling as best we can before filing them away in our brains. It's not because we're hateful or petty - it's because we're human. Though some people are just hateful and petty, but that's a matter for a different time.

Ambiguity doesn't always sit well, and despite how much we try to fight binarism, it creeps in because we simply have no other way of talking about things in relation to each other. One of the first concepts we learn as children is opposites. For a further example of binaries at work, I took a course in 18th century literature that looked at the issue of sexual disguise and gender ambiguity; I completely understand the need for multiplicities in gender and sexual identity, but to say that it helps to create a theory called "female masculinity," doesn't completely work. Within that theory is the assumption that there are still fundamental differences between femininity and masculinity, but the theory needs this binary in order to make its point. So as to not completely digress myself senseless, I think that in order to discuss music, it is often inevitable that one classifies certain music as mainstream or alternative, and certain music as good or bad. Or at the very least, not as good as the good music. This is what music obsessives and critics do. There is no inherent value to any piece of art - despite endless arguments about aesthetics and high/low culture, the value is in what a piece means to people. Having said that, people, especially obsessives, classify and judge people by their tastes, and I think that most people align themselves with those of similar tastes and proclivities. It may not be guaranteed that I will not become friends with someone who loves Il Divo, obsessively watches hockey, or reads a lot of romance novels, but if they do all three, that likelihood increases along with the probability that I will not be able to have a very long conversation with him/her. That is how taste functions.

According to others, my suggestion that Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah was better than Alexandra Burke's is deeply flawed. Oddly enough, it's flawed because some of the people who commented see Buckley in the same light as Burke: singers whose cover versions released on a major label. Fair enough; however, I would argue that despite being on a label aiming to sell as many albums as possible, Buckley still comes at the song from an entirely different angle, and though time can be the only judge, I think Buckley's version is the timeless, unique one. Anyhow, at the heart of my previous argument was not some objective truth about who produced the best version of Hallelujah - it was about how each version made me feel. I acknowledge it's a completely subjective stance, but everything is subjective. No, no one put a gun to my head to listen to Burke's version, but I thought it was only fair to listen to it and then make a judgement rather than follow a knee-jerk reaction to an X-Factor cover of a classic song. It just so happens I truly didn't get anything out of Burke's version and I felt like her's missed the point of the song. I don't believe that Cohen's song is meant to be a schmaltzy power ballad.

I would also like to impress upon people that I do not love Buckley and his music because he drowned in a river in his 20s, nor even because he had the range of Pavarotti; I love his music because it means something to me and because it feels as though it meant something to him. Since I value Buckley's music independent of others' opinions about it, I could have cared less if Buckley ever made it back into the charts for Christmas or any other time; rather, I just think it's a little sad that the masses seem to enjoy stampeding without really thinking and without a real point (it's like everyone buying a copy of The Secret, the book on positive thinking that was preposterously popular a couple years ago, only to have the remainder forgotten in the bargain bin a few months later). Additionally, it's interesting that it seems Buckley's own post-humous fame and martyrdom have appeared to make him, on some level, just as mainstream as Burke, and now it gains someone more subcultural capital to reference Kathryn Williams. I had actually not been aware of Williams nor her version, but upon listening to her Hallelujah, I like it, especially for the fragility I think the song requires, but I will still never love it the way I do Buckley's. And that is merely an issue of taste, ergo, I will not think those who prefer Williams' version to Buckley's are snobs.

Some of my detractors claimed that I sounded like them when they were teenagers; this response makes me wonder whether expressing a critical opinion is only for the young. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't all that critical of the music industry as a teen; in fact, I rode wave after wave of Top 40 pop and rock for a few solid years (most music fans and friends I know now wouldn't have even talked to me then). Looking back at myself during that period actually confuses me because I cannot really connect with 90% of the music I loved then, and I often try to understand what kind of person I was and why I made the choices I did. All I can conclude is that I was still looking around and trying on different ideas and tastes to see what stuck, and like many adolescents, I was often influenced by my closest friends or the most immediate media sources. And maybe I had a pretty sheltered, naive outlook longer than others might have. Admittedly, I also never thought too much about what I was consuming, a realization that makes me much more aware now; life experience changes perceptions, and along with them, taste. As I aged, I kept growing and formulating my personality, and eventually, I ended up with what I would call my taste foundation - I may continue to shift and add to/subtract from the specifics that lie on top, but I don't think I will ever discard or waver from that established core of preferences in music, books, and films. I will never love a Shopaholic book, nor will I ever stop loving the Manic Street Preachers (the latter being a preference that is rarely fashionable).

For the most part, I don't bother raging against taste quibbles with the NME, Top 40 radio, or even MTV; when I do complain, my beef with them usually comes in with the amount and/or variety of music they deal with. And even then, my rants come in sporadic spurts as I negotiate some kind of bi-monthly bile. Most of the time I write about what I like in the hopes that I might expose someone else to something he/she may also like, and sometimes I might actually entertain at the same time - it just so happens I'm often at my most entertaining when I'm ranting. To rail against entities I don't even usually partake in seems pretty futile when I keep this blog as a hobby.

As for the counterarguments against a perceived connection between being comfortable and having a crap taste in music, I'd like to clarify here: I said that the news story I was watching connected economic crisis with comfortable music purchases, and in fact, I didn't agree with that assessment. I stated that the majority of people buying mass-marketed music purchase out of comfort nearly all of the time, regardless of economic situation. There's no doubt that economic crises often incite very artistic music; believe me, I'm well aware of the history of punk, post-punk/new wave, etc., and social circumstances shape music just like they do any other art form. However, in making the argument that it was significant that people were pushing music like that of the Sex Pistols into the Top Ten, one is already making a value judgement about music - in essence, that the Sex Pistols and punk (or Blondie, The Pretenders, et al) are better than some other type of music, including what can be termed "pop" music. The people pushing certain well-known bands and their albums into the top are often people who might only buy a few CDs in a year, and who spend their time on things other than searching for music beyond mass media sources. They are what I would consider casual music fans or listeners in contrast with the music fanatic category, in which many music bloggers fall into. Perhaps it was errant to call the latter category "real" music fans in my earlier post; I was trying to get at the fact that those who take a much more active and/or obsessive interest in music -and, thus, in looking harder for music that doesn't get advertised or marketed the same way popular music does - need alternative channels, which I firmly believe the Internet has allowed for. The music industry is changing slowly but surely, and as a music fan, I want to be part of that rather than support a dead horse that is beating itself to death.

I would also like to address the fact that it seems people think I equate people who like mainstream music to slobbering, acquiescent idiots. I apologize if that's how it came across; there's no point making generalizations in the first place - there will always be numerous exceptions to a rule and reams of anecdotal evidence. I do think that a more general attitude towards being comfortable can be affected by smaller acts of comfort and complacency that reach a critical mass. Having read too much Neil Postman and Aldous Huxley, I can't just perceive entertainment as innocuous anymore, and all I really want is for people to think more and to take a less passive role in the information, including entertainment, they consume. What my whole issue with Christmas number ones, X-Factor and mass market music all boils down to is the predictability of it all. I will always view complacency and aversion to new things as stifling, and in some political cases, a dangerous thing. There's a time to unwind and feel mindless, and maybe exposing the inner machinations and manufactured hype of the music industry in reality shows like X-Factor is actually some new form of Pop Art or the television equivalent of the Pompidou Centre, but my fear is that too many people never think about it that way and that too many would rather stay in a state of amused mindlessness all the time.

Should I never express a critical opinion of music I don't like or see value in? I hope not. Ultimately, we're all a little hypocritical when discussing snobbery because having opinions and interests that you feel strongly about will inevitably pit you against other people with strong opinions and interests, and in pitting yourself against someone else, you are attempting to argue that your choice is superior to another's. If you don't have any opinions or interests, you're likely not going to be accused of being a snob, but then again, you won't have much of a personality either. There's also a part of me that thinks music fans, or fans of any sort, enjoy bantering over obscure trivia and feeling different from those who would never understand. I'm not and never will be one of the "cool" kids (any glance between my blog and countless other more popular ones will tell you that), but I don't aspire to be. If there is anything negative attached to hipsterdom, it's the artificiality of it - pretending to be or like things you don't just to appear either forward-thinking or cool. I'm wary of hype not because I'm afraid of looking like an unoriginal bandwagon jumper, nor because I worry about looking out-of-step with hipsters, but because I've been disappointed too many times and sometimes time is the only thing that can provide me with clarity. And at the very least, I'd like to be honest about my tastes. In the end, I'm glad that people challenged me because it made me think a lot harder about what I was trying to say and it helped me refine it.

