The Americana and roots music authority
Clouds in my coffee: A continuing contemplation of the new impermanence.
What follows is an attempt to corral some ideas running loose after reading Easy Ed’s blog about the new Apple gadget, and the coming of what is called cloud computing, which I take to mean that all the software (programs, music, video, etc.) is housed on a server outside your computer, and you simply interact with it through your various electronic devices.
Should that prove an inadequate summary, I’ll trust my better-educated brethren to correct me.
I’ve gone down this road before, and shall try not to repeat myself too often. Clearly, I’m a Luddite who has difficult appreciating, apprehending, and adopting new technologies. Except that I’ve been writing and designing on a computer since 1986, so maybe that caricature doesn’t quite fit.
Instead, let’s try starting from the novel notion that just because something is new doesn’t inherently mean it’s better. (I'm mostly quoting Ed Ward there, to give credit where it's due.) Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Like software, say. My first version of MS Word saved a document the size of these first few paragraphs at 4k. My outdated version of Office saves those same words at 24k. Granted that memory is dramatically cheaper than it was for my SE-30, my question is: Is MS Word eight times better as a writing platform than it was in 1988. And my answer (boy, this will come as a surprise) is, No. It’s not. It does a bunch more things I don’t know how to do and never want to have to do, but in terms of writing and editing text, it has done very little to make my work flow any easier. To improve my writing, which is all I really care about.
Y’know what really improved my writing (besides getting older)? Moving from a manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric.
(I am mindful, per a James Fallow piece in The Atlantic, back when I could afford to subscribe and had the time to read, that Microsoft really designs software for the users who buy hundreds and thousands of licenses, not for we poor suckers working at home. I know it’s not about me, that I’m just collateral damage.)
Same thing with design. At a certain point PageMaker could do every single thing I needed it to do so as to design a professional-quality magazine. (To the extent that I was ever competent to do so.) And then they replaced it with InDesign, and have kept upgrading that platform to the point where even if anybody wanted to hire me as a designer I may be too far out of date to do the job.
But what’s really changed is the notion of what a designer is and does. Not simply is a designer now also expected to do the job of a typographer (which I used to be, as well) and an editor, and a copy-writer, and a photo-retoucher, and all the rest. (Psychologist…) A designer is now evaluated and hired on the basis of technical proficiency with software. Has been for a decade or more. Not on the ability to think and solve problems, and certainly not on the quality of his or her work. In part this is because very few people hiring designers are capable of distinguishing good from bad design; they buy the presentation, the suit, the look, the rap, and what their friends say.
What has driven that change? Software. Technology makes things possible, and so we do them. Notice a lot of gray shadows adorning objects in the magazines you read? InDesign makes that easy, so people do it now. I've never seen it done well. Why does software constantly change? Because if it doesn't, the software developers have nothing to sell.
But the real question is, has all this technical prowess improved design? I don’t think so. I think it has made it increasingly dishonest, more decorative, and less connotative. Design is not about anything, it is cobbled together with no sense of the history or connotations of images and typefaces and colors. It’s just pretty and attention-grabbing.
Take, for example, the recent Rolling Stone cover with the stars of “Mad Men” on it, which isn’t even pretty. Instead of hiring Annie Leibovitz or Kevin Westenberg or Marina Chavez to photograph them, Rolling Stone settled for a bad PhotoShop job. Instead of documentary photograph which shows what actual people actually look like, we are now treated to such egregious retouching that the actual human beings only barely reseumble their published avatars. (Now contrast that with the classic George Lois Esquire covers, for example.)
This is somehow better? I have a seven-year-old daughter, and I don’t think that these unreasonable representations of the female form are in any way good for her, nor for our society. There are designers who can use PhotoShop to pull together found or rented images to good editorial effect. But not many, and they’d be good designers regardless the tools they use. It’s the ability to think that’s important.
