On The Future of Popular Music

The Future Sound of Nothing-Nowhere

The future of popular music probably isn't too good. This isn't one of those music was better in my youth kind of rants because frankly even if that were true, it's not a point I exactly want to litigate here. While it might be seen as taking that same line, I would posit that there are far more technically accomplished musicians working in popular music than at any time in history. Even allowing for that, popular music's future is very bleak. 

The historical trend on artistic complexity seems to be that over time, complexity is reduced as the form of the music gets reified. In once sense, music is moving towards fewer players per ensemble - from orchestra to Big Band to quintets and quarts and then trios, and duos. The ultimate is the solo artist who accompanies themselves with a computer or karaoke device or looper pedal. As more contributing players are shed, the simpler the music becomes in structure. While there are plenty of jaw-dropping players working in this kind of format, it is still a lot simpler than music played in larger groups. 

Songwriters themselves have reduced the range of harmonic content in their songs. They are structured more simply than any time before. The proliferation of songs with just one chord progression with no variation has overtaken all the other kinds of songwriting. In that instance it is hard to tell if it is the retreat of complexity or the advance of simplicity. There is the information theory whereby if you want to reach more people, you have to reduce the complexity of your message, so it stands to reason songwriters have taken an axe to such concepts as a verse being different to a chorus, or that there might be a middle 8 in-between the verse and chorus. After all they are playing to a generation that fast-forwards through the guitar solo. 

And yes, there is the crux of the biscuit right there. What kind of hare-brained asshole fast forwards through the guitar solo? What kind of absence of mind does that? It is not a matter of taste - it's a matter of failing to understand what a guitar solo is. Yes, there are some terrible solos out there - some of them played by your truly right here - but you can't be fast forwarding through all guitar solos on principle without incurring the observation that it's not guitar solos that are the problem, but the people who can't appreciate them who are the problem. 

Contrary to all the amazing guitar players plying their trade on Youtube, guitar solos have been phased out of popular music. All these new songs without a change in chord progression from verse to chorus, also seem to come absent the guitar solo. 

Now don't get me wrong. It's not all about the guitar solo. It's that fact that there's a young audience out there that doesn't connect to guitar solos. Surprisingly there's a whole generation or two of kids who just don't view music the way the previous generations did, and this has turned into time bomb. As Rick Beato rightly points out, kids today have a whole eco-system of stuff to indulge themselves. Music simply sin't enough. So while there are some amazing players doing their thing on instagram and TikTok and Youtube, the general population is pulling away from music as fast as the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers ran towards music. If music itself is losing value in the discourse as we go forwards, then you can't expect it to be in better shape in the future. 

This Does Need A Bit More Explaining For Future Generations

Skip this bit if you're an old fart like me - older readers know what the hell it used to be like before the internet. The people in the future will have no idea. Hence my need to write it down here.  

So this is a sketch of the old world before the internet: Before the internet, information used to be hard to come by and when we got it, it wasn't cheap or free. And we accepted this condition as capitalism. So we paid for newspapers and we paid for books and subscriptions to magazines. We paid to find stuff out in most part. You would be lucky to find stuff in libraries. If you were looking for granular information on something of a minor field, your school library or council library was not going to cut it.  

It so happens music was one of those information formats. It wasn't clear to us growing up, but music was in of itself a kind of information - we only found that out when things went digital with compact discs. In one sense, we had to put our money down to obtain the information that was music, just as we did with everything else. The record store then, was sort of an information exchange, and you can see that in the loving portrayal in the movie version of 'High Fidelity'. In turn, music, was the communal space that connected a global audience. World tours by big bands, whether that be The Police or Dire Straits  were culturally significant moments.

As the format of the information evolved the vendors of the information saw fit to raise the prices on the information. Thus, in Sydney in the mid 1980s, LPs and Cassette tapes were priced around $10 but Compact Discs were $30. As a student working late night shopping and weekend jobs, you were making $12-15 and hour at best. The calculations would then go, do you exchange roughly an hour of your worked time with 1 album on LP or do you instead swap three of those for something with higher fidelity. Kids who were in to music were exchanging their blood sweat and tears into their music collections. 

And there was a cohort who grumbled loudly about the prices of Compact Discs all the time. 