If loving the music I love or expressing my opinions in the way I do make me a music snob or an elitist, then I'll just have to accept that. And after all, the beauty of the Internet is the fact that you have choice, so in the event I'm too offensive, you definitely don't have an obligation to read my blog or listen to the music I post. Hopefully, the one thing we can all agree on is that we take music seriously. In some cases, too seriously.

And as for my choice of diction in the earlier post...artless and artificial are not actually redundant when the former means without skill or finesse and the latter means manufactured or insincere. But there's no point nitpicking, is there?

Hipsters Are the New Jocks! - MESH

Cool Scene - The Dandy Warhols

The "New" Music Industry: frYars and Bandstocks

I happened to be on London-based musician, frYars' MySpace page and discovered that a full-length album called Dark Young Hearts is in the works. After two excellent EPs, I was excited, and when I discovered how he was accomplishing it, I was intrigued. frYars is using Bandstocks, an organization that acts as a fairer middleman between fans and musicians, allowing fans to invest in the artists in return for both some of the profits and recognition. I signed up for a free download of the new frYars MP3 entitled Visitors (which features some vocal help from Dave Gahan), glanced briefly over what Bandstocks was and frYars' proposal to potential investors, and then went on my merry way to mull things over. I was reminded about Bandstocks again when I was sent the free MP3. In the process, I also discovered that frYars (real name: Ben Garrett) was, in fact, the first artist to sign up with Bandstocks' funding model.

Apparently, an investment of £10 buys you:

- a download (except for VAT) of the whole album
- a name credit on the album and on the Bandstocks website (if you want one)
- the right to buy (at extra cost) a special limited edition of the album signed by frYars
- special booking privileges for concerts
- special merchandise offers
- a share of the net receipts generated by the album

For this funding model, though, you have to be a UK resident over the age of 15, and if you're not, you would have to appoint a trustee in the UK to act on your behalf. Also, Bandstocks ensures that the artist receives 50% of the net profits, which seems a much better deal than with major label contracts (at least to my knowledge). And the catches already seem to be presented up front: you are not guaranteed any money back and you get a free, high-quality digital copy of the album you invested in (notably not a physical one, but you get a chance at a discounted price for the physical ones). It's all very interesting, but this isn't the first business model for musicians to emerge in the wake of the music industry crisis.

Sites like Amie Street, an organization which offers music initially for free download, but with an increasing price tag as the music gets more popular; Sellaband, a very similar set-up to Bandstock created by ex-major label executives two years ago; and Slicethepie, a site which allows fans to invest in musicians both financially and via scouting and review-writing, are also attempting to re-write the rules on how the music industry works. If anything, these sites are opening up the exact same music industry system that has existed for the past eighty years to anyone with some money to spare and an interest in music, which isn't a bad thing. How well these models are working at the moment is difficult to gauge. Then again, it can be difficult to determine the value and success of art outside of the financial framework. There are many musicians out there making music that I assign a lot of value to, but who aren't making very much money off their work at all.

Perhaps what I find most interesting about frYars decision to use Bandstocks and fans' investments is the fact frYars isn't exactly an unknown artist. He has been critically acclaimed by several "official" sources, including even the generally out-of-touch NME, toured with the likes of Goldfrapp, and worked with people in the music industry like Luke Smith, ex-Clor guitarist, and now Gahan. I would think his profile is sufficiently high enough to gain a record contract in the traditional way. This then leads me to believe that this was a conscious choice on frYars' part, a choice which eschewed the regular channels of the major labels and their subsidiaries, a choice which puts power in the hands of those who already feel emotionally invested in his art, a choice which makes frYars seem rather smart. I would think this is a way to be accountable to the people who matter the most to an artist: the fans. Interestingly, Patrick Wolf, who shares some similarities to frYars in terms of offbeat style and who has already found relatively large success around the world with the major label release of his last album The Magic Position, is also due to release his fourth album Battle by using Bandstocks. Wolf explains his reasons for doing so a lot better than I can here.

As of yet, I haven't invested in any artist via these channels, but I like to think I still have invested by continuing to purchase music, especially from independent artists and labels, by attending concerts when I can (sometimes even when I can't), and by maintaining a blog like this that attempts to give free publicity to the artists I want to see succeed. Being a real music fan is also a sizeable emotional investment that I'm prepared to make to those who warrant it. Perhaps I will invest in some bands up front in the future, especially when I'm gainfully employed, and I'm eager to see where this new system of capitalistic patronage will end up. It's not exactly a new music industry, but it's a start.

Visitors - frYars

The Novelist's Wife - frYars

Not Down With Prince

A couple of weeks ago I had a hankering for watching a Prince music video. I didn't really care which one it was as long as it was from the 80s. When I searched for any on YouTube, I barely got any hits and when I clicked on one for When Doves Cry, the video played without sound. I was puzzled, tried a different video, and got the same result: a muted music video. Finally scrolling down to the comments area, I discovered that all Prince videos on YouTube wouldn't have sound because the Artist himself was trying to "reclaim the Internet." This meant he was attacking any and all "illegal" uses of his property, including both his music and videos. For some reason, I hadn't been aware of this controversy at all for the past couple of years.

According to stories from a year ago, Prince hired a British-based company called Web Sheriff to hunt down those who were using his material in a pirately fashion. They've gone after sites like YouTube, Ebay and Pirate Bay on his behalf. It's actually quite fitting that a prince should be attempting to suppress pirates with a sheriff. The problem being that Prince is yet another in the long line of people misunderstanding the Internet and its potential for the future of music and promotion. I know I keep coming back to this issue on this blog, but it's something I feel quite passionate about.

I can fully understand not wanting your copyrighted work to be sold as pirated copies via Ebay (although I've never come across any pirated music except for bootleg concerts) or to be distributed free via torrents, but uploading Prince's music videos or using his songs in YouTube video clips isn't pirating in the same way. YouTube is often the only place people can view what they want on demand - before the giant Mighty Boosh purge a year ago, I was first introduced to the series via YouTube. How else was I to watch a series that is only broadcast on foreign networks and can only be purchased in a different region code? And because of the exposure on YouTube, I ended up becoming a huge fan, buying all three series and the live DVD in Region 2, and then buying a DVD player that could play them. Not to mention BBC iPlayers don't work for anyone outside the UK, which has forced me to find alternate, seemingly "illegal," ways to watch documentaries or series that I can't find any other way. The BBC has been particularly ornery when it comes to watching their content; not only have they had tons of clips removed from YouTube, but they don't allow foreign viewers to watch their clips via YouTube unless they're posted to the BBC Worldwide account. A completely counterproductive tactic. If those at BBC were on the ball, they could see YouTube as a marketing measurement tool. The more people trying to watch a particular show or series from other parts of the world, the more they could potentially market their product there by releasing on an appropriate format.

And when I want to see a music video, I won't be sat in front of the television waiting for a Prince music video to pop up on the music video channel. Hell would be having a toboggan party before I would see a music video from anybody on music television. YouTube has transformed the music video industry in that any artist with any budget can get exposure without television executives, advertisers and programmers getting in the way. The fans who are posting Prince music videos are not personally profitting from them - they are merely providing a service to other Prince fans. The greed is not coming from them, it's from Prince himself. It's a shame that someone who has had such a visionary career in music can't see the future this time. It's also rather ironic because Prince apparently received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 because he was the first artist to release an entire album exclusively on the Internet. Of course this isn't hugely surprising for someone as conflicted as Prince is.