Or, since we’re here, let’s talk about music. It is argued that MP3 files and all the rest of the gadgets and transitions which have gone with that have somehow improved our range of choices and listening experiences. Even though, of course, we accept the fact that MP3 files are a degraded form of the recorded original. It is argued that the dissolution of the filtering mechanisms which were hallmarks of the first century of the recorded music industry – record store clerks, paid critics record labels – has made it more possible for musicians to be heard, and to make a living.
This gets said a lot: We have more choice, as listeners, and the musician has a better opportunity to make a living.
I don’t read trade magazines any more, but I have difficulty accepting the second half of that sentence without proof. And I’m not aware of the proof. Are there more artists succeeding in making a decent living from their work today than there were ten or twenty years ago? Don’t point at the success stories of people who have used the wisdom of the web to build an audience (say, Joe Pug, who’s done a fine job). Talk about the average working musician. I’m listening, honest.
It also gets said a lot that musicians are or should be freed from the shackles of major labels, that labels kept good music from being heard. We can all think of examples on both sides of that, but, in the main, I don’t think so, at least in the period of music history during which I was active (say, 1977-2007 to make the numbers neat).
Did the Strawberry Zots benefit from their brief relationship with RCA? I dunno, actually. Did Love Battery survive a bad mix job on their A&M debut? Sort of, but not really. Did onerous label staff stifle Lucinda Williams’ career? Maybe, at times, but her gifts won out.
And that, I think, is the case: If the gift is there, it will get heard. Maybe not by a Dixie Chick-sized audience, but it’ll get heard. Or it would, in the old days. Now…I’m not so sure. Now I’m not sure where the money and input comes from to sustain a young artist’s career.
For a brief moment it was argued that TV placements would fund young artists and open them up to an audience. If my informant is accurate, however, the revenues from those placements were cut drastically when TV producers realized that the young musicians they were paying were benefiting more from the exposure than the money. Or could benefit more from the exposure, and so they could cut the fees. (Rumor and innuendo without sourcing, beware.)
Which brings me, more or less, back to the clouds (a fine play by Aristophanes, incidentally).
Two ideas I want to play with.
First, when books and music are tangible objects for which one pays, they retain some kind of value. Not all of them, to be sure, but when one moves (say) and needs to raise money, you used to be able to sell your LPs and 45s (the ones you thought you could live without), or your CDs, or your books. You wouldn’t make near what you paid for them (just like buying a new car, eh?), but there was money there in your apartment that you could reach out and touch if you absolutely had to.
Which is different from Hemingway first editions and Butcher Covers and all that collector memorabilia stuff, but it all ties together.
There’s no resale value for an MP3 file. Or for a digital book.
Even if we pay for (rent) text or music, we now have a fundamentally different relationship to it. It is no longer money we can reach out and touch. It is, instead, just like TV: a disposable pop medium with no lasting impact.
This may even be a good thing, I hasten to concede. Maybe. But we’re not thinking about it, best I can tell. We’re just rushing higgeldy-piggeldy toward this future because the technology always seems to win. (See: Global warming.)
Why is this important (the paragraph I left out of the first draft posted here; there may well be others)? This is crucial in our society because we only value things that we pay for, and we value them according to how expensive they are. If music and prose are now to be things one rents, instead of buys (or checks out of the library), they are devalued in the commerce of our understanding. If music and prose are devalued -- are free, in effect -- then why should we value the creation of those things, much less the creators? We come quickly to a world in which only those with trust funds can afford to be creative. Or rich spouses.
Second, I think responses to that first notion will break around class lines. If you come from affluence and ease, the resale value of your books and records is of no import. At one point in our society, having a lot of those things marked you as a wealthy person of class and knowledge. But, just like a suntan (once the mark of the lower class because they worked outside; then the mark of the leisure class because the lower class worked in a factory; now the mark of the lower class because the leisure class doesn’t want to go to the skin doctor), possession of physical media objects is no longer an upper class status twitch. (Unless, for the moment, it’s vintage vinyl.)
