Category: Musings

The Decentralization of the Music Industry

For the last few years I’ve been wondering about the Internet’s impact on the music industry, specifically what will happen to cash-cow national acts when the Internet empowers more independent and regional artists. If more people are using MySpace and iTunes to check out music based on word of mouth and their own ears, rather than the tastemaking churn of radio/MTV/magazines, then those tastemakers will be at a loss for words. How can they generate a buzz nationally about the latest hip new band when they can’t get everyone to listen to it?

As the first potential proof for this suspicion, I give you this terrifically lost and confused MTV roundtable discussion on SXSW at MTV.com. All the writers involved seem genuinely saddened at the lack of any individual “It Band” at SXSW.

Plink, plink…do you hear that? That’s the sound of the world’s tiniest violin. Cry me a f*cking river, MTV.

Here’s hoping that 2007 gave us a bellwether SXSW and the days of the “It Band” are numbered. Maybe music fans will start listening to what they like because it’s what they like, not because some pretentious weasel at MTV or Spin or Clear Channel decided to orchestrate a “buzz” campaign.

By far the best comment was from writer James Montgomery:

“I’m struck by how all these points we’re making about the festival are also completely interchangeable for the music industry. I was struck by how it’s like a microcosm of all the problems the industry is facing now: It’s too big, there’s too much to see out there, you have no idea what’s going to be big, it’s too splintered, there are too many ways of consuming music.”

Buddy, if too much music is your idea of a problem, start looking for a new career. The music scene should be big and splintered and not easily digestible. This will make it easier to weed out the generic bands that the industry chooses to foist upon us. I guess it might be difficult for casual listeners to choose, but I’m sure they’ll be OK with whatever comes their way. Lord knows they are entirely too contented with the crap they’re listening to now.

Words from Vinnie

Master drummer Vinnie Colaiuta had some very astute observations in this month’s issue of Modern Drummer:

“What I see happening a lot within drumming is a microcosmic example of what’s happening in society, which is sensationalism. Sensationalism was once the domain of sideshow barkers selling cure-all tonics and tickets to see the bearded lady, but there was always a place for art. But now if it’s not sensational, its value is diminished. That kind of mentality contributes to short attention spans, the inability to read a book or to be able to read and write something more substantial than a cursory email.”

Commuter Reflections

As I drove home from work last night, I thought about the flying car. Technological limitations aside, it could never really happen for one mundane reason: insurance premiums. Conventional car insurance rates are already hefty, and automobiles only travel in two directions, forward and backward. A flying car, potentially[1], could travel forward, backward, hard left, hard right, up and down. That’s two more sets of axes, so at the very least we’d triple our potential for accidents, and thus triple our insurance rates. Then take into account the amount of skill needed to pilot such a craft, and how many people have a hard enough time not crashing their cars as it is.

Of course, while I’m dreaming, I think really the only way for a flying car to be a viable mode of transportation for average people would be for it to somehow conquer gravity. Propellors and turbine engines are just too dangerous for Joe Sixpack. The mythical flying car would have to involve some kind of anti-gravity buffer that protects it from hitting the ground and from hitting anything else around it. A force field, I guess. Only then would the accident rates drop low enough to be cost-effective, possibly even lower than automobiles.

Anyway this is the sort of thing I think about during rush hour traffic.

1.) I’m assuming the flying car is VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) because not everyone has access to a safe runway.

Attention Television Executives

Television as we know it will be dead soon. Everyone will have a DV-R at some point and we will skip commercials, rendering your revenue source nearly nil. What you must do to survive is this: digitize your entire catalog of old programming (if you’re smart enough to have saved the tapes) and offer your own YouTube-style service in which you can sell website ad space. You’re sitting on a goldmine of over 50 years of programming you thought you’d only air once or syndicate for reruns. But we want that content on-demand. Especially the nightly talk shows of which there are so many episodes that DVD just isn’t feasible: classic Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, early David Letterman in particular. You’ve got it and we want it. For example, I want to be able to go CBS’s website and search on “Mel Torme Buddy Rich” and find this choice gem from Merv Griffin’s show in 1978.

We want to be able to watch what we want, when we want. It’s your content; you control it. If you build it, we will come. So get to work. It’s your only chance to survive.