All Prince has succeeded in doing is creating a backlash akin to ones both Madonna and Metallica have experienced. Several videos like the one above are protesting Prince's actions, and Prince fan sites banded together as Prince Fans United to take on the legal take-down requests. Despite this, Prince has continued the crusade, including taking down all fan footage of his cover of Radiohead's Creep at Coachella this year. However, just as Prince has said, you take down one and hundreds more crop up the next day - I managed to watch the Creep cover here (aside from blistering guitar solos, not too much to be excited about). Fighting the proliferation and nature of the Internet is a losing battle, and any victory is a pyrrhic one. As Radiohead has proven, established artists can both continue their success and work within the new framework of technology and music distribution. And with someone like Prince, whose live performances and music videos have been intrinsic to his success, allowing footage of him (which would have been public in the first place) to circulate would only benefit him, especially at this later stage of his career.

I've been a Prince fan since I was a teenager, but this hasn't been the first time I've felt burnt by him. Six years ago, Prince came to Winnipeg, but tickets were well over $100 a piece, so I, being a financially-challenged student, didn't go to the show along with many others who viewed the price tag as exorbitant. I then found out that he performed a much cheaper aftershow at a small venue, but it was too late. The fact I only just found out about this more recent controversy probably says something about how much I've been following Prince these days. Apparently I'm just as out of the loop as Prince is - we're both still caught up in the good old days from 20 years ago.

Sign O' The Times - Prince

Creep (Live at Coachella) - Prince

Read All About It

Through life's strange twists and online accessibility, my MA thesis, Does NME Even Know What a Music Blog Is?: The Rhetoric and Social Meaning of MP3 Blogs (see earlier post), is now available as a book published by VDM Publishing. That's the good news. The perhaps not-as-good news is the fact it is priced at $64 US - I have officially become a part of the artificially inflated academic book market. Currently, the only place where it actually appears to be in stock is on Amazon US and Target, and is listed, but not yet in stock on Amazon UK and Amazon Germany. I definitely don't intend to get rich from this, but at least it feels like I didn't sacrifice a chunk of my sanity for nothing, and I still feel the current technological climate of the music industry and its counterpart of music journalism is a fascinating area that needs far more exploration, academic and otherwise. It's exciting to think that I've contributed in some way to this global dialogue, especially since I couldn't find any secondary academic sources about MP3 blogs when I was researching. It's funny how, as a child, I always imagined my first published book would be a novel - then again, I also thought I'd grow up to be both a scientist and an artist.

At any rate, this will likely be the first and last time you'll find me tooting my own horn, so to speak. I'd much rather promote other people, which I suppose I did inadvertently in the book as I used numerous examples from MP3 blogs and their aggregators. However, as I tended to argue in the book, promoting others really comes down to some sort of self-promotion anyway. I'm ready to go back to the more imperceptible kind.

Inside the Electronic Revolution - Cabaret Voltaire

Oh! Vanity - Charlatans

Sound the Last Post, Then Unite and Take Over

I, like many MP3 bloggers, am deeply disturbed by the information gathered on a post over at The Vinyl Villain. JC has collected links to the following posts that all address the current censorship and bullying that is taking place in the MP3 blogosphere:

To Die By Your Side Post
Song, By Toad Post
Teenage Kicks Post
17 Seconds Post

I encourage you to read them all because each of them provides a slightly different insight into the rash of MP3 blog post removals, specifically by Google's Blogger. I would also like to add a couple of my own links to relevant stories, including this story about Metallica and the Muxtape story. Now, as many of you know, I've been studying MP3 blogging with a fair amount of depth this past year, and as far as I could tell, most MP3 bloggers appeared safe from legal action because of the ephemeral nature of most download links, because of their disclaimers about asking for removal of MP3s, and because of the fact that as long as they posted only a few MP3s, and not full albums, they were operating under the following "fair use" clause of the Copyright Law:

"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."

As evident through the above bloggers' stories, this safety net has been torn from under us. Now there are talks of blogs disappearing and/or going underground (ie: email subscription services), but what I fail to understand is what record labels hope to gain by attacking MP3 blogs. Have they heard of torrents? Is it because it's easier to target a bunch of relatively small static entities rather than massive networks whirling around the globe? To treat MP3 blogs and their offshoots as though they're the same as the P2P filesharing frenzy started by Napster in the late 90s, is utterly ridiculous. There are so many flaws in these actions on the part of both major record labels and Google, but I would like to point out a few pertinent ones.

Firstly, how can archaic copyright laws be applied to drastically new developments in technology? How can you steal something whilst leaving it with the person you "stole" it from? This process is one of cloning, not of physical products leaving one spatial location to be in another. And after being in academia so long, I know the copyright law well enough - of course you can't photocopy a whole book, but you can definitely copy portions that you need for your studies. The reason why this analogy doesn't quite work is because photocopying a book would be a lot more time-consuming than downloading and burning an album or several. But I would like to point out the fact that research and epistemological processes have been built upon the foundation of citation. You cannot write an academic piece of literature without references, citations and examples from previous works to bolster your argument. Well, MP3s are bolstering our arguments. We are not plagiarizing entire books, we are providing our examples. Consider our MP3 links to be inside quotation marks.

Ideas and art do not spring from a vacuum. This is the civilized world that literacy ushered in. Once thoughts and information could be recorded for reference, they could be easily used to continue building on, generating a sense of progress. Science and technology themselves couldn't have gone anywhere without the free flow and dissemination of information. Knowledge generates knowledge, and by preventing access to ideas and cultural artifacts, big businesses are only killing civilization as we know it. However, when you take a look at the history of communication, we are merely repeating it. When the printing press became more widespread, copyright laws were created by those that feared losing power, and restrictions were placed on who could produce printed news and books, but eventually, progress broke the elitist hold and the presses were opened again. This is not to say that censorship isn't alive and well and that "free" societies are actually completely free and democratic.

In the current state of the world, it is becoming increasingly apparent that information is the new power, not military. Wars shall be fought with information and gathered intelligence - knowledge is indeed power. Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model makes the point that journalism is greatly shaped and filtered by restricting means of production and communication to only those who have the financial means to do so. These filters are firmly entrenched in the world of journalism, so much so that they tend to be invisible to most people. I suggest you read Manufacturing Consent to illuminate this fraudulent concept of freedom of speech. My worry is how these filters will eventually find their way from the world of "official" journalism to the world of "unofficial" journalism. In some ways, they already have. For those without the money for a computer or high-speed Internet, MP3 blogging wouldn't be an option in the first place. But soon the privileged, but non-elite people who maintain MP3 blogs could be silenced, too. If more of the financial elite get control over the Internet and its applications, the supposed freedom of online communcation and creation will completely disappear. My only hope is that there will continually be innovative people one step ahead, using their individual brains and sources of knowledge.

The issue here is primarily MP3s - I highly doubt blogs that merely discuss music without free downloads are being targeted in the same way. In many ways, MP3s are art, but they are also literally encoded information, so by stopping bloggers from using a few samples, music labels are obstructing the flow of information and attempting to curtail individuals thinking for themselves. Music fans are gaining power through being able to sample before buying, so record labels need only fear if their artists aren't good enough to convince people to purchase their product. It's hard to believe that the people in charge of the music industry have any business acumen at all with the absurd strategies they're using. These strategies include the hidden Copyrighting Board Private Copying Tariff on the prices of blank audio cassettes and blank CDRs.

Secondly, it seems mad that record labels haven't learned from their first go-round in which they fought the very technology that affected the future of their industry/commodity. Now, they're fighting the future of music publicity. It's like reaching for the bail bucket on the Titanic. The removal of MP3 blog posts is a pyrrhic victory for the music industry and a classic case of the music industry gnawing on the hand that feeds it. To attack people who have provided disclaimers and expired links, is an exercise in futility and ends up infringing on the property of others. And these others are the "real" music fans -the ones who actually buy music and go to live shows as opposed to the casual music fans who don't care whether they get all their music from torrents and who will likely never be the target market for excessive music buying.