Now the status attends to possession and mastery of the latest gadget. Not what you’re listening to or reading, not its condition, not its content. But what device you’re consuming it on.
So status is now conferred by your skill at buying toys. As it always has been, I suppose. By how few actual objects you can get by with in the digital era. (I remember a “Star Trek” episode in which some crewman beams aboard with a small small container of belongings, including one rare, bound book, which marks him/her as…different.)
The problem, if you’re a musician, is that every time you oblige somebody in my income bracket to buy a new device to hear your music, you make it more and more likely that I’m going to choose to eat instead. And every time you presume that because you big city folks have and can afford high speed internet, the rest of the world can too? Well, no. We can’t, and we don’t all. So if you want to build a brave new musical world in which we have to be attached to the internet by some device which will have to be replaced every 18 months because that’s how the manufacturer really makes money for their stockholders, well, a lot of us can’t and won’t play.
Maybe you didn’t want us in your audience, anyhow.
We move further and further down this road selling intangibles, and I am fascinating (and frightened) by how it will play out. We’ve built empires selling flavored sugar water and weeds one burns and inhale. So we know how to sell shit people don’t need, that’s for sure.
When you change music and books from tangible objects with resale value to this other intangible thing, my relationship to it changes. Generations far younger than me will not contemplate this change; it’ll just be the way things are. But it’s our job, as elders, to decide if this is a good thing, to manage the process. Isn’t it?
I work surrounded by objects my wife wishes I would get rid of. Some of which I’ve sold in eBay because even I recognize that the house we’re building is smaller than this one, and I no longer can justify the size office I maintain, and all the stuff in it.
There is talk that I have some acquisitive disease, and should be fixed somehow. I think that misunderstands the creative process, as I understand it. All these things with which I surround myself, they remind me of ideas. They remind me of who gave them to me, of songs, and songwriters, and guitar lines, and maybe I’m not going to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight again any time soon, but I like knowing it’s on the shelf. I like knowing that if I need to hear “Karn Evil No. 9” it’s on the shelf. I realize both of those things can be found online at this point. But I won’t encounter them online in my office unless I go looking; if I turn around, they’re both here, waiting for me.
My way. Different from the future, and this is all a battle big corporations will win and I will lose. But I grow weary with the pace at which change proceeds, nobody asking what it means and how we are being changed.
I heard somebody from law enforcement on the radio today, saying that he feared the instant gratification of our computer age makes kids more susceptible to the instant gratification of Oxy and meth. I’m not sure he’s right, but I’m sure a lot of people around here agreed with him.
At least, we live in interesting times. I wish I had more time to fiddle with this, but it’s already at least a thousand words longer than anybody can be expected to read. Ah, well.
Should that prove an inadequate summary, I’ll trust my better-educated brethren to correct me.
I’ve gone down this road before, and shall try not to repeat myself too often. Clearly, I’m a Luddite who has difficult appreciating, apprehending, and adopting new technologies. Except that I’ve been writing and designing on a computer since 1986, so maybe that caricature doesn’t quite fit.
Instead, let’s try starting from the novel notion that just because something is new doesn’t inherently mean it’s better. (I'm mostly quoting Ed Ward there, to give credit where it's due.) Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Like software, say. My first version of MS Word saved a document the size of these first few paragraphs at 4k. My outdated version of Office saves those same words at 24k. Granted that memory is dramatically cheaper than it was for my SE-30, my question is: Is MS Word eight times better as a writing platform than it was in 1988. And my answer (boy, this will come as a surprise) is, No. It’s not. It does a bunch more things I don’t know how to do and never want to have to do, but in terms of writing and editing text, it has done very little to make my work flow any easier. To improve my writing, which is all I really care about.
Y’know what really improved my writing (besides getting older)? Moving from a manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric.
(I am mindful, per a James Fallow piece in The Atlantic, back when I could afford to subscribe and had the time to read, that Microsoft really designs software for the users who buy hundreds and thousands of licenses, not for we poor suckers working at home. I know it’s not about me, that I’m just collateral damage.)
