Social Change and the Mp3

Billboard charts aren't what they used to be...

A very perceptive article by Eric Harvey of Pitchfork, regarding the advacement of music mediums through time-- radio, LP, cassette, mp3-- the social and economic shift it has caused, and how it has transformed traditional ideas of interaction and production:

When radio came along, its broadcasts created communities of music-listening strangers, physically distant from each other but connected through the knowledge that they were listening to the same song at the same time. Where radio brought listeners together as a listening public, the LP started splitting them apart. The LP and 45 rpm formats took the phonograph, which had been in existence for over half a century, to the masses, right as the American middle-class was going suburban and privatizing their lives. We could then use musical objects like we'd been using literature and art for centuries prior: as collectibles, and signifiers of personal taste. The emergence of the cassette--the first sturdy, re-writeable music technology-- allowed us to "manufacture" our own music in the privacy of our own homes and recirculate it at our will, through mixtape trading and full-album dubbing. By the early 1980s, home taping had become the latest fall guy for an industry trying to blame consumer delinquency for its slipping fortunes, rather than its own overspending... [now] the cassette "crisis" seems quaint when compared to the rise of the mp3.

The impact:

 In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution upended Western societies from their agrarian ways of life, distancing the average person from the means of production, and introduced what would later be called "modernity." In the late 20th century, the Internet quickly made this phase of communication and economics look quaint and distant. This latest shift-- you can tell your grandkids you lived through it-- opens the possibility to freely create and distribute culture, with the idea of reaching a global audience.

Comments on the future of a music industry and culture without profiteering:

Artists need to make money for their music (if they want to), and they need a set of flexible legal and technological guarantees to ensure this. But these guarantees need to be flexible enough to allow the fans themselves to use their collective intelligence and passion to help the artists themselves, without being exploited, or written into a script fit for retired actors. If the networked public sphere shaped by mp3s could collaboratively re-imagine itself not as an audience or a market but as members of a civil society, who feel that they deserve a stake in its own culture, then the rules going forward, and our appreciation of music's social and affective values, might emerge like mp3s themselves: from the bottom up. We've long since figured out how to grab and recirculate music.

Very few things grasp the circumstance or reflect the values and ideals of a culture as well as music does. With an unwritten, virtuous air-- music evolves, influences change, and interprets events with a permanent nostalgia. The mp3 will only serve to further the proliferation of music-- and most importantly, breed diversity and nourish creativity.

I see the true musician as somewhat of an anomaly in the scheme of selling, buying, markets, and economics. As we have seen in the past decade-- the less people who want to pay for music, the more musicians want to make it. A steep contrast with nearly everything else that is bought as sold. Simply put, the rise of free (and cheap) music has served its purpose to diversify the fans taste and to swing the door of opportunity open for the artist.