It appears that Coxon of To Die By Your Side could have been targeted because he wrote a critical review of Cold War Kids' latest album. Well, I did, too - here. And perhaps one of the reasons I haven't had my post removed yet is because I'm still flying under the radar and not generating huge traffic. I, like most other bloggers, have had plenty of positive feedback from the artists themselves, who are happy that their art is being exposed to the public by people who are just as passionate about it as they are. Unlike the music industry, and to an increasingly greater extent, the music journalism industry, many MP3 bloggers view music as art, not as strictly a commodity. If the music industry is so in tune with the laws of capitalism, they should recognize the moment when a business has to adapt or die - that moment has already come and gone, but the industry has found no viable solution for itself; thus, industry people busy themselves by bullying those that can't feasibly fight back so that they can feel proactive rather than the lumbering retroactive people they are.

Fear generates fear. The obsolete middlemen in the music industry are fearing for their livelihoods, and are thus using fear tactics upon both blog hosts like Google and MP3 bloggers. I refuse to be fearful. If and when it comes to sounding my last post, I, along with other music fans, will find a new way of communicating because the process that literacy set in motion cannot be stopped. If we are to be viewed as shoplifters, then all I have to say is: Shoplifters of the world unite and take over.


Shoplifters Of the World Unite - The Smiths

Can the Haves Use Their Brains - McCarthy

The Pirate's Dilemma: Selling Out is the New Cool

I recently finished reading Matt Mason's book The Pirate's Dilemma and I was struck by the positive tone of his analysis of the act of the piracy. He looks at piracy at various points in history, but with most of the focus on the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and he views it not as an anti-establishment act but as a fantastic capitalistic force. Mason is very careful to reiterate time and again that he is not proposing a digital communism (you wouldn't want to be blacklisted by McCarthy now would you?); instead, he views pirates and their acts as business opportunities and sources of healthy competition for the capitalist system. Naturally, I have several problems with his argument.

While Mason's subtitle is How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, I would argue that capitalism isn't reinvented in this case - it is merely sped up. Ideas are just moving about the world at a faster rate and we're cycling through from one to the other at hyperspeed. We as the human race are not nearly as novel and progressive as we like to think. The way I see it we're going around in circles but the circles are getting slightly larger every time, encompassing more cultural objects and practices for market exploitation. Subcultures are being snapped up by profiteers at a breakneck speed, but thankfully, it seems there will always be some truly innovative, interesting people who will keep abreast of it and give the best chase they can. Just as media conglomerates buy up popular web applications and sites, new ones spring up to fulfill the needs of those avoiding the trappings of a financial consumer-based system. This reinvented capitalism is merely pushing youth culture further and further underground until it pops up the other side in China, where it can be mass-manufactured by children.

It's the classic case of coopting the cool kids, which has gone on for as long as there have been cool kids. Coolhunting kills what it finds, and is thus self-perpetuating, but hardly revolutionary. Reinvention implies creativity and innovation, which are exactly what is relinquished when subcultural activities go corporate and depend on advertising dollars. Capitalism at its very core has always been based upon creative and innovative people with the ultimate goal of making financial profit; you can't reinvent the wheel, and you can't reinvent capitalism.

Mason contends that piracy is good for the market because it demonstrates what people really want, and thus what can be most profited by, and then forces the bigger corporations to alter the way they operate to regain the market share they overlooked or misestimated in the first place. It's a rather utopian attitude that ignores the disgusting hypocrisy in branding a revolution. We've always liked to be inspired by renegade heroes from Robin Hood to Captain Jack Sparrow, and Mason plays off this warm and fuzzy feeling of DIY pirates fighting the system, but in his version, the best heroes end up just as corporate as their enemies - Robin Hood trades in his jerkin for a business suit and becomes an executive. Success is still only measured in dollars, not in strengthened community, not in ethical improvement, not in intellectual stimulation.

Another issue that needs to be explored in relation to this book's case is that of value. Most of the time, especially as capitalism grows older, value is an artificial concept. Money itself is a primary example of artificial worth - there is no inherent worth in the bits of metal and paper in our wallets. It is a universally agreed upon semiotic system that is no better or no more sophisticated than a game of Monopoly. Rules create value. Mason is rather excited by the idea of a 3D printer, which he mentions several times throughout his book and which is a machine which can basically produce anything you program it to - for example, you could print yourself your own pair of sneakers. Mason appears to see this invention, which can even replicate itself, as a boon for third world countries and those who don't have access to the expensive means of production. Does he not see the potential disaster for the very capitalist system he's championing? If anyone can print any object indefinitely, including the means of production itself, what worth will anything have in the current system based on artificial value assigned according to supply and demand? Does he not remember the financial inflation disaster of the Weimar Republic that ultimately led to Hitler? You can't just print more money to make everyone richer; unfortunately, our system doesn't work that way. And hasn't this easy self-replication and self-distribution already proven its own results in the arena of MP3 filesharing?

People are increasingly less willing to pay for music, movies, etc. that can be available for free. This phenomenon is displaying in a rather palpable way the value placed on art and cultural objects in this time period. There's no denying that art is subjective and its very worth is bound up in that subjectivity. What makes Damien Hirst's pieces of art worth millions? An agreement by the elite (those with the capital and power to sway the masses) that it is valuable. Are we moving into an era in which we all realize this artificial worth? Will we end up only paying for those things with immediate practical worth like food, shelter or fuel? What kind of society will it be if art is perceived as public property and not a commodity? Without patronage, artists may cease creation in favour of actually making money doing something more profitable to survive. Or art may end up as strictly a hobby or career sideline, as it is for several artists already. Honestly, I don't know if either of these options are good ones or not. All I know is that a world without art of any kind would be one without value, artificial or otherwise.

Mason notably uses several examples from the music world for his argument, including the musical styles/subcultures of punk, disco, house, dub, and hip hop, and musical issues like that of pirate radio, fanzines, and filesharing. Though I didn't have too much of a problem with Mason's writing style for the most part, I did feel cheapened by his little tutorial sessions at the end of many of these sections in which he "teaches" you how use these subcultural concepts to become a successful capitalist. For example, he takes you through how to use the DJ concept of the remix to "remix" your own business idea, comparing your target market audience to a dancefloor crowd. These rather useless "lessons" read like those crappy business how-to books that use ridiculous analogies to sell simple ideas to businesspeople (Ping the Frog, anyone?). Even more revolting is the "game theory" portion at the end of the book. No wonder Seth Godin provides the pull quote on the cover of the book.

Summing up the crux of Mason's flawed argument, his entire chapter on hip hop seems completely contradictory - Mason maintains hip hop is the perfect subculture because it is both underground and market savvy. These two ideas don't gel for me. Either you're anti-establishment or you're not, and that's the true pirate's dilemma if there is one in this argument. If DIY start-up FUBU (which stands for "for us, by us") needs massive hip hop celebrity LL Cool J to give it the kick in visibility it needed to become a multi-million company, how is it escaping the celebrity endorsement that GAP used him for at the exact same time. Can you punk a system by using the same system that you initially refused to do so? And who is "us" in FUBU's context now that the creators and owners of it are clearly not in the same position they were in when they began the enterprise? Would FUBU be okay with someone selling knock-offs of its products in the name of "punk capitalism"?

Selling out becomes an inevitability in a system where seemingly impractical goods and services depend on those in power to bestow worth upon them. Different audiences have different value systems. Once Pete Tong and Trevor Nelson made the move from pirate radio to BBC radio, the audience changed along with the artificial value in terms of subcultural capital - once everyone can access the same music and the underground moves up a floor, the original value disappears in favour of a general market value. We're dealing in meaning, not numbers. Selling out becomes subculturally bankrupt in order to be financially successful.

As sad as it is to admit, human beings are greedy and self-centred and haven't shown any growth or progress in overcoming this problem. It is why communism failed. It is why capitalism hurts more people than it helps. Overall, Mason's book is a fairytale story of cooptation, not of beating the system. Don't pretend that being a renegade can coincide with being a profit-driven mogul - you haven't bucked the system, you haven't even changed or reinvented it. There isn't much of a leap between DIY pirate to corporate pirate. Piracy just seems to be a method of putting a neon sign around the loopholes in the system, so that those in power can continue to bulk up the regulations and stitch these holes shut. It seems the only dilemma in sight is a false one in which our only two real choices seem to be exploitation for profit or a largely ignored labour of love. Perhaps it's not so false after all.