More Unhealthy Questions

Another great example of a question that does not deserve an answer is “how many webpages are there on the Internet?” Any answer would be misleading because you have to first define what a webpage is, and then consider that thousands of sites contain thousands of pages that are dynamically user-generated, so if they’re different every time you visit – how do you count those? If a webpage pulls in data from a database and recombines them into something new for every session, does that count as a unique page?

So the question presupposes that webpages are discrete things that can be counted, and they’re not. Websites, on the other hand, are a little easier to count. Top-level domains like www.amazon.com are quantifiable. Even that, though, brings up the question of subdomains. Does ec2.images-amazon.com count as a website? It could stand on its own if Amazon wanted it to. So, there’s still some room for error.

Punk Rockers = Low Self-Esteem?

Mick Jones of The Clash had this to say in a recent Onion AV Club interview:

Well we certainly appreciated the Sex Pistols, yeah. They were quite influential just on a personal level. I was a great music fan, and always wanted to be in a band. I followed music intensely, from a very young age, and Sex Pistols showed me that music was something anyone could do.

I hear that a lot with punk and indie musicians: the realization that music is something anyone can do, as though there were some barrier beforehand that gave them the impression that they couldn’t do it. Jones is essentially saying “Anyone can play punk music,” which contains within it the assumption that there are other musics that not just anyone can play.

Maybe punker rockers all have low self-esteem and looked at those other musicians as people doing things they could never do. Or maybe they were simply lazy and thought music would be hard so they never gave it a try until punk music, apparently the easiest rock genre, came along and showed them the way. It’s no wonder, then, that punk rockers so eschew musical virtuosity; it’s the stuff that comes from that other world of music that they thought was too hard to do.

It’s not my intention to insult punk rock or its practitioners; I’m just wondering about the psychological roots of their chosen genre. I suppose in the 70’s (and still today), as the Big Rock and Roll Machine was coming into its own, taking over more and more arenas with bigger recording sounds, that kids would look at that inflated circus and assume that the mechanics of music were just too much for a kid to understand. Because rock and roll isn’t just music; it’s theater and sporting event and circus and fashion shoot. Strip all that away and it’s just guitar chords and lyrics, and that’s what punk wanted to do: strip out the other junk.

However, punk left theater in (few musicians are as theatrical as Johnny Rotten, Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer), and then fashion snuck back in as all the kids were determined to dress “punk,” and so the circus came back to town. So maybe what we need is a genre of pure music, with no attendant fashion expectations. That would most likely end up being jazz, though.

And that would definitely be too hard to try.

Unhealthy Questions[1]

Whatever your stance on God, Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, makes an important point about The Big Questions like “what is the meaning of life?” and “why does the universe exist?” Dawkins says:

“Just because a question can be asked, doesn’t mean it deserves an answer. The mere fact that you can frame an English sentence beginning with the word “why” does not mean that English sentence should receive an answer. I could say, why are unicorns hollow?”

Language can make things tricky. Many questions are loaded with hidden presuppositions. Just ask lawyers. I especially hate it when I see courtroom dramas where the attorney instructs the witness to simply answer “yes” or “no,” as though the truth can be fully conveyed in binary. Bad questions abound, and so being aware of their existence really helps you to fend against them.

Of course the source of those Big Questions is the pre-linguistic emotional process of humans trying to make sense of a confounding universe, so Dawkins isn’t saying that our yearning for the universe to make sense is invalid, just that our inquiry needs to be more articulately stated. Other questions such as “how did the universe begin?” and “what made those amino acids form the first protein?” are perhaps more likely to get us on track toward a greater understanding of existence.

1.) Note that I didn’t say “bad questions,” because I’m a firm believer that the words “good” and “bad” are the philosophical equivalent of blunt objects. They can cut through nothing and inflict only trauma.

Reflections on Texas

It has probably been said that Dallas is to LA as Austin is to San Francisco, but I would go a step further to say that Dallas is Los Angeles without all the fun stuff to do.

When I think of Dallas I think of heat, bright sunlight, traffic congestion, pavement, urban sprawl, no major natural water source, SUV’s and superficially-dressed women with breast implants. In other words, LA minus the movie and music industry.

Nerds on Politics

An associate of mine said words to this effect recently:

“The US is having a hard time installing a new operating system in Iraq because they’re doing it on faulty hardware. If Iraq’s hard drive is going to work it probably needs to be partitioned.”