. . .is more or less the subject of our productions and of this weblog. While most of the music writers I meet harbor their deepest obsessions for specific artists or genres of music, I'm most fascinated - at the end of the day- with the elusive and ever-changing confluence of creativity, commerce and policy that shapes the musical ecosystem, from stars to bars to choirs to amateur hours. I want to explore the music infrastructure in America and elsewhere in the world. What determines what's popular, what's available and what gets made in the first place? How do people make music a part of their lives, and what assumptions do different people make about music? Why do people take up an instrument and why do they quit? Why do some people play, while others dance, while others don’t do either one? Why are there music snobs and what's the difference between a fan and a snob? And then why do many people regard music as a quasi-religious sacrament - the universal language that can quell conflict and engender brotherhood among people?
The answers may lie in a place few people have looked with sustained attention - the nexus between entertainment industries, non-profit arts organizations, schools, churches and government. Lots of people have studied the players in the game and how they play. Fewer write about the places and ways the rules of the game are made up. The best sources I've seen seen so far for collecting these ideas and facts in one place are the Future of Music Coalition and the Mike Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy. The former is run by young idealists, policy pragmatists and technology watchers in Washington DC. The latter happens to be right here in Nashville, run by Bill Ivey, who used to chair the National Endowment for the Arts, after years in charge of the Country Music Hall of Fame, again here in town. For three or four years now, I've been reading a lot and writing a bit about copyright, webcasting, music publishing, new technology, new models, new media etc. We're living through the most profound shift in music delivery since at least the dawn of the CD era and perhaps since magnetic tape and the transistor radio. And I hope to cover and comment on those changes here.
So I'll wrap this, because this is a marathon not a sprint. We're not divulging everything yet. Please comment back. This is about dialogue as well as monologue.
Craig writes: "We're living through the most profound shift in music delivery since at least the dawn of the CD era and perhaps since magnetic tape and the transistor radio."
You're understating the case there, buddy. What we're living through is the most profound shift in the delivery of ALL information and entertainment since... well, since Gutenberg.
The printing press represented the first "commoditization" of what we now call "content," the first time information could be distributed in the form of easily replicated "products." The printing press really presages the entire industrial revolution: Gutenberg's bibles were the first "manufactured" products.
What we're living through now, this Internet/digital transformation, represents the reversal of all that Gutenberg started. Suddenly "content" is no longer dependent on the "surface" on which it is distributed. It is entirely disembodied, and, in the case of music, it will not be too much longer before it can all be pulled on demand out of the ether. With subscription services, iPods, and music-enabled cell phones, we're only about another 20 minutes away from the "Celestial Jukebox."
More importantly, the Gutenberg revolution, and the ensuing five or so centuries of ever increasing audiences (first with print, then with electronic media), brought with it the concentrations of economic and political power that define the world today.
Now we live in the pivotal era of what I like to call "The Gutenberg Reversal." There is evidence accumulating on a daily basis the shows that the once "mass" audience is now becoming increasingly fragmented and simultaenously localized and globalized. Only time will tell what impact this transition will have on the economic and political institutions of the very near future.
--PS
Posted by: Paul Schatzkin | January 11, 2006 at 05:45 PM