Same thing with design. At a certain point PageMaker could do every single thing I needed it to do so as to design a professional-quality magazine. (To the extent that I was ever competent to do so.) And then they replaced it with InDesign, and have kept upgrading that platform to the point where even if anybody wanted to hire me as a designer I may be too far out of date to do the job.
But what’s really changed is the notion of what a designer is and does. Not simply is a designer now also expected to do the job of a typographer (which I used to be, as well) and an editor, and a copy-writer, and a photo-retoucher, and all the rest. (Psychologist…) A designer is now evaluated and hired on the basis of technical proficiency with software. Has been for a decade or more. Not on the ability to think and solve problems, and certainly not on the quality of his or her work. In part this is because very few people hiring designers are capable of distinguishing good from bad design; they buy the presentation, the suit, the look, the rap, and what their friends say.
What has driven that change? Software. Technology makes things possible, and so we do them. Notice a lot of gray shadows adorning objects in the magazines you read? InDesign makes that easy, so people do it now. I've never seen it done well. Why does software constantly change? Because if it doesn't, the software developers have nothing to sell.
But the real question is, has all this technical prowess improved design? I don’t think so. I think it has made it increasingly dishonest, more decorative, and less connotative. Design is not about anything, it is cobbled together with no sense of the history or connotations of images and typefaces and colors. It’s just pretty and attention-grabbing.
Take, for example, the recent Rolling Stone cover with the stars of “Mad Men” on it, which isn’t even pretty. Instead of hiring Annie Leibovitz or Kevin Westenberg or Marina Chavez to photograph them, Rolling Stone settled for a bad PhotoShop job. Instead of documentary photograph which shows what actual people actually look like, we are now treated to such egregious retouching that the actual human beings only barely reseumble their published avatars. (Now contrast that with the classic George Lois Esquire covers, for example.)
This is somehow better? I have a seven-year-old daughter, and I don’t think that these unreasonable representations of the female form are in any way good for her, nor for our society. There are designers who can use PhotoShop to pull together found or rented images to good editorial effect. But not many, and they’d be good designers regardless the tools they use. It’s the ability to think that’s important.
Or, since we’re here, let’s talk about music. It is argued that MP3 files and all the rest of the gadgets and transitions which have gone with that have somehow improved our range of choices and listening experiences. Even though, of course, we accept the fact that MP3 files are a degraded form of the recorded original. It is argued that the dissolution of the filtering mechanisms which were hallmarks of the first century of the recorded music industry – record store clerks, paid critics record labels – has made it more possible for musicians to be heard, and to make a living.
This gets said a lot: We have more choice, as listeners, and the musician has a better opportunity to make a living.
I don’t read trade magazines any more, but I have difficulty accepting the second half of that sentence without proof. And I’m not aware of the proof. Are there more artists succeeding in making a decent living from their work today than there were ten or twenty years ago? Don’t point at the success stories of people who have used the wisdom of the web to build an audience (say, Joe Pug, who’s done a fine job). Talk about the average working musician. I’m listening, honest.
It also gets said a lot that musicians are or should be freed from the shackles of major labels, that labels kept good music from being heard. We can all think of examples on both sides of that, but, in the main, I don’t think so, at least in the period of music history during which I was active (say, 1977-2007 to make the numbers neat).
Did the Strawberry Zots benefit from their brief relationship with RCA? I dunno, actually. Did Love Battery survive a bad mix job on their A&M debut? Sort of, but not really. Did onerous label staff stifle Lucinda Williams’ career? Maybe, at times, but her gifts won out.
And that, I think, is the case: If the gift is there, it will get heard. Maybe not by a Dixie Chick-sized audience, but it’ll get heard. Or it would, in the old days. Now…I’m not so sure. Now I’m not sure where the money and input comes from to sustain a young artist’s career.