Then the internet came along together with compressed data. Suddenly people were 'ripping' CDs and file sharing them in .mp3 format. Naturally this got record companies very upset and the rest of it is history. The internet devalued the entire music industry and denuded it of profits. A lot has happened since that moment in history but essentially there is music everywhere for free, if you just choose to look. Kids today don't have to necessarily exchange their blood sweat and tears for mere music.  In turn the monetisation of music has changed radically in response to the internet. 

The point of all this is that the music listener of the Boomer and Gen-X vintage had skin in the game. This is why they have the wrong opinions they have, and in turn this is why there's a lot of judgemental put downs by these people towards Millennials and Gen-Z. Is this fair? No - but you should know why this happens. The judgement is coming from a place of heavy emotional investiture. This is not to say Millennials and Gen-Z don't have heavy investment in music themselves. It's just that in the scheme of things, it most likely won't be their main emotional investiture simply because of where they are in history (and to be totally frank I don't judge the younger generation harshly for that fact).

The bad news for music and those with heavy emotional investment in music, is that the Boomers are finally dying out in droves. Even Gen-Xers are starting to pop off, kick the bucket and fall off their perches. This means that in the future, there are fewer people invested in all of this than there are going to be more. As the demographic changes, it is evident that things that hold meaning are changing hands. With the dead, goes the past. As ever, the living inherit a world they cannot fathom. 

Just what can be done about this for music?

Meaning As Social Construct

Back in my own formative years, something that got pounded into me by a philosophy major (read, Mr. Pharmakeus) was that a great man called Ludwig Wittgenstein said that 'meaning' is 'socially determined'. There are a lot of ways to come at this statement but one of the ways is that the more people who engage with a subject matter provides more meaning to the subject. 

This is evidenced by say, Wikipedia, where ever more people have come to add ever more knowledge and opinions across so many topics. You can probably rely on an article that has passed through the oversight of thousands of people, more than something with a short entry that was agreed upon by 5 people, but in most part Wikipedia represents the sum total of volunteered knowledge and opinions of internet denizens. While Wikipedia probably won't match the kind of epistemological reliability of a peer-reviewed study, it can get close in some matters. In turn, it has raised the curtain on the process whereby we can ask whether peer-reviewed studies are exactly what they're cracked up to be, and whether Encyclopaedias like the Britannica and Americana ever could have matched the breadth and scope of of Wikipedia. 

The point of the above paragraph is that the more people you have participating in a field, you have a way of achieving more and deeper meaning. The more people working a field and contributing to it, the more likely you are to achieve a higher granularity of knowledge as well as a greater pile of it. This in turn means the more people there are playing rock guitar, then, the better the chances are of rock guitar continuing into the future in a meaningful manner. Ultimately, an artist is not some point that exists in a sea of meaninglessness but a representative of a demographic of people working in an area. This is how you get not just The Beatles, but also The Rolling Stones and the entire British Invasion in the 1960s; and a generation later, not just Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but the entire Grunge movement. 

In once sense, if there isn't a critical mass of a critical, mass listenership, popular music is not going to gain the kind of meaning it once possessed. With the advent of the internet, it may never again reach the height of importance it once held. 

So What Happens Now?

Without the critical mass of the critical masses, popular music will fail to form the kind of meaningfulness it once possessed. In a sense, it is going to be more meaningless than meaningful - and there's going to be a lot of the meaningless stuff over the meaningful stuff. It's not exactly a joyous future, but there is an upside. Thanks to the same technology that destroyed social meaning, it is also now dead easy to make your own music. In as much as there will be people making their own music for their own meaningful experience, music will not die out. There will be meaningful music in a sea of meaningless music. People are just going to work very hard to find it and get to it. 

If you want meaningful music to exist in the future, then you'd better start participating in it.   

 

News That's Fit To Punt - 23/Sep/2014

It's Not The Burqa, Stupid

There are people making statements about the burqa and hijab, starting with Jacqui Lambie.  It's a funny thing - now the National Party is complaining that their anti-burqa message is being garbled by Senator Lambie's efforts. There's now an Islamophobia hotline to boot because anti-muslim sentiment has gone up in the wake of the arrests of the ISIL//ISOR-sympathisers and their random-beheading plot.

