New Wine, New Bottles, No Sweat
February 14 2010

This post deals with music consumption today. But first...

The Pianobabbler: habitual news addict.

Magazines every week, papers every day, television every night, radio every hour. For decades, these served as my news supply media. They fed the Pianobabbler's compulsive, biodependent need to know what is going on.

Now, the whole structure seems on the verge of immolation. The jeremiads abound. O! The newspaper is dying. Lo! Old media mavens chest-pound. Oy! New media mavens... wait, they don't care.

The Pianobabbler has an easy piece of advice: remain calm. Yes, some newspapers will go away. Yes, familiar media will become unfamiliar. Yes, the world will change. And so?

News, the infinite stream of infinite facts about the world - will not disappear. Events will continue to occur. Knowledge of them will remain a desideratum. Access to that knowledge will expand, not contract.

Only the formats and onramps will change. More video. Less paper. More wiki. Less voice of God. More cumulative. Less monolithic.

Lament all this? Jeepers- we've never had it so good. CBC, BBC, Le Monde, NY Times, HuffPo, Arts&Letters, TWIT.tv- always on, always streaming. Pinch me someone. Tell me I'm not dreaming.

Change, though, is hard. Especially for the dinosaurs who still roam. Beginning with the Rupertraptor Murdochosaurus. Where not so long ago he and his breed knew money abundance, today they forage in vain. The Google now reigns as lord of the infoverse.

Similar change has and will come to music. This has frightened the poultry masked as music business people. They only see the sky falling. Poultry: your masks are impairing your foresight.

The music industry thrives today as never before. More music is created and consumed than in any time in history. (I have no footnote for that, but if you can prove me wrong, I will cook you a spaghetti dinner.) Musicians play at a higher level, with more sophistication. Music literacy has become global. The news is good.

As with news, though, we are witnessing a revolution formats and access routes. CDs, records, nyet. Downloads, files da. Albums, no. Tracks, yes. Pay, sometimes. "I only listen to [fill in one single music format]", fuggedaboudit.

So what? For every old dollar lost, ten new ones appear. (Once again- no footnote for that. Once again, a spaghetti din-din.) We artists can afford to make our own CDs. We can distribute them ourselves., We can sell them directly at gigs. Video has become no sweat. Audio ubiquitous. Web radio rules. Band websites. Creative Commons-licensed music. Music podcasts. We stand at the threshold of a new golden age of music.

It all needs a bit of sorting out, and re-organizing. I'll grant that. We have many new ways and memes to deal with.

But let's get on with it. Ignore the gripers. We have better things to do, and better ways to do them.

Over 125 years ago, in her sublime Middlemarch, George Eliot quoted Sir Thomas Browne writing 200 years before her, on the difficulty every aging generation has with change. I love the passage:

It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their
forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times
present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do,
without the borrowed help and satire of times past;
condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions
of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue
the community of vice in both.

Bull's eye. Change is hard, and it's always been hard. Now, let's move on.

I'm looking forward, looking forward, to where the music business goes in the 2010's.

The Pianobabbler has spoken.

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