See The Pirate's Dilemma Web site for more of Matt Mason's "punk capitalism."

I Fought the Law - The Clash

The Procession of Popular Capitalism - McCarthy

Does NME even know what a music blog is?: The rhetoric and social meaning of MP3 blogs

Well, here's the fruit of my four hardcore months of labour: my MA thesis on MP3 blogs. I had a few qualms about posting it here for download, not for intellectual property rights (because that would be rather ironic given the content of the thesis), but because I still feel there's so much more to be done and I know I could potentially have more reactions and responses than I can handle. For those who download and read it, bear in mind, I needed to make an argument of some sort, so I can understand there will be counterarguments and/or disputes with what I came up with, especially from those bloggers who have far more experience in the actual act of blogging than I do. Having said that, I will appreciate any and all comments and criticisms (unless of course you all pick up your pitchforks and run me out of the blogosphere). At any rate, it seems the powers that be have signed off on this thesis (thankfully, without any requests for revisions), and I think I'm in the clear to graduate with my MA degree. What comes next is anyone's guess...

Does NME even know what a music blog is?: The rhetoric and social meaning of MP3 blogs (Megaupload)

And some song treats to help the academia go down:

College - Johnny Boy

A Strange Education - The Cinematics

The Girl Who Wanted to Be God: Gender and Music

Gender has been a fascinating concept for me, especially ever since I started university eight years ago. I've only taken two courses that actually dealt with gender directly (one on the Rhetoric of Gender and the other on Sexual Disguise in the 18th century), but they were enough, along with my general interest in androgyny, to give me a good sense of gender as a social construct. Even within the context of gender classes, where people should be most open to gender variation and ideas, I felt like a bit of a square peg because I'm not some militant feminist. To be particularly ornery, I would always twist my essay topics into ones that either dealt with androgyny or masculinity as a concept - the rest of the class likely had the feminist issues covered anyway. Admittedly, feminism is/was important, especially considering the track history of the world, but I figure that gender equality should work both ways when gender performance theory is concerned. Men are performing just as much as women are. And I generally don't care for stereotyping and those who feel they must adhere to gender stereotypes. Then again, maybe this is because I don't often fit into one very neatly.

One particularly irritating stereotype is the one that implies females cannot be involved in music the same way males can, whether it be as an artist or a critic or a fan. Sure, females can be artists, but they'll always run up against some sort of crazy catch-22 where if they're too masculine, they're betraying their femininity, but if they're too feminine, they're just playing into female stereotypes. Just read Simon Reynolds and Joy Press's book The Sex Revolts to experience this frustration (I disagreed with several points in the book's argument, especially the chapter that dealt with The Clash and the Manic Street Preachers, which argued that both bands were so homosocial and "gang-like" that they deliberately excluded women from their worlds - anyone who actually knows anything about both bands couldn't possibly criticize them for this borderline misogynist attitude). Additionally, sure, there have been female music journalists/critics, just not nearly as many as male ones, nor as many famous ones - I know that I haven't ever been aware of being a fan of a female music journalist or critic. And as far as music fans go, most music magazines are clearly aimed at a male market as males are assumed to be the most fanatical and obsessive when it comes to loving music. Females are often portrayed as being less critical in their music choices and as lovers of popular music rather than alternative styles, that they are more suited for fawning, groupie-like behaviour than that of intelligent connoisseurs. It's all ludicrous from my point of view, but then again, just by scanning through the MP3 blogs out there and The Hype Machine demographics, I would have to admit that the vast majority are written and consumed by males.

In the research I've done on blogs and general blogging behaviour, it seems more females blog than males, but that they are more likely to favour the diary style as opposed to the filter style, which is arguably more objective and usually about topics and issues outside of the blogger's personal life (ie: politics, technology, etc.). When doing my own primary research about MP3 blogs, I noticed a plethora of styles that couldn't be concretely linked to the bloggers' genders. In many cases, bloggers, including myself, use pseudonyms that don't readily reveal the bloggers' genders. To be honest, I hadn't really thought too much about whose blogs I was reading in relation to their gender identity - selection of music and writing style most often draw me to particular MP3 blogs more than anything else, which I assume is the case for most other MP3 blog readers. At least I hope so.

Interestingly enough, I received a comment awhile back on a post I wrote about not wanting to grow up; it stated that the feelings I was expressing were a "boy thing." I've also been called a "dude" or "guy" in other places by other bloggers and once or twice in comments on my YouTube videos. I find this rather fascinating from a rhetorical standpoint - it means that something in my style or rhetorical presence connotes masculinity. At this point, I don't quite know what it is since I analyze enough rhetoric without bothering with my own (I'd rather not be too conscious of the how in case it affects and influences my future writing). Admittedly, ever since I was younger I read books mostly by male authors, but did that really shape me and my future writing style, or was there something in my nature that drew me to them first? And why can I only share my musical fanaticism with males (most of the females I know get glassy eyes after I ramble on too long about music)? Is any of this related to each other? I hadn't until recently realized how out of place I seemed in my attitude towards music (and several other things, mind), but gender performance and societal expectations seem to explain this issue.

Though the song, The Girl Who Wanted to Be God, was definitely not one of the Manic Street Preachers' finest moments, it still holds some of Richey Edwards' most cryptic lyrics as far as I'm concerned (okay, Revol is also a bit of a mystery). Having a history of writing songs that either criticized or bemoaned masculinity, Richey, and to a somewhat lesser extent Nicky Wire, seemingly wrote from a position of gender identity crisis. However, this song's meaning, no matter how much I use my university-educated guesswork about metaphor and imagery, still eludes me.

There are no sunsets just silence
You could see that she was true and faithless
But see through the future and forget all the lies
Black out the words for the blind have eyes
I am the girl who wanted to be God
There are times when you feel hopeless
Just for once for no-one else we are blameless
The dawn is still breaking its heaven is so high
She told the truth, told the truth and then she lied
Hold me she said love me to death

These lyrics switch between third and first person positions, seemingly making its narrator both objective and subjective. Is the girl the narrator? Is the girl actually a male narrator? How much of Richey can be read into these words? Like with most literature, no one will ever concretely know the answer; everything is speculation. While Richey often appeared to identify himself with females, whether through songs about prostitution or anorexia, it all seems to amount to his feeling trapped into gender performance expectations, and perhaps that's part of what made me identify with and love the Manics so much. As well-known as the Manics are for their comments and lyrics on politics, they are just as prolific in gender politics. Though the Manics did glam it up (and the Wire still does to an extent) in their beginning, emphasizing the artificiality of gender roles just as glam and camp acts always have, I think they had some of that more internal androgyny that Morrissey was so adept at expressing. My thinking is that androgyny of this sort would be a lot more helpful in creating a whole human than favouring one side of the gender spectrum in some global game of make-believe.

What came first, the gender stereotype or the behaviour? I suppose that's more of a question of nature versus nurture, which, with only an introductory course in Psychology under my belt, is an issue I'm not prepared to debate right now. In my perfect world, none of this would matter at all anyway. Gender is just one of the many ways of identifying who one is. I would much rather classify people by the music they love than whether they are female or male, girlie or boyish. In the words of Depeche Mode, people are people. And music is bigger than that.


Gender Bombs - The Stills

The Girl Who Wanted to Be God - Manic Street Preachers

Has the World Changed Or Have I Changed?: Musings on the New Musical Express Train to Nowhere

I've been meaning to write something about my general feeling of malaise with new music, and now that I've read two very eloquent posts about this same feeling at To Die By Your Side and The Vinyl Villain, I very likely don't need to now because I don't know if I have that much more to add, to be honest. But since I must write something to keep this blog alive, I'll do it anyway. It's my blog and I'll rant if I want to.