It needs to be said, hounding women with these head dresses is hardly going to achieve anything towards achieving the defeat of ISIL//ISOR or towards World Peace. If we're going on about Sharia Law and who intolerant Islamist muslims are, then it's probably worth talking about other religions that have a highly intolerant branch. Judging muslims by the behaviour of ISIL//ISOR is  like judging western society by the behaviour of Westboro Baptist Church. Complaining about the burqa is equally irrelevant as people who complained about bikinis. We've learned to live with bikinis, we'll learn to live with burqas.

Classical Music As Prestige Hobby

Pleiades sent in this story which deserves a bit of kicking around. It turns out that it wasn't just the ballerinas that got a reprieve from the Budget slashing knife wielded by Worst-Treasurer-Ever Joe Hockey; Melba Recordings which specialises in classical music recordings goat direct injection of $275,000 from the Federal Government, directly bypassing the Arts Council.

The story then tells us that Melba Recordings has been receiving Federal grant monies for a long time, and each and every time has been bypassing the Arts Council. This fact alone fills one with great mixed feeling - but I'll get on to that in a moment.

ArtsHub reports that: “Melba’s last published financial statements appear to be from 2011-12. They paint a dismal picture. The foundation recorded a $566,704 loss on revenue of only $630,848, of which the Federal Government grant was $500,000 – an extraordinary subsidy ratio of approximately 79 per cent.” 

“Melba’s sales record is equally glum. The 2012 annual report shows an “other” income, which appears to include CD sales, of only $39,225. Sales from earlier years were equally disappointing. In 2011 the foundation made only $18,000 and in 2010 as little as $3,500, according to a 2012 analysis by Samantha Randell, a researcher at the Association of Independent Records,” the website reported.

The amazing thing about classical music is not the years of devotion and training it takes to master the technique, only to end up teaching the stuff or working in some cruddy orchestra as fifth violinist down the back or something; it's that it keeps finding patronage in the most extraordinary places.

Like, the Attorney General's Office.

Jokes aside, you do wonder how valid it is to be spending money on a label of classical music, recorded in Australia by Australian musicians and artistes. On the one hand, it's good that there is a forum for classical musicians to get a go, recording stuff. Otherwise, it's forever going to be the cultural cringe of worshipping at the altar of 'Deutsche Grammophon' and 'ARKIV Produktion' and 'Decca Records' and all those wonderful, established recording houses in Europe. On the other hand you would think, if there's no market purchase whatsoever, it's in the same basket-case basket as Australian Film & Cinema. Why are we spending good money after bad to indifferent effect, pissing it into the wind when the very same government is screaming about cuts to everything worthwhile?
The mind boggles.

Equally, one understands what the funding selection criteria process would be like for a classical music label to undergo at the Arts Council. It would be a hard sell, and some weird-as left wing ideologue is bound to scuttle sending money to something so conservative and backward looking as a classical music label. They would have no shot - and as progressive and trendy-lefty as I am, the musician side of me wonders if the Arts Council should be the kind of arbiter body for something like this?
It would be really - make that tremendously - hard to make a case that an Australian playing 'The Goldberg Variations' on a harpsichord made in Australia was still culturally Australian in the way funding bodies like it. But is this a fair ruler with which to measure this kind of venture? Is this venture that lacking in national interest?

All the same, when you look at just how much money has been spent and how little money that's been made selling classical music from this label, one would have to conclude this is just this conservative Coalition wanking on spending public monies on something that belongs with private philanthropic enterprises. It says a lot about Australia that this sort of thing happens at all. Bottom line is this: why aren't Jamie Packer and/or Lachlan Murdoch forking out money for this instead of the government? What's wrong with these billionaires? Acute Philistinism perhaps?

'Downloaded'

The Generation Y Promise

Way back in the late 1990s, Napster was the rage. All the crappy mp3 files were there to be downloaded if you wanted it. being of the Gen-X persuasion, the excitement of this technological development passed me by because I was quite happy buying CDs andtrying to get a better sound quality out of my limited Hi-Fi budget. Even now, I'm not big with this downloading business. I recently downloaded the David Bowie release 'The next Day' when it was released, through iTunes. A few weeks later, I spotted the CD version and bought that too and really, I've listened to the CD more often than the iTunes-Download. I'm just old fashioned that way.

Still, I get the excitement. Not having to pay for stuff is great. Even if the file is crappy, it's better than not having it at all. Napster essentially plugged that 'gap' for the young and a bunch of hotshot Gen-Y guys made it fly, changing the world forever. If you ever wondered about those guys and what they were like, well, this is the doco for you.

