[Dixielandjazz] Where will the music be seen/heard?

[Steve Barbone]

CAVEAT - Long Article about where the music is going. May not interest you
so prepare to delete. Futurists with inquiring minds might wish to read on.

Summation of article: Those bands among us that wish to build "national"
reputations and/or really make a living at it, should get their act together
on YouTube and MySpace, just like the Arctic Monkeys did.

The challenge? How to get people throughout the world to visit your page on
YouTube or My Space. Think Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways"

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


2006, Brought to You by You

NY TIMES - By JON PARELES -  December 10, 2006

IMAGINE paying $580 million for an ever-expanding heap of personal ads,
random photos, private blathering, demo recordings and camcorder video
clips. That¹s what Rupert Murdoch did when his News Corporation bought
MySpace in July. Then imagine paying $1.65 billion for a flood of grainy TV
excerpts, snarkily edited film clips, homemade video diaries, amateur music
videos and shots of people singing along with their stereos. That¹s what
Google got when it bought YouTube in October.

What these two highly strategic companies spent more than $2 billion on is a
couple of empty vessels: brand-named, centralized repositories for whatever
their members decide to contribute.

All that material is ³user-generated content,² the paramount cultural buzz
phrase of 2006. It¹s a term that must appeal to the technocratic instincts
of investors. I prefer something a little more old-fashioned:
self-expression. Terminology aside, this will be remembered as the year that
the old-line media mogul, the online media titan and millions of individual
Web users agreed: It demands attention.

It¹s on Web sites like YouTube, MySpace, Dailymotion, PureVolume, GarageBand
and Metacafe. It¹s homemade art independently distributed and inventively
promoted. It¹s borrowed art that has been warped, wrecked, mocked and
sometimes improved. It¹s blogs and open-source software and collaborative
wikis and personal Web pages. It¹s word of mouth that can reach the entire
world. 

It¹s often inept, but every so often it¹s inspired, or at least worth a
mouse click. It has made stars, at least momentarily, of characters like the
video diarist Lonelygirl (who turned out to be a fictional creation) and the
power-pop band OK Go (whose treadmill choreography earned far more plays
than its albums). And now that Web entrepreneurs have recognized the
potential for profit, it¹s also a sweet deal: amateurs, and some calculating
professionals, supply the raw material free. Private individuals aren¹t
private anymore; everyone wants to preen.

All that free-flowing self-expression presents a grandly promising anarchy,
an assault on established notions of professionalism, a legal morass and a
technological remix of the processes of folk culture. And simply unleashing
it could be the easy part. Now we have to figure out what to do with it:
Ignore it? Sort it? Add more of our own? In utopian terms the great
abundance of self-expression puts an end to the old, supposedly wrongheaded
gatekeeping mechanisms: hit-driven recording companies, hidebound movie
studios, timid broadcast radio stations, trend-seeking media coverage. But
toss out those old obstacles to creativity and, lo and behold, people begin
to crave a new set of filters.

TECH oracles predicted long ago that by making worldwide distribution
instantaneous, the Web would democratize art as well as other discourse, at
least for those who are connected. The virtual painting galleries, the free
songs, the video blogs, the comedy clips, the online novels ‹ all of them
followed the rise of the Internet and the spread of broadband as inevitably
as water spills through a crack in a dam. Why keep your creativity, or the
lack of it, to yourself when you can invite the world to see?

Every so often the world notices. British rockers like the Arctic Monkeys
and Lily Allen built huge followings at home and abroad by making their
music available on MySpace, where bands can post full-length songs and video
clips. When the Arctic Monkeys released their first album as 2006 began ‹
full of songs that fans already had on their computers and iPods ‹ it drew
the highest initial sales of any debut in the history of the British charts.
Both of them are exceptions, however; many musicians are still waiting for
the first stranger to visit their MySpace page.

While some small percentage of the user-generated outpouring is a first
glimpse of real talent, much of it is fledgling bands unveiling a song
recorded last Thursday in a friend¹s basement, or would-be directors showing
the world their demo reels. There¹s deadpan video vérité, raw club
recordings, ³gotcha² moments (like Michael Richards¹s stand-up meltdown) and
wiseguy edits, along with considerably more polished productions. And users
generate all sorts of recombinant art: parodies, alternate video clips,
mash-ups, juxtapositions, ³Star Trek² scenes accompanied by U2 songs, George
W. Bush rapping. 

User-generated content ‹ turning the audience into the auteur ‹ isn¹t
exactly an online innovation. It¹s as old as ³America¹s Funniest Home
Videos,² or letters to the editor, or community sings, or Talmudic
commentary, or graffiti. The difference is that in past eras most
self-expression stayed close to home. Users generated traditional cultures
and honed regional styles, concentrated by geographical isolation.

In the 20th century recording and broadcasting broke down that isolation.
Yet those same technologies came to reinforce a different kind of
separation: between professional artist and audience. A successful artist
needed not only creativity and skill, but also access to the tools of
production ‹ studios, recorders, cameras ‹ and outlets for mass
distribution. 

As the music and movie businesses grew, they flaunted their economic
advantage. They could spend millions of dollars to make and market
blockbuster hits, to place them in theaters or get them played on radio and
MTV. They owned the factories that could press vinyl albums and make the
first CDs, before the days of the home CD burner and MP3s. Independent types
could, and did, release their own work, but they couldn¹t match the scale of
the established entertainment business.

They still are at a disadvantage. But they are gaining.

Low-budget recording and the Internet have handed production and
distribution back to artists, and one-stop collections of user-generated
content give audiences a chance to find their works. With gatekeepers out of
the way, it¹s possible to realize the do-it-yourself dreams of punk and
hip-hop, to circle back to the kind of homemade art that existed long before
media conglomerates and mass distribution. But that art doesn¹t stay close
to home. Online it moves breathtakingly fast and far.