I'm twenty-five, so why I feel so jaded about music already is something I would like to try to understand. I agree with what the bloggers above have said about how maturity and acquired knowledge does eventually make music sound less "new" and "innovative"; the more you know about music and music history, the more connections you can make between new and old music. And if there's one thing I had to learn over the years, it's that art of any kind must always use what's come before it in some way. Originality is a flawed concept, and it's a concept that has dogged me for many years as I shied away from writing creatively for long periods of time, believing that I had nothing "original" to say. In fact, I wrote a short story called Life is Art is Life all about that particular conundrum. I realized that it's how you build on what's come before you that makes you special and memorable; no one reinvents the wheel, instead, you get fantastic variations like cars, ferris wheels, and my personal favourite, the pennyfarthing.

As others already noted as well, the music of your youth or the music tied to "new" experiences in your life will always be special to you. It's why there's such a thing as nostalgia. I like to think that there will continue to be new bands that will impress me in the future as I grow old, but at the same time, I don't think they could ever make me feel the way the Manic Street Preachers, The Smiths, The Clash, and New Order do. These artists/bands got to me first and changed my life in their respective ways; for the most part, they ushered me into adulthood. Sadly, only one of them is still around, and through unfortunate circumstances, have had to change from their first, truly brilliant incarnation.

So, have I changed? And is that at the crux of my lack of excitement over most new bands? Likely, that's a big part of it, but at the same time, the music industry and its attendant press has changed rather drastically in recent years. Technology and the Internet have expanded access for both artists and fans, and they've sped up the process of production and promotion. While these developments can be hailed as the next stage of a truly DIY music scene, in a lot of ways, to borrow from Dick Hebdige, they've defused and diffused it. It's become increasingly harder to pick through the sheer masses of artists/bands out there (for my thesis, I made some rough calculations and figured there are at least 450 000 artists/bands with profiles on MySpace). Add to this overwhelming number the erosion of interest via media bombardment, and the situation gets sadder - the more information people are exposed to, the more apathy there is. The brain can only handle so much before needing to defer to others' opinions to make decisions, and in some cases, the brain just shuts out information wholesale in an act of self-defence.

And of course the advent of MP3 blogs and their aggregators have made it quite easy and speedy to hype a new artist based on very little. Of course, if a band is ultimately worthy of praise, they will weather the hype and continue to make interesting music. But this mad rush for the "new thing" has accelerated to such speeds, I can't bother to keep up, and instead, have found refuge in filling out my collection with older bands' back catalogues. Often I end up discovering an old band that I had never heard of before (some blogs can be thanked for this). For example, I only just found out about the post-punk band The Sound this year, and I now consider them one of my favourites. I'm also very aware that the bulk of new music I end up paying attention to is created by artists/bands that have been around for awhile - though, I can often also be disappointed in new output by old artists as stated in my post about The Cure. That's a different discussion for a different time, mind.

At this stage, my modest patch of cyberspace has by no means garnered too much attention by promotional people, but out of the emails of this nature that I have received, I've only been interested in two or three, and only really and truly loved one. As Coxon from To Die By Your Side stated, most bands are just too samey to be worth listening to, let alone worthy of a blog post. I require more than just a new Libertines or Arctic Monkeys, and I am too often disappointed by the comparisons of these new bands to older bands that I love, comparisons which never pan out.

Not only do I have to be critical of the promotional hype I get in my inbox, but I have to be just as critical of the information I get from "professionals." I know I'll sound like some whiny curmudgeon when I say that the music press isn't what it used to be. Sure, in the past, editorial and journalistic styles have displaced that which preceded them, but the recent shifts really don't speak to me. I like to believe that I would have been far more impressed with the work of Lester Bangs and Nick Kent had I been alive at the time they were prominent. I may also have romantic notions of the more politicized, intelligent NME of the early to mid-eighties, considering I was a small child then, but I do long for those times. I read less and less music magazines these days because either their information is out-of-date, or they're too busy chasing the next Libertines/Strokes to care about what really matters in music and the discourse that surrounds it. You will never see as brave a cover as that nearly all-black 1986 issue of NME that discussed youth suicide, nor content as brave. As much as I love The Mighty Boosh, they are merely a sales figure booster for the NME with comedic links to music and Noel Fielding's rather pathetic public antics. I can't imagine the bands being championed in the recent press as being as iconic and meaningful even ten years down the line as bands like Joy Division and The Smiths were/are. And though I don't expect all artists/bands to carve "4REAL" into their arms in order to prove a point to the NME, I do long for those who are willing to stand out and stand by their beliefs and opinions, or frankly, willing to have an opinion at all.

Having said all of this, I will say there have been rare instances when the white noise of bands clamouring for attention has cleared for a moment, allowing me to hear new music that I believe has that capacity to change my life. I believe in these bands and what they stand for; not only do their music and lyrics affect me, but so do their ideologies and philosophies, aspects which make art meaningful. They take the brilliant elements of previous artists, musical and otherwise, and multiply them into something more than the sum of their parts. They are "4REAL" in the same way Richey Edwards once was. And these bands aren't even at their peak yet; there's no reason they should be, and that very fact makes them exciting. These bands are Vanilla Swingers, Stroszek and Black Umbrella, and you can read about them in more detail when you follow the links below.

Post #1 on Vanilla Swingers

Post #2 on Vanilla Swingers

Post on Stroszek

Post on Black Umbrella


These are the bands that will mean something to me in ten years time. These are the bands I would feature on the cover of a magazine purporting to be about "new" music. These are the bands that continue to give me hope that not all good music was in the past.

Goodbye Lennon - Vanilla Swingers

Railway of Bones - Stroszek

Secret Kiss - Black Umbrella

This Is the Industry, But For How Long?: Thoughts on the State of Music Today

It's undeniable that the world of music is changing, and along with it, the industry that has accompanied it ever since the music publishing boom and the likes of Tin Pan Alley. The twentieth century made music more of a commodity than it had ever been before, and now the twenty-first century is seemingly tearing all of that down. I feel like discussing all of these thoughts here, so it can serve as a bit of a brain dump for the ideas that have been floating around my head ever since I started my MA thesis on music blogging and music journalism. As sustained arguments and their attendant research tend to do, this thesis has led me well beyond my original hypotheses and topics. And all this expansion into other areas is about to tear my brain into its separate hemispheres.

With the advances of digital technology, the world has seemingly both exploded and imploded in a McLuhanesque way. Privacy and publicity have morphed into "publicy" and the alternative has effectively blurred into the mainstream. So many people have more access to ideas and commodities, and at the same time, many people are putting more of their ideas and products out there. I consciously use "commodity" and "product" differently - to me, commodities are primarily there to be bought and sold for financial gain while products can be creative results produced for the sake of those producing them with or without financial gain. This distinction is significant for me because I feel as though music is moving from being a commodity back into being a product, and those who depend on it being a commodity, are the ones most upset about this shift.

Due to the emergence of the MP3 file and fast Internet connections, music now freely circulates the globe, both legally and illegally. The music industry itself was slow to realize and anticipate this fact, and will probably forever pay the price. As I mentioned in an earlier essay on digital music, the medium does transform the message, and in the case of the Internet and music, the medium is multiplying and fragmenting the message. Because making, promoting and distributing music has become so democratic (technology and software in combination with the Internet has made it quite possible for anyone to create and promote their own music), there is a proliferation of music, bands, and artists out there in cyberspace. So many, in fact, that it would likely cause you brain damage if you tried to listen to them all. You also can't possibly know about them all. One look at MySpace and you can hear them all screaming for your attention, for their fifteen minutes. MySpace has made Warhol Nostradamus.

With the glut of music, worthy or not, the market for music has both exploded into fragmentation and imploded into solipsistic subcultures and subgenres solidified by the smaller communities who support them. Musicians used to depend on a major label deal to gain global publicity and popularity - even the bastions of DIY, the punks, all ended up selling out to the majors. Now musicians are able to promote themselves globally, but often within a sliver of society - definitely not to the heights of bloated stadium pomposity.