For a brief moment it was argued that TV placements would fund young artists and open them up to an audience. If my informant is accurate, however, the revenues from those placements were cut drastically when TV producers realized that the young musicians they were paying were benefiting more from the exposure than the money. Or could benefit more from the exposure, and so they could cut the fees. (Rumor and innuendo without sourcing, beware.)
Which brings me, more or less, back to the clouds (a fine play by Aristophanes, incidentally).
Two ideas I want to play with.
First, when books and music are tangible objects for which one pays, they retain some kind of value. Not all of them, to be sure, but when one moves (say) and needs to raise money, you used to be able to sell your LPs and 45s (the ones you thought you could live without), or your CDs, or your books. You wouldn’t make near what you paid for them (just like buying a new car, eh?), but there was money there in your apartment that you could reach out and touch if you absolutely had to.
Which is different from Hemingway first editions and Butcher Covers and all that collector memorabilia stuff, but it all ties together.
There’s no resale value for an MP3 file. Or for a digital book.
Even if we pay for (rent) text or music, we now have a fundamentally different relationship to it. It is no longer money we can reach out and touch. It is, instead, just like TV: a disposable pop medium with no lasting impact.
This may even be a good thing, I hasten to concede. Maybe. But we’re not thinking about it, best I can tell. We’re just rushing higgeldy-piggeldy toward this future because the technology always seems to win. (See: Global warming.)
Why is this important (the paragraph I left out of the first draft posted here; there may well be others)? This is crucial in our society because we only value things that we pay for, and we value them according to how expensive they are. If music and prose are now to be things one rents, instead of buys (or checks out of the library), they are devalued in the commerce of our understanding. If music and prose are devalued -- are free, in effect -- then why should we value the creation of those things, much less the creators? We come quickly to a world in which only those with trust funds can afford to be creative. Or rich spouses.
Second, I think responses to that first notion will break around class lines. If you come from affluence and ease, the resale value of your books and records is of no import. At one point in our society, having a lot of those things marked you as a wealthy person of class and knowledge. But, just like a suntan (once the mark of the lower class because they worked outside; then the mark of the leisure class because the lower class worked in a factory; now the mark of the lower class because the leisure class doesn’t want to go to the skin doctor), possession of physical media objects is no longer an upper class status twitch. (Unless, for the moment, it’s vintage vinyl.)
Now the status attends to possession and mastery of the latest gadget. Not what you’re listening to or reading, not its condition, not its content. But what device you’re consuming it on.
So status is now conferred by your skill at buying toys. As it always has been, I suppose. By how few actual objects you can get by with in the digital era. (I remember a “Star Trek” episode in which some crewman beams aboard with a small small container of belongings, including one rare, bound book, which marks him/her as…different.)
The problem, if you’re a musician, is that every time you oblige somebody in my income bracket to buy a new device to hear your music, you make it more and more likely that I’m going to choose to eat instead. And every time you presume that because you big city folks have and can afford high speed internet, the rest of the world can too? Well, no. We can’t, and we don’t all. So if you want to build a brave new musical world in which we have to be attached to the internet by some device which will have to be replaced every 18 months because that’s how the manufacturer really makes money for their stockholders, well, a lot of us can’t and won’t play.
Maybe you didn’t want us in your audience, anyhow.
We move further and further down this road selling intangibles, and I am fascinating (and frightened) by how it will play out. We’ve built empires selling flavored sugar water and weeds one burns and inhale. So we know how to sell shit people don’t need, that’s for sure.
When you change music and books from tangible objects with resale value to this other intangible thing, my relationship to it changes. Generations far younger than me will not contemplate this change; it’ll just be the way things are. But it’s our job, as elders, to decide if this is a good thing, to manage the process. Isn’t it?
I work surrounded by objects my wife wishes I would get rid of. Some of which I’ve sold in eBay because even I recognize that the house we’re building is smaller than this one, and I no longer can justify the size office I maintain, and all the stuff in it.