Folk cultures often work incrementally, adding bits of individuality to a
well-established tradition, with time and memory determining what will last.
In the user-generated realm, tradition is anything prerecorded, and all
existing works seem to be there for the taking, copyrights aside.

In the process, another thing users generate is back talk. Surfing YouTube
can be a survey of individual reactions to pop culture: movie and television
characters transplanted out of their original plots or synched to improbable
songs, pop hits revamped as comedy or attached to new, unauthorized imagery.
(Try searching for Justin Timberlake on YouTube to see all the variations,
loving and snide, on his single ³Sexyback.²)

Copyright holders might be incensed; since buying YouTube, Google is paying
some of them and fielding lawsuits from others. But a truly shrewd marketer
might find some larger value. Those parodies, collages, remakes and mismakes
are unvarnished market research: a way to see what people really think of
their product. They¹re also advertising: a reminder of how enjoyable the
official versions were.

The amateurs may seem irreverent, disrespectful and even parasitical as they
help themselves to someone else¹s hooks. But they¹re confirming that the
pros came up with something durable enough to demand a reply. Without icons,
what would iconoclasts mock?

Some pros understand that they don¹t need to have the last word on their
work. Rappers like Jay-Z customarily release a cappella versions of their
rhymes, a clear invitation for disc jockeys and producers to work up their
own new tracks. Rockers like Nine Inch Nails have placed their raw
multitrack recordings online, along with the software to remix them.
Filmmakers have not been so forthcoming, but that hasn¹t stopped viewers
from, for instance, editing ³The Big Lebowski² down to all the moments when
its characters use a certain four-letter word. It¹s a popular clip on
YouTube. 

Of course the notion of culture as something bestowed by creators and
swallowed whole by audiences never had much to do with reality. Now fans can
not only tell others about their responses to art ‹ in the user-generated
content of fan sites and discussion forums ‹ but they can also demonstrate
them directly. 

IN the tsunami of self-expression, audiences have been forced to take on a
much bigger job: sifting through the new stuff. For musicians, the Internet
has become an incessant public audition. What once was winnowed down by A&R
departments, and then culled again by radio stations and other media, is now
online in all its hopeful profusion. A listener could spend the rest of her
life listening to unreleased songs. Some people do just that to claim
bragging rights, or blogging rights, for discovering the next indie
sensation.

Individually the hopefuls can¹t compete with a heavily promoted major-label
star. Face it: Song for song, most of them just aren¹t as good. But
collectively they are stiff competition indeed: for time, for attention and,
eventually, for cultural impact. The multiplying choices promise ever more
diversity, ever more possibility for innovation and unexpected delight. But
they also point toward an increasingly atomized audience, a popular culture
composed of a zillion nonintersecting mini-cults. So much available
self-expression can only accelerate what narrowing radio and cable formats
had already begun: the separation of culture into ever-smaller niches.

That fragmentation is a problem for businesses, like recording companies and
film studios, that are built on selling a few blockbusters to make up for a
lot of flops. The music business in particular is going to have to remake
itself with lower and more sustainable expectations, along the lines of how
independent labels already work.

But let the business take care of itself; it¹s the culture that matters.
Fragmentation is difficult too for artists with populist intentions, who
want to be heard beyond the confines of their core following. That kind of
ambition isn¹t only a mercenary one. It¹s a challenge to preach to the
unconverted, and an achievement to unite disparate audiences. Every so often
it¹s good to break through demographic categories and share some cultural
reference. Popular culture has never been entirely monolithic ‹ someone,
somewhere, has no opinion on Michael Jackson or ³Titanic² ‹ but 21st-century
stardom has less clout, less scope. It¹s shrinking down to mere celebrity.

Yet there is a limit to how splintered a culture can become, one that¹s as
much psychological as aesthetic. Humans like to congregate and join a crowd,
at least up to a point. One thing the Internet does superbly is to tabulate,
and it¹s no accident that sites featuring user-generated content prominently
display their own most-viewed and most-played lists. Even if they take pride
in ignoring the mass-market Top 10, users still want a little company, and
perhaps they hope that the collective choices add up to some guidance.

Humans also like to share what they enjoy; hence all the user-generated
playlists at sites like Amazon or eMusic, the inevitable lists of favorite
bands and films on social networking sites and the proliferation of music
blogs, like fluxblog.org or obscuresound.com, that gather hard-to-find songs
for listeners to download directly. The songs on music blogs are chosen not
by companies desperate for profit, but by individuals with time to spare,
and if the choices often seem a little, well, geeky ‹ indie rock, with a
side of underground hip-hop, seems to be the overwhelming choice of music
bloggers ‹ who but a geek would be spending all that time at a computer?

Those geeks make life easier for the media moguls who bought into
user-generated content this year. Selection, a time-consuming job, has been
outsourced. What¹s growing is the plentitude not just of user-generated
content, but also of user-filtered content. (There are even sites like
elbo.ws that tabulate songs found on music blogs, finding yet another Top
10.) 

The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find
better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from
unsigned bands on MySpace ‹ some played two million or three million times ‹
tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on
YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can
be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.

Unlike the old media roadblocks, however, their filtering can easily be
ignored. The promise of all the self-expression online is that genius will
reach the public with fewer obstacles, bypassing the entrenched media. The
reality is that genius has a bigger junk pile to climb out of than ever, one
that requires just as much hustle and ingenuity as the old distribution
system. 

The entertainment business is already nostalgic for the days when it made
and relied on big stars; parts of the public miss a sense of cultural unity
that may never return. Instead both have to face the irrevocable fact of the
Internet: There¹s always another choice.