The danger of having so many people claiming to be musicians and claiming that their music is worth listening to and/or buying is that people become overloaded and apathetic. This has already happened in the realm of politics and news. If there's too much music out there, most people cannot be bothered to care and take the time to figure out which artists they actually like. Mainstream media serves a purpose for those people who are casual music fans by literally telling them who to adore and whose music they should purchase. Mainstream media, which includes television, advertising, and regular Top 40 radio, selects the reality these fans see and hear. In the latter half of the twentieth century, music journalists came into the music scene to help influence those who weren't as likely to be convinced by mainstream media and the popular music it was flouting. They became more discerning selecters of music reality and those music fans who were more than casual looked to these journalists as their tastemakers.

Now here we are in the twenty-first century, the irony and skepticism of the 1990's still fresh in our minds, and the big media pundits have only gotten bigger and swallowed up smaller ones, while consumer markets have shattered into thousands of slivers. Casual music fans are being influenced by media conglomerates, passively consuming the next bland music act, while true music fans are being smothered by the choices offered by the Internet. These people who are truly passionate about new, innovative music, have largely abandoned traditional music fan publications. The NME, which used to be the tastemaker for rabid music fans, is now the most maligned piece of music press out there. Because music publications like the NME cannot and/or will not keep up with the explosion of new music that anyone with an Internet connection can find for themselves, they are becoming increasingly obsolete for those who are passionate about music. But even these truly passionate music fans need help in this sea of undiscovered music talent, and so step in music bloggers.

Music bloggers, or MP3 bloggers as they are also known, are the new tastemakers with a word-of-mouth style rather than the official, paid stance of a journalist. These disparate voices in the wilderness of cyberspace have now also been united by music blog aggregators like The Hype Machine and Elbows, making the disparate seem unified. These aggregators can generate little waves of hype for artists as they crawl the Internet for new music blog posts and reveal who has been blogged about the most at that particular moment. Is this hype having an impact in today's fragmented market? It can be difficult to gauge. In looking at some traditional music publications, it seems music bloggers can have an effect on the music press that they are slowly and quietly subverting. Spin featured Vampire Weekend on their cover before the band even had an album out - instead, their popularity and worth was based primarily on the hype generated by music bloggers. At the same time, I know for a fact that most people I know do not even know what a music blog is, let alone religiously check aggregators and music blogs for information. In effect, music bloggers often seem to be preaching to the converted, and the ostensible unity shown via aggregators is an illusion of solidarity, where music blogs serve various fragments of music fan audiences. If there is a soldiarity amongst all these blogs, it comes from being a solid genre with tacit rules and conventions. And perhaps this sort of solidarity will eventually change the face of music journalism.

As more of the mainstream public become aware of music blogs, maybe they will serve a larger purpose than they currently do. In a world wary of advertising and continual corporatization of the Internet's freedom, music blogs provide a way for music to exist outside of a commodity-driven framework. Most music bloggers use a distinct discourse about music, a discourse which puts love and passion about music above all other goals. They want to share music that has touched them or meant something to them with their friends, and because of the blog medium they use, they also end up sharing that music with the world.

And they do literally share this music with their audiences. Music blogs feature a few tracks for free download with every post, allowing their audiences to sample music before making a decision to purchase and/or support live gigs. This practice points to a new way of consuming music - it is no longer the commodity it once was. Because of the onslaught of new music available, much of it not terribly good, true music fans have become more selective than before, they have had to become more selective in this current explosion of bands and artists. This provision of free music, legal and often not, has been one of the contentious issues surrounding the music blogosphere, but in light of other filesharing issues like torrents, they are hardly worth the RIAA's batting of an eyelash.

The fuss about illegal sharing of music and copyright violations just leads me to another question about whether music should even be the commodity it once was. It isn't a coincidence that the first law about copyright and intellectual property came about in the eighteenth century when capitalism was moving into full swing. Music itself, whether it is an intangible file stored on a computer or a groove on a record, has rarely been particularly lucrative for the artists themselves. Most of the money made on album sales is sucked up by the record label. If a musician was going to make any significant amount of money, touring live shows would be the most effective way of doing so. Of course the arguments put forth by music labels and the RIAA always conveniently sidestep these facts.

It has also been pointed out before that many artists, including writers and visual artists, cannot support themselves by their art alone, so any musicians who believe millionaire stardom is their birthright need to re-think things. Perhaps music itself shouldn't be viewed as a commodity anymore. Perhaps it needs to be seen as art once again in order for it to make sense in this brave new world. I, myself, am a firm believer in abolishing the whole middleman music industry. Those musical artists who can grasp and hold onto fans' attention will continue to do so without interference from bottom-lines and media blitzes.

Music blogs are just an increasingly more visible portion of a seachange in the way music is created, promoted and consumed. There are so many other Web sites and platforms out there that are promoting a democratization of music tastemaking. Sites like MOG, Last.fm, muxtape, and The Sixty-One, are all ways to share your impeccable music taste with the world, and in cases like The Sixty-One, the concept of choosing who the best artists are becomes entertainment itself. Ordinary fans are increasingly taking the place of A&R people, and even festival promoters are taking note of this.

With the proliferation of music-makers, corporate-sponsored events are becoming just as ubiquitous and overwhelming as the waves of new bands on MySpace. It seems every mobile phone provider hosts a music festival, and looking at many of the line-ups, very few of them deviate from the same roster. However, more and more are attempting to get fans involved in choosing those bands who get to participate, including the Green Man Music Festival and their Green Poll (http://www.thegreenmanfestival.co.uk/greenpoll) and Benicassim Festival and their contest via Supajam (http://www.supajam.com/contests/fasttrack/home.html), yet another music social networking site. Whether all this A&R frenzy at being the first to discover a new band is actually productive or not, time will tell. Yet another danger of music blogs and their online offshoots is the hyper-speed of music discovery, where finding obscure music and being the first to post about it becomes the sole goal, barring any actual commentary or connection to the music being promoted. And in the end, posts like these disrupt the music discourse set up by music bloggers in the firstplace, making them less of an alternative to and subversion of the traditional music press.

Where is all this heading? I don't have a clue. And that's probably why I find it so fascinating and chose it all as a topic for my thesis. For the most part, music bloggers don't promote music for money, nor do they do it at the behest of record labels (unless they feel the music warrants it), and they don't have editors to please and/or contend with. These facts about music blogs can very likely change in the future as each new medium topples the next, and for some music blogs maybe these facts have already changed. But as it currently stands, music blogs are at the frontlines of music, wading through the mind-boggling masses of music out there and separating the wheat from the chaff for the benefit of those who have otherwise grown completely apathetic in the face of such choice. Too much choice can end up eroding any interest at all and weakening people's passions. Music blogs will hopefully continue to make sure this doesn't happen. Music is a special, affective art form (the most affective one for me, personally), and it deserves a promotional medium that matches that. Not another commodity-driven "industry."

Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll - The Killers

This is Industry - Calvin Harris

The Medium is the Music: An Essay on Digital Music

I realize that this post may be a bit lazy, but I'm in the process of writing a take-home exam this weekend for my social semiotics class, and I'm a wee bit panicked at the moment. So, I decided I would post an essay I wrote for a previous media studies take-home exam because it involves music and new media. It may seem a bit too academic for a blog post, but I think it's a relevant topic for those who are interested in music and the study of media in general. The question for this exam was to discuss the following Wired article about Universal and its CEO Doug Morris and their being completely unprepared for new media in the music world: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-12/mf_morris . In addition, we were supposed to reference Neil Postman's book Technopoly and Mark Poster's book Information Please. It was actually one of the more fun essays I've ever written.

The Medium is the Music

Seth Mnookin’s article about Doug Morris, the CEO of Universal Music Group, reveals how the music industry’s major, and costly, mistake was its inability to understand the nature of digital media in relation to traditional analog media. This error extends to the music industry’s misunderstanding of the Internet as a medium as well. Mnookin demonstrates how not only did Morris err in failing to recognize the changes that digital music and peer-to-peer sharing would pose, but he also initially responded in a way that attempted to control a medium - through lawsuits against Yahoo, YouTube, and MySpace for using Universal music videos without paying for them, and through charging Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace for using the Universal back catalogue - that cannot be controlled by traditional means, and perhaps not at all. As Mnookin notes, “the more restrictions you put on your files, the more you encourage customers to turn to illegal services to get songs the way they want them.”

