Please Self-Release Me, Let Me Go - Progressive Rock Music Forum

The problems start with something like Dasani ...

If you've never heard of the marketting disaster of this Coca Cola branded bottled water in the UK, you have to read this >here<

People buy bottled water, but they are not mugs - they know what things are worth and are willing to pay the price, but if the product is bogus it is actually worth less to them than tap water and they won't buy it.

1. Hasn't it always been this way (and worse)? Was it easier for Bach 300 years ago to make his works stand the test of time?

Well, since we know his works some 300 years later I would answer yes to that. The recording medium he used was not as volatile - the written manuscripts have survived and the Well-Tempered Clavier is still in print (ISBN-13: 978-1854726544). Also, even though his music (and Baroque in general) went out of favour soon after his death, but less than 50 years later the composers of the Classical period (Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn etc) were all "fans" because his manuscripts were still accessible to them.

Just because a medium itself is less volatile doesn't necessarily allow for better persistence of information. Digital has the obvious advantages of near instant, non-degrading and free replication and distribution. What if someone had accidentally burned the original manuscripts for Well-Tempered Clavier before they were copied? If Bach had been living today he could just have upload backups of it to three different servers and with almost no effort be very safe.

I'm pretty sure that, over the centuries, there are a few great works that have vanished forever because there were no backups.

I'm sure there are too, but I think we are wandering away from the topic a little and delving into the realms of pure speculation (interesting though it is). However, "off-site" backup storage isn't that safe, nor is it guaranteed. As we have discussed, the internet is in a state of continual flux and ever evolving, servers and services disappear overnight and electronic media is not future-proof. We can still read 300 year old manuscripts and we can still read the Rosetta Stone and Egyptian hieroglyphs - no one can make that claim for electronic media - if all Prog albums of the 70s were only ever recorded on 8-track cartridge this forum would not exist today, so relying on multi-server backups to save today's music is risky to say the least.

stefolof wrote:

Dean wrote:

stefolof wrote:

2. So what if music disappears. If no one is interested, is that such a bad thing? Isn't this cleansing mechanism, in fact, an answer to your first post?

This cleansing method would be arbitrary and non-selective and not quite what I had in mind. Having no one is interested in the music does not mean it is poor music, we could lose the world's greatest album of all time by that method simply because the artist was not very good at promoting himself and still praise the most generic piece of rubbish ever produced as being magnificent just because we believed the word-of-mouth hype, much of which was fabricated by payola, fake street teams, spamming and clever marketting.

I hear you. But instead of attributing this problem to technology - digital distribution - I attribute it to economy - the current monetary system - where "loudest is king". I've said it before, take away the money from this business and you take away the noise.

Or do you? If you are giving your music away for free don't you still want to reach as many people as you possibly can? You still have to promote your album - you still have to create a noise. Word-of-mouth is a promotional tool, it is social engineering, just as hyping the album on a public forum is - several levels down the line people will not be able to tell the difference between a genuine buzz and a fabricated one because they will look, taste and smell the same. The only way we can tell the difference at the moment is because the professionals do it better than the amateurs. Even without the lure of cash - the loudest will still be king.

If you take away the money from the direct product then the "industry" will make its money from indirect products, from merchandise and from ticket sales. The album is then reduced to being a mere advertisement - just another promotional item.

stefolof wrote:

Dean wrote:

stefolof wrote:

Sometime ago, I saw an interesting talk by Jimmy Wales who's the founder of Wikipedia. WP is run by a number of enthusiast. He often gets asked how they maintain the integrity of the site when practically anyone can edit it. The answer is that there's enough users who are serious and active in keeping it clean. They believe in it. The analogy to what we're discussing here is that, I think if music is good enough, it will stand the test of time because it will be kept alive by people. The media it is stored on is less important.

Wikipedia is unique in that poor articles, plagiarisms and acts of vandalism disappear very quickly because of the way in which the hierarchy of editors work within the system. The method forces a professional approach in the writers and an acceptable quality standard in both how they write and factual accuracy of what they write. Entries get constantly amended, updated and re-written - each wikipedia entry is a work in progress.

... in self-released music you don't get that - the music is presented as a finished work, and is accepted or discarded "as is" - there is no peer review or team of editors correcting and amending it. If some of the album is good and some is bad then that is how it stays.

And that's why music craves voluntarism. We're currently watching an industry that is milking the last drops of a musical landscape that is so watered down it's not even funny. The only way forward, in my opinion, is to rid music of business.

It sounds ideal and I would certainly support it, as a socialist I can think of nothing better than removing the entire entertainment industry from the economic environment and seeing all those who derive a living from it getting proper jobs. After all, it's not as if writing music is difficult or even hard work, in fact of all the "arts" I've dabbled in it's by far the easiest thing I've ever done, though being any good at it is another issue...

and that's the crunch... we are willing to pay for what we think is good, we are happy to buy a piece of music that has value to us personally and is by an artist we admire, that's why music sells and that's why the industry exists.

However, I do not believe that is possible to rid music of business, nor do I believe it is the true desire of all artists. I think many artists like their lifestyles, they like their fame and they crave the recognition and adulation that goes with it, and there are many more aspiring artist behind them who want that. The industry will exist to feed those egos and to feed off of them, they will profit from the changing landscape that the digital age creates by one means or another. If they cannot control access to the material then they will control some other aspect and profit from that instead.

