Gruntled: Top 10 Reasons It's A Good Time to Be in Music
March 07 2011

The Pianobabbler bears as much guilt as others.

Many in the music media and business are disgruntled. The storm clouds and shadows obnubilating the musicscape owe much to their grumblings. This includes the Pianobabbler's.

Survey music media from recent years, e.g. Pianobabbler 122 or 140, and you may discern a prevailing gloom. Music has taken on a dystopic air for many. Profits down. Opportunities down. Feeling down. Down. Down.

Well, buck up maties. The Pianobabbler comes with joyous tidings today. The principle underlying these tidings: we have many reasons to celebrate being alive at this time in music history.

Panglossian naivete? Selective optimism? Whistling-past-the-graveyard obtuseness?

No. No. No.

The Pianobabbler has 10 reasons to celebrate being in music right now. To wit:

• 10. MP3s - The digital portability and transferability of music have made it immediate, and immediately available. No one could have imagined this, even 20 years ago. Once a rare element, music now pervades the atmosphere.


• 9. Finale - Music notation software has relieved us who write music from the tedious or expensive task of having to write the music. We find ourselves less burdened, more free to create.


• 8. Email/ texting/ social media - Instant communications mean we can run the business of our music more productively. Fielding and confirming gig calls, booking musicians, invoicing, promoting, everything- we can do it with firehall speed and focus.


• 7. CD Baby - Artist-friendly, honest, effective self-distribution channels. Just what the 99% per cent of us not signed to majors needed to get our product out there, and selling.


• 6. Porta-studio - New hand-sized, inexpensive digital devices allow us to record ourselves with quality levels approaching those of full-sized old-style studios. As important to us as the invention of the mirror was to actors.


• 5. Liberty - We run our own show now. We run our own shows now. The majors have faded for all but the McMusicians. Buyers have adjusted to dealing with independent artists, who were not so long ago relegated to oblivion for being independent.


• 4. Archives - Our access to more and more music of the recent and distant past has expanded the inspirational and referential confines imposed by pre-digital listening practices. I'd known Art Tatum's version of Yesterdays for decades before having the mind-altering YouTube opportunity to see him perform it.


• 3. Communities - Social media have enabled us to be aware of and in contact with our followers and colleagues. We are less isolated. Less alone.


• 2. Education - You can find lessons on everything everywhere on the web. If you need to know about a composer, you can locate a biography. If you are puzzled about some musical principle, a quick search and you can learn about it. Wait- did you hear that? It's the sound of the musical intelligence universe experiencing a Big Bang expansion.


• 1. Change - Art thrives on change, and languishes in stasis. Change has achieved relativistic proportions in music today.

Oh sure, problems persist in music. Difficulties, frustrations, aggression and internecine ruthlessness abound.

But: the problems do not detract from the energy and uplift with which these phenomena- and others -are stimulating music.

So, today we shed the dour cerements of disgruntlement, and proclaim: Let us all be gruntled with music today.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabbler.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the Mailing List link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.

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