There is talk that I have some acquisitive disease, and should be fixed somehow. I think that misunderstands the creative process, as I understand it. All these things with which I surround myself, they remind me of ideas. They remind me of who gave them to me, of songs, and songwriters, and guitar lines, and maybe I’m not going to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight again any time soon, but I like knowing it’s on the shelf. I like knowing that if I need to hear “Karn Evil No. 9” it’s on the shelf. I realize both of those things can be found online at this point. But I won’t encounter them online in my office unless I go looking; if I turn around, they’re both here, waiting for me.
My way. Different from the future, and this is all a battle big corporations will win and I will lose. But I grow weary with the pace at which change proceeds, nobody asking what it means and how we are being changed.
I heard somebody from law enforcement on the radio today, saying that he feared the instant gratification of our computer age makes kids more susceptible to the instant gratification of Oxy and meth. I’m not sure he’s right, but I’m sure a lot of people around here agreed with him.
At least, we live in interesting times. I wish I had more time to fiddle with this, but it’s already at least a thousand words longer than anybody can be expected to read. Ah, well.
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Comment by Paul Dionne on September 3, 2010 at 11:14am -
I was waiting for this expansion of your thoughts about Easy Ed's initial post about Steve Jobs/Apple; And I thank you again for writing; there is so much that you are THINKING about here in this post alone, that reflects in my thinking too -
So, the new cloud based technology is that - it is a cloud; there is more but more what? The quality of thought, and what we are given, does not change because we can get more. Finding quality in things remains, it's just now we are bombarded by more and more; the chaos theory is taking shape; our future is presenting itself to us more and more.
I read Lefsetz because in his newsletter is present the thoughts and the way the music industry is going to get it's crap together. And frankly, when I read Lefsetz, it scares the crap out of me. He treats Steve Jobs as the greatest rock star of our day; selling more stuff I suppose is a function of a star, but that's not my idea of thought, and of quality. And when Lefsetz opens his mailbag...I can't help but read those car wrecks along the path; everything from rants for Arizona; for Ted Nugent; to you name it; rare is the critical thinking that any of those people that I can appreciate , and say to myself, there is someone who I'd like to sit down and have a discussion with, or there is someone that likes other people; and these are music industry insiders, for the most part;
I agree with you Grant, the future as it is appearing to us is still to sell, more gadgets and more product but the quantity of quality is no different; sorry for all the tangents.
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Comment by Jack Williams on September 3, 2010 at 12:06pm -
I’m a 50 year software engineer. I figure I’m closing in on 2,000 CDs. I’m sure there’s a good number of people who visit this website with bigger collections than that, but I don’t run into many such people in my day to day life. At this point, I have not downloaded a single song from the internet except maybe for the occasional freebie from an artist website for preview purposes. I mentioned this at a family social gathering recently and a cousin of mine thought that was very odd, especially considering how much of a “music fan” I was. A big part of the reason I have resisted is the “intangible” aspect. Another is that it seems too easy and that I fear that once I start, I won’t be able to control myself and I’ll just spend just too much time and energy on it.
For me, the CD medium is close to perfect. It is tangible, requires little in the way of maintenance and is quite convenient. I had a pretty big album collection back in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. Kept them in milk crates and banana boxes and carted them to and from college many times. As I wasn’t overly meticulous in how I took care of them, they didn’t age very well. CD’s, on the other hand, don’t require much too much vigilance with respect to care. Just put them back in the case when you’re done listening to them and you’re pretty much good to go. I can handle that. I like the fact that when I buy a new CD, I can bring it with me on my next car trip and listen to it. Couldn’t do that with albums. Then, I can put on the shelf, where it will wait for me until next time I want to listen to it. That is all that is required of me.