Sony entered into the "software" end of the music industry by buying CBS, ATV, BMG, UA etc. because they lost the VHS/BetaMax "hardware" war and had no intention of losing the CD, DVD and Blu-ray wars - Apple could not do this due to a legal restriction imposed on them by Apple Corps so they created iTunes to ensure that the iPod had a ready supply of "software" - if the Entertainment Industry wants to control the distribution and access of their products via the Internet then they will find a way - if I was a Multinational Corporation I would not target piffling little dot-coms and ISPs, or go for anything that could be bypassed or overcome by smart programmers (such as DRM) or employ any legal restrictions that required an army of lawyers to manage - I would go for the underlying infrastructure that the whole Internet is reliant upon - the Internet backbone and the Tier 1/Tier 2 networks, and I would not need to buy into all of it - just key areas - because regardless of the format the internet takes in the future it will still have to go through the backbone.

What we could end up with is a two tier system - the professional and the amateur - and the demarcation between them will be far wider than anything we have ever seen in the past - no more semi-pros, no more pro-am - getting an unsigned band on even one gig of a pro tour was extremely difficult in the past, in the future it will be completely impossible - the pro circuit will be a closed shop. The division between signed and unsigned will be so wide it will be difficult to see them as being the same art-form. This could be "a good thing", I'm not convinced, but it could be.

Edited by Dean - February 15 2010 at 18:48

Yes, sorry. But if you agree on the replication/distribution advantages of digital would you not also agree that storage safety increases with every new replication point added to the mesh? Don't you think digital has a better potential because of these properties (in a broad way, not just the internet)?

The storage of anything is only as good as our ability to retrieve it, not the ease in which we can store it or how readily the data can be replicated. Any database (which is all any storage system is) is only as good as its indexing system - it does not matter how smart the query language, if the index is corrupt or lost so is the data. If something is valuable then the safeguards will be in-place to ensure the security of the data and all links to it - but for everyday data, like the millions of mp3 files that exist throughout the internet and over millions of PCs those security measures are not in place. If the next big thing is a highly compressed lossless format (let's call it μFLAC™ so I can get rich on the royalties) then those mp3s will fall into redundancy in a very short space of time ... people will just delete them and/or the links that point to them, with no guarantee that all the deleted data would have been converted to the emergent format first.

stefolof wrote:

If I had access to all necessities in life and was able to survive, I wouldn't mind about reaching out. The music itself is the reward for me. The special feeling I get when mixing certain types of melodies, rhythms, harmonies and sounds - that's the driving force. All else is just expectations of society.

Isn't that the same as just noodling at home and keeping your music to yourself?

stefolof wrote:

We've all been told that "one should earn his living from the sweat of his brow". Well, if that was true, we wouldn't have been given the ability to build tools, machines and robots. All boring, monotonous jobs should be automated (and in fact, it's happening) so that people would have more time for their own creative ideas.

That's not working too well at the moment - automation replaces the wrong strata of "workers" from the economic system. In the current system the people in the manufacturing industries support those in the service industries who in turn support those in the academic/research industries and they all support those in the entertainment industries. Ironically, automation not only removed a skilled and semi-skilled layer from the employment pool, it also wiped-out an entire layer of middle-managers and support staff who possessed few practical or useful skills. The current (western) economic model has shown that removing the manufacturing industries does not create more jobs in the service industries, so the problem is delayed by moving the overspill into academia - more people are going into further education and they are staying there longer - but there is nothing for them to do when they leave but go into the already overloaded service sector, or become educators for the next generation of academics. The entertainment industry is only sustainable when all the other levels are producing a surplus of wealth, even though it does create wealth of its own in the form of "product" it is not an essential "product".

What we haven't experienced (yet) is a drastic reduction in working hours that would facilitate the Utopia you desire. The average working week in Europe is still longer than it was in the 14th Century (and that wasn't exactly a hot-bed of creative output... well, except Dante and Chaucer).

stefolof wrote:

You're right in that it's not possible within the system as it exists today. As I wrote to Easymoney one post above, it would require a complete transformation of the economy. I don't believe anyone is born with a true desire for fame and fortune, it's a (distorted) value imposed by society. I do, however, believe that most of us want to live in prosperity.

I disagree (slightly) - the one thing that motivates children is the approval of their parents - they want praise for doing something right - that reward-system is what drives us to learn stuff, develop skills and to be good at them. We carry this on into adult life, we all want the respect and approval of our peers for doing something right - fame and fortune is the natural extension (and logical conclusion) of that "reward" system. The modern (distorted) values imposed by society have created the situation where people expect reward/respect/approval for doing anything, whether it is done right or not. Which neatly brings us back to the topic of this thread.

stefolof wrote:

Sounds like a nightmare but I think your analysis is accurate. The polarization of power structures is an accelerating process. But, to confuse things, I think it can go either way, it really depends. We have the consolidating corporate structures on one hand and we have the free information, open source grassroot movements on the other. What side will win, who knows?

Being a cynic, I'd hazard a guess that neither side will win and the result will be an unsatisfactory and unwieldy compromise.

Edited by Dean - February 16 2010 at 13:42

"I am proud of what I am, I... am a librarian"

Sorry if this is old, but I had to bump it because what you are saying is not true in the slightest. People have been making a lot of noise about that possibility in America if Net Neutrality dies, and I don't know what the current status of net neutrality is, but nobody's even come close to trying to do that yet, because people would throw a fit if you could go to Google but not the smaller sites Google linked you to.

What i want to say is :

I dont belive many bands can survive without going live. And i think the ability to do great live shows have allways been a key-stone in rock. So the critics will still be able to pick out the great live stuff.

This just to comfort those that think it will all drown in a flood of selfmade amaturism.

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