There is an interesting article in this month's Exclaim! about the 2009 Transmission music conference. This is apparently a North American (maybe just Canadian - a bit unclear from their website) organization that puts together conferences about the entertainment industry. This is not the interesting part. Writer Allison Outhit aims a provocative suggestion at music industry folk: Is music more about music or about making money off of music?
"One fundamental question that never gets posed," she says, "not even at Transmission, is whether it's right that we continue to base all discussions on the future of music on the premise that only through its commodification can we truly 'value' music."
As I try to start up my own band, the inevitable question "why" has been easy to answer for me: because I love making it, and because other people like consuming it and perhaps there's a chance we might scratch each other's back. Even if I never get paid a dime, I'll still play/write. I think Radiohead has got it right: the future of music is free. Call me naive, but I still believe that if at some point, people want me to drop everything else I'm doing and just make music, then they'll come out to shows and buy merch and give what they can give for tracks. Until then, I'll continue to work and make music on the side.
I hope the industry never manages to resurrect the cash cow that music once was. But I'd be interested to hear an economist's opinion.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
I don't know about economics, but I think the problems started when we forgot that music is a trade. ("Artist" is a special case of "artisan".) It corresponds exactly to carpentry or plumbing in terms of method of training (apprenticeship), professional organization (the guild), standards of evaluation (the quality of your work, as judged by colleagues), and the way to attract clients (word of mouth). This is precisely how the business still works for every freelance musician.
Somewhere along the line, though, people got confused. University professors seem to think that music is a profession, like law or medicine (it's not). Many otherwise intelligent musicians think that it is a higher humanitarian calling, with the potential to solve all the world's problems (it's not). Members of the general public oscillate between thinking that music is a Special Gift, inaccessible to mere mortals, and using it as sonic wallpaper (it's neither). We alternate between placing an enormous, disproportionate emphasis on music, placing a weight on it that it can't possibly bear, and treating it in a cavalier, frivolous way that insults the person who composed it.
The broader society will eventually either sort all of these issues out, along with the other unresolved contraditions of modernity, or else collapse. In the meantime, however, musicians can restore some semblance of sanity by cultivating our relationships as tradespeople within the community. You can't have a meaningful "relationship" with Celine Dion, Lang Lang, or the members of Coldplay, but you can with your local piano teacher, a professional accompanist, the freelance clarinet player that does all those shows in town, or (yes) the parish organist. Music made by the first group becomes a commodity; music made by the second group resists commodification. It's on this basis, I think, that the economic questions of music will sort themselves out.
Good to see you back in the feed reader, BTW.
Glad to be back. Composing music, I now know, doesn't leave much time for discussing music.
Good observations. The more I think about how my future involves music, the more it seems to align with the "artisan" idea you're talking about. It will likely take a while for the grand illusions (and they are illusions) of fame and fortune through playing music to die down in my imagination - they're quite deeply ingrained. But I think the sooner I can do that, the more honest my music will become.
As a bonus, the more honest it is, the more meaningful it will become.
Mixed tenses...
Real stupid Lacalamita...
Post a Comment