What's Good About It

The awful truth is that both the Baby Boomers and Gen-X were completely ambushed by the advent of Napster and peer-to-peer sharing, and this film doesn't sugar coat it.

The doco goes into great lengths with Sean Fanning, and as the the film unfolds, you come to realise that the Sean Fanning that the media demonised so much back in the heyday of Napster was probably a lot more genuine and admiring of musicians and the music industry, rather than this great disruptor that destroyed the business model. Sean Parker too comes across as a lot more vulnerable and human than the hyper-real, slick, wheeler-and-dealer he was presented as  in 'Social Network', played by Justin Timberlake. We get lengthy explanations by the guys who formed the core of that company, and in turn we get a firsthand account of the rise and fall of Napster and what it was like  to be on the receiving end of the music industry's ire.

The shooting style is quite dry, and the best work is probably in the edits; both picture and sound. It makes a very interesting presentation out of something that might have been a little dry.

What's Bad About It

Because of the terrain it covers, the film seems to shorthand the more interesting ethical and legal questions surrounding copyright. In some ways you're none the wiser for why the music industry fails to understand the future is at their doorstep. The film explains it in terms of control and how the big labels don't want to relinquish control, but the issue is deeper than that when it comes to copyright law and the film doesn't quite get to it,even though it puts it in scope.

What's Interesting About It

The truly interesting thing about Napster is that it might have only been the harbinger of the Big Now. It came out of the brain-space of a bunch of young kids not even twenty years old, and it essentially broke the business model of record companies. As somebody who lived through the destruction of that business model, it's exciting to see that Napster merely signals the beginning. The rigid corporate control of media is breaking down faster as more technology becomes available. The Napster phenomenon, when properly documented shows what Schumpeter called creative destruction.

Even the great success of Google and then Facebook comes downstream from the impact Napster made as a tech start up. And despite the money lost on Napster, the rise and fall of the company essentially kicks off the era of internet where people who code, code our world.

The Big Now Beckons

The interviewees in the doco have a few insightful things to say. One of the things pointed out is that Napster and peer-to-peer sharing represents a break from the vertical line structure of authority as presented by the law and instead releases things in a horizontal plane across the users. In other words, the process of sharing is immensely democratising. This is then dovetailed with Henry Rollins' claim that musicians are going to be providing more and more social power through social networks and empower people.

Certainly, we now live in a  time when there are more people alive today than there have ever lived and died in the history of Homo Sapiens - a Big Now that flattens history across geopolitics today, rather then as a thread we follow through a time line. What is extraordinary about the Napster story is that it is at once an expression of the Big Now as it is a force that propelled the effect of the Big Now. in essence, it destroyed music industry price through unleashing and supplying demand for free music. In the process, it effectively ended recorded music as having any commercial value and cosigned it to history. We can talk about the history and development of music along different lines up until the moment Napster comes along. After that, the industry is a shadow of itself, and there's just this strange landscape of the industry trying to sell things with ever diminishing relevance than ever before.

The Metal Guys Were Supposed To Be The Outlaws

One of the more interesting observations by Sean Parker is that the people who got the most irate with Napster were Heavy Metal artists and Rap artists. Artists presenting themselves as renegades and outlaws turned out to be the most sensitive to the flow of money that comes from the control of copyright.  It's funny how the two Seans were bamboozled by this turn of events, but the politically conservative undertow in Metallica is fairly obvious to see and Rap artists are looking for slights everywhere so it's no surprise they jumped on a bunch of white boys giving their music away for free.

Peer To Peer As People Power

The really obvious lesson in all of this is that Peer-to-Peer technology is one of the most disruptive technologies out there. Napster connected peers, thus cutting out the middlemen which, essentially made record stores selling back catalogue right out of business. The extension of this today is that the internet vendors of various goods are sending bricks and mortar retailers to the wall. The more interesting extension of this phenomenon right now might be Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and all the other crypto-currencies taking off as we speak. What these virtual currencies are doing can be described as Peer-to-Peer of money, cutting out retail banking as well as the Reserve Bank's function of setting interest rates. Bitcoin is the Napster of money-trade instead of music-swaps. If the rise and fall of Napster is anything to go by, we can probably expect a giant backlash against Bitcoin by the worldwide banking establishment, but in the long run it might not be possible to stop all of these Virtual currencies from sending retail banking to the wall.