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Comment by David Haskin on September 3, 2010 at 2:55pm -
As one of the pro- new technology responders in the previous post on Apple, I want to first make sure, Grant, to be clear that I highly respect your opinions and agree with many of them. To me, though, a key way of looking at this is through the lens of democratization of art. When Gutenberg perfected the moveable type printing press, it opened the way to any literate person potentially becoming a reader or even an author. And, over time, what did that do to quality? On the whole, I would argue, it decreased quality -- gone were the beautiful illuminated volumes of the pre-Gutenberg era. But the proliferation of both books and authors utlimately made freedom of speech possible. The same process is happening with new technology. Now, anybody can be a "journalist," which, as a retired journalist, makes me cringe a bit, it's true. But it also will lead, hopefully, to more people watchdogging government, looking for abuse, etc etc. With electronic publishing, anybody with a few bucks can be a novelist, which as an avid reader, also makes me cringe. But some good work is already emerging out of this new technology. A small percentage of these new authors, musicians, etc will have anything important to say and an even smaller number will be able to say something both important and artful. But there will be more voices and some of them will be important and artful. So while quality goes down overall, opportunity increases as democratization increases.
Democracy, it's been said many, many times, is a messy process. The greater availability of music, prose and whatever is not an unalloyed good but, I would argue, on the whole, it is an important improvement.
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Comment by Adam Sheets on September 3, 2010 at 3:44pm -
I own thousands of CDs, but I'm not really a fan of the medium. It sounds too clean and digital for me, while vinyl has a warmer, earthier tone. In terms of my warped version of sound quality, the mp3 is really no worse than the CD and possibly a little better. If it makes any difference give me mono over stereo also.
Of course, I still buy (and am sent) CDs over mp3s because I enjoy holding something in my hands, looking at the booklet to see who wrote what and who played what, and yes, as you said, I like something that has value and can't simply be deleted and lost forever.
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Comment by Easy Ed on September 3, 2010 at 4:44pm -
There's a lot here, some of which I totally get and other things I'm confused by.
On the subject of musicians having a better opportunity to make a living in a digital world...I would substitute "access to audience" for "opportunity" and scratch "make a living". By stripping some of the big costs out of the process (recording, manufacturing, financing), retaining ownership and being able to place your product right along side everyone else...you've eliminated some of the fundamental industry problems of the past. The "make a living" part involves things such as talent, the ability to market and luck, to name but three, and is a completely separate issue to the discussion of distribution and the format.
In my experience within the industry, roughly the same as yours plus five, one of the questions has always been this: how do you put a hundred pounds into a one pound sack? With a medium-sized Tower (RIP) store having 50,000 titles on hand (and most record stores are much smaller), and an industry that churned out 25-30,000 new releases a year, how do you manage the space? The answer is you set priorities. A label or a distributor, or both together, decides that this artist will get advertising dollars and this one won't. That artist will get radio promotion and the other one won't. A salesperson will negotiate with a buyer and say "take this and this and this, and you can skip these." So there was a ton of music (we can argue all day whether we think it was good or not) that never saw the light of day. Just go through all the archives at ND and read all the great reviews from artists that never got a fighting chance to share shelf space because there simply was not enough room. If for no reason other than that, digital solves that problem.
I get lost at your point about the importance of having a tangible item with a resale value. As someone who has transitioned to digital, my relationship to music has broadened and deepened. I listen to much more music, more often than I ever did. I can sit here at a computer and visit artist's websites, read their blogs, see pictures or a video from last night's show, trade emails, track gigs and listen to samples of their art. My digital files have an incredibly high value to me, and the relationship has nothing to do with cost or ownership. And in a twist of fate I guess, the cloud renders my files obsolete.
Gadgets. I don't know about you, but I've owned a crystal radio set, a tube radio in a big wooden cabinet, two 45 rpm RCA players, a couple 16-33-45-78 portable systems, a giant sci-fi looking components and speaker system, tons of transistor radios, Walkmans, cassette and 8track players, a reel to reel, CD players galore, televisions both black and white and in color, small screens and big, countless cell phones and probably two dozen computers by now. It's not all a capitalist conspiracy to sell you crap you don't need or stuff that will break quickly. Most of the changes in technology are for the good, although even I'll admit a nostalgic feeling thinking about my old record collection with it's snaps, crackles and pops.