Mark Poster views the potential of the Internet and peer-to-peer music downloading as having two possibilities: “an Orwellian extension of governmental and corporate controls or a serious deepening of the democratization of culture” (193). In Mnookin’s article, it appears that Morris and Universal Music tends to favour the former more than the latter. Because Universal’s goal is to increase profit, and because its primary way of achieving this goal is through selling music, Morris ostensibly still sees peer-to-peer downloading of music as theft. Poster argues that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who also view MP3 sharing as theft, was making errors in their understanding of media differences: “In their suit of September 2003, the RIAA acted as if downloading music files is the same thing as taking a music CD from a retail store without paying for it. This claim of equivalence is a political move that ignores the specificity and differences of each media – CDs and digital files. When the CD is taken from the store, the store no longer has it; when the file is downloaded, the person sharing the file still has it” (189). Morris’s “blasting MP3 players as merely ‘repositories for stolen music’” makes the same assumption as the RIAA, an assumption which does not make sense in that digital objects like MP3s are copied, not actually stolen in the traditional sense of theft. This issue also complicates and evades traditional copyright law. Poster states: “Copyright law covered the medium in which inventions or acts of genius were embedded for reproduction” (197). However, now that the medium has changed from traditional ones like printing presses and CD manufacturers to the Internet and its attendant programs, the nature of how production and reproduction function has changed drastically.

In explaining these fundamental shifts, Poster writes: “Digital cultural objects do not fall under the laws of scarcity and the market because they require almost no cost to produce, copy, and distribute, and like ideas they do not diminish when they are given away” (195). In this way, digital cultural objects threaten the capitalist market and those, like Morris, who gain most from it. If music is no longer viewed as a commodity, but instead a public possession that does not require economic power to exist or be distributed, then corporations like Universal seem to be obsolete under this new system: “In short, digitization changes the nature of the producer and the consumer, blurring the boundary between them” (Poster 195-96), and “Digitization threatens the media corporations because one no longer requires great amounts of capital to produce, reproduce, modify, and distribute cultural objects” (198). Mnookin writes that Morris and Universal’s “current moves – DRM-free songs and the Total Music subscription service – aren’t about serving consumers, at least not principally. They’re aimed at taking on Steve Jobs and, specifically, limiting the power of iTunes,” meaning that it appears that Morris has still not completely understood the nature of the new media and how it is changing the capitalist market for cultural products.

Morris insists on continuing to think about competition within the traditional capitalist system, and his long-term competition is not other corporations, but those who understand the new media better than he does – the consumers themselves. Not only is there a serious threat to the cultural corporations of America, but there is a further political link in that, for the US, cultural objects are “second only to defense in export value” (208). If the national economy can no longer support itself through cultural exports like music, the entire country will be affected, and the government may be more likely to try to step in and control media sharing; however, as demonstrated by the control problems experienced by the music industry, there would be great difficulty policing the Internet for media sharing, especially under current laws. The global networked nature of the Internet also poses a dilemma because every country would have to adopt the same laws regarding media sharing, a daunting task, and it would not necessarily safeguard against constant innovation in technology finding ways around these laws.

The constant innovation in the sharing of digital music creates an interesting paradox in which the very foundations of the capitalist system are the cause of its problems. Despite Morris’s acquiescence with giving music away through Total Music, Mnookin points out: “The irony is that if he decides to base his plans around DRM, Morris will be missing the larger truth that has propelled his business for the past 30 years. Ultimately, it’s convenience and ease of use that drive new media formats.” Morris’s attitude demonstrates this paradox in that “If the music industry wins its case against Internet technology, capitalism loses its legitimacy as the bearer of progress” (Poster 190). With the advent of digital media and file sharing networks over the Internet, the progress narrative of capitalism is halted because the advances that appear to be in the processes change the nature of the product; in a McLuhan-like way, the medium becomes the message.

Furthermore, this aspect of the Digital Age has been overlooked by the music industry, and it ensures that process exceeds content in its importance and dominance. Neil Postman argues that “Because of what computers commonly do, they place an inordinate emphasis on the technical processes of communication and offer very little in the way of substance [...] The computer is almost all process” (118). By looking at the issue of digital music sharing in this light, it seems that the computer and the Internet value speed and reach of communication over what is actually being communicated between users; this is not to say that people do not care about the music they listen to, but that they feel entitled to it because of the very process and medium that makes it available to them.

In Mnookin’s article, Rio Caraeff, executive VP of Universal’s digital strategy, says “the company will eventually need to transition from running a product-based business to running a service-based one,” including ringtones, subscription services, and deals with mobile providers. This shift in strategy shows how the attempted control over the products, which are arguably the content of the medium, has been shifted to control over the form of the medium; in effect, Universal realizes that music and many other cultural products are no longer physical, tangible commodities, and their existence is both fluid and public. This issue also raises the question of what happens when something becomes part of the public domain, and with the Internet, what is actually public? As Poster demonstrates with his discussion of internet identity theft, everything tends to become externalized through the medium of the Internet, radically changing the perceptions of privacy and the public domain.

Besides the loss of profit for the corporation, the music industry’s main argument against peer-to-peer file sharing is that it is also violating artists’ royalty benefits. Poster gives three reasons to refute this argument: it is not necessarily true that artists receive compensation for the reproduction of their work, file sharing does not mean the sale of commodities, and the artists themselves have “borrowed” from others in the creation of their art (201-02). He also argues that most of the royalty money an artist earns is taken by production costs, and that distribution of an artists’ music has not been a fair process before file-sharing in that radio stations and DJs were often bribed to play certain artists on heavy rotation (205). The “unfairness” of file-sharing is unfair to the industry only because it negatively affects the industry itself and has nothing to do with popularity being an indication of music’s status as an art form.

The recent tactic employed by Radiohead in allowing their fans to choose the monetary value of their latest album poses an interesting alternative to current music download practices and raises particular issues about the capitalist market and the value of cultural objects. Since Radiohead was no longer attached to a contract with a major label when they released their latest album, they chose to release their album as a download and those who wanted it could pay any amount they deemed worthy of the album, including paying nothing. The average price chosen by those who purchased the album turned out to be £5 (approximately $10 US), which perhaps places the album at a slightly lower price than it would have sold at conventionally; however, considering the record company was not involved, thus not making money from it, the band likely made more profit per album than by selling it through a major label, which would have taken a higher percentage of each total, thus increasing the price presented to consumers. Also, there may have been a higher percentage of people who paid a considerably lesser price than the average, but would have illegally downloaded it for free elsewhere otherwise. A tactic like this may not have worked as successfully without a high-profile band with an established, strong fanbase, but it does change the way in which people think about music and other cultural products. By allowing consumers to assign their own worth to a cultural product, Radiohead relinquished the control that Morris and Universal refuse to.

There also many bands with profiles on MySpace, who are either unsigned or are signed to a truly independent label or distributer rather than an “independent” branch of a major label. In these bands’ cases, they remove the middleman of a major label and sell their music directly to their fans. Because music production technology has also become more available and relatively cost-efficient to use, many artists no longer need a major label to pay for studio time or producers. The role of major labels as having promotional clout is also waning with the amount of buzz being generated by either the artists themselves or independent music bloggers. Most recently, an independent act named IAMX (www.iamx.co.uk), which is based in Europe, managed to tour successfully throughout North America without any promotion outside of their Internet networks and “street teams” composed of fans. In effect, they have cut out the need for a major label for production, distribution, and promotion. While Morris and Universal have chosen to attempt “an Orwellian extension of governmental and corporate controls,” artists as diverse as IAMX and Radiohead are embracing “a serious deepening of the democratization of culture.” The difference lies in the recognition and understanding of the new media and its inevitable effect on capitalism and culture.

Nude - Radiohead

House of Cards - Radiohead

We're in the Music Biz - Robots in Disguise