Crossposted at Uncertain Form, which is a blog that you must read if you’re interested in the future of music.
1. One Year Ago…
I decided to stop being part of the destruction of the old music industry and to be part of the construction of the new music industry. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant: having discovered Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Archive.org and Official.fm in the course of sharing some lo-fi cut-and-paste tracks that I’d put together over the previous year, I knew that I’d only scratched the surface. The more I dug, the more I discovered: a range of netlabels, the Free Music Archive, free culture blogs, a whole ecosystem of creativity that existed in ambiguous tension with the commercial music business.
My place in that ecosystem was and remains unclear, at least to me – partly because the old label of “consumer” doesn’t seem to fit any more. I listen to a huge amount of free music of all genres, and I’m always seeking out more, but I haven’t produced any since last year. I started to share a monthly podcast (sporadically monthly, but I can always dream…) using only free music, and started a twitter hashtag to share some of the best albums I was listening to (#yourfreemusictoday, if anybody wants to join the fun). I occasionally write to artists to thank them, I share specific albums with friends, I write posts like this one – but none of that feels like it’s enough.
The reason why it doesn’t feel enough is described Alexander Stretton’s post, which finished by saying “As consumers of the freely distributed art we are participants in the creative commons culture and community, but it is time we become active.” The internet provided new means of disseminating music, but while that shift has created new infrastructure for marketing and selling, we have not yet managed to get away from the terrible verb of “consuming” music. The music business continues to dominate music – although sometimes the price it pays is its own continued existence – partly because it continues to dominate a model in which music is “consumed”.
So we reject that old label of consumer; we’re not Hungry Hippos, gulping wildly at any cheap plastic marble that the industry machine rolls in front of us. Yet it’s not clear what we are in a confused and confusing post-scarcity musical economy, where the tools of production are in the hands of the workers thanks to a technological culture driven by libertarian principles. We don’t want the free music culture to become like poetry culture, where those interested in and supporting the music are primarily the ones producing it, but what other models do we have for participation?
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