I'm sure there's more.
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Comment by Grant Alden on September 3, 2010 at 6:16pm -
Ed: I'll have a longer tirade later, I'm sure.
To some extent I think the difference in our consumption patterns may have to do with our relationship to the computer. I listen to music while stripping doors, driving to and from the farm, washing dishes. It's easy to pick up a stack of CDs and shove them in the car. I have no way of playing my MP3 player in the truck (where the CD player is on the fritz again), or in the car (which has a cassette player, and we've lost the adapter thingy which played CDs). Used to be when I went on a road trip I'd grab a mail tub of CDs and listen and sort while driving. I can't do that with a MP3 player, even if I had one that played through the car stereo.
Your digital files may have an opportunity cost that you value. But you can't sell it to me.
I have about 10,000 CDs here. If times got really hard, I could probably make $10k unloading them, more if I had time to list each one on eBay. That's different from the electronic files on my computer.
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Comment by RP N10 on September 4, 2010 at 5:27am -
I can understand the resale argument in terms of a right to enjoy each song or album independent of anyone else. This entire cloud computing thing means you're always reliant on someone else for access to what's yours. While these services are in their start up mode they'll be nice and cuddly but once they have a large number of users then the subject of paying for access will start to rear its ugly head. And if the service goers into bankruptcy what do you do then? And there's a risk it winds up like the old music industry with a more restricted choice.
BTW for Grant - I have an old car which I cannot play my ipod in (except with a cassette tape adaptor). If I have a long journey I'll burn off a few CDs of what I think I'd like to hear and play them.
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Comment by Lost Hills on September 4, 2010 at 6:23pm -
I never had a computer until 2004. I used to tell people that computer couldn't do anything for you that you couldn't do better with a typewriter and a library card. Of course I was a dolt....
I've thought about getting an ipod, but held off. MP3 files are great for sharing music on the web, but they're not cd quality, and I like albums. I want to hear the whole album, in the order the artist intended, and have access to the original liner notes. CDs aren't perfect, but they're better than cassettes. I still buy LPs, but I know from long experience that they don't age well.....
A lot of people think they can be internet rock stars. The internet is great for self expression, but not for making money. To make money with your music, you have to get signed to a label, quit your job, and tour. You can do a lot of groovy things on your PC: record and manufacture professional looking cds, sell them on cd baby, have your owb website, etc, but if you want to make a living at it you've still got to do it the old fashioned way.....
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Comment by Bryant Brabson on September 8, 2010 at 11:35am
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Great post- the resale value of music and books has never crossed my mind.
I contend that many people have been using cloud computing for longer than they know- if you're not downloading your email to your computer using a client such as Outlook then where is it? It's on a server owned by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc.
I might be in the minority, but I have purchased cd's because of new music that I've been exposed to via the internet. For that matter, being able to stream music has also prevented me from buying come bad records as well.
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Comment by hyperbolium.com on September 8, 2010 at 1:06pm -
"When you change music and books from tangible objects with resale value to this other intangible thing, my relationship to it changes."
Interestingly, both books and music transitioned from intangible story telling and live performance to print and recording. Perhaps those disenfranchised from digital media will be a return to music making?
The notion, repeated a couple of times in this thread, that MP3s are of low quality is a comment on MP3s vended commercially, not on the technology itself. One can encode MP3s at bit rates that are indistinguishable from the original CD audio, which makes them a terrific, portable format. If you haven't an audio jack into your car radio for an MP3 player, you can get a cassette adapter for less than $10. If you don't have a cassette deck you can get a radio adapter, which should work especially well in rural areas with lots of blank space on the FM dial.
Finally, what prevents the resale of MP3s that have been purchased from a commercial source? Do Amazon and iTunes prevent their customers from reselling MP3s? So long as you actually destroy your own copies, is there a licensing issue, or is there simply no market for this (yet)?
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