Music and the "Gift Economy" 7: Alternative Economies

Previous posts in this series:
Music and the "Gift Economy" 1: An Introduction
Music and the "Gift Economy" 2: Examples
Music and the "Gift Economy" 3: Commons, Copyright, and Radical Politics
Music and the "Gift Economy" 4: Personal Versus Impersonal Transactions
Music and the "Gift Economy" 5: Supporting Artists
Music and the "Gift Economy" 6: Problems with Free Art

Over the course of this series, I've explored the concept of a gift economy and haven't found any indication that it presents a way to support the arts any differently than we have done for hundreds of years.

However, some people have suggested some new ways of remaking local, national, and international economies which might include, as a side benefit, support of the arts.

Let me outline a few of the proposals, from least radical to most radical:

Art as a Form of Payment
Barter has a long tradition, so I won't detail it here. I'll just point to a couple of examples of programs where artists can give art as payment instead of money.

The [Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center] Artist Access program, which launched in May, allows artists, through performances or interactive programs for patients, to exchange their art for health care credits. "Art for Health Care," New York Foundation for the Arts.

In Mexico, artists can pay their taxes with artwork, which has allowed the Mexican government to amass a collection of over 4000 pieces since the program started in 1957.

Expanded Use of Commons
In part 3 of my series I brought up the idea of commons. Some people feel we could do even more with the concept as a way to promote creativity and community. Sharing and collaboration are variations on this theme.

Some of the research on commons involves shared natural resources and community areas (e.g., pastures, fishing grounds, forests, parks). Here's what people have learned.

Certain attributes of the local community have been shown to positively affect the outcome; (U1) users are dependant on the resource system for a major portion of their livelihood, (U2) users have a common understanding of the resource and of how their actions affect each other and the resource, (U3) users’ relations are built on trust and reciprocity (direct communication), (U4) users have prior organisational experience and local leadership (Ostrom, 2000). Two more attributes are often discussed as well, but the results on their impact are ambiguous. These are group size and the extent of homogeneity in the community (ethnicity, gender and interests), related to the distribution of resources (Baland and Platteau, 1996; Bardhan and Dayton-Johnson, 2002; Ostrom, 2005).

... “Rules are shared understandings among those involved that refer to enforced prescriptions about what actions (or states of the world) are required, prohibited, or permitted”, according to Elinor Ostrom and Victor Ostrom (2004). "Commons protected for or from the people: Analysis of strategies to establish protected areas in the Swedish Mountain Region." Anna Zachrisson.

Some people are extending the commons concept to sharable items (e.g., equipment, cars). Yochai Benkler wrote a paper outlining the types of products which are especially suited for this, such as those that an individual or family may want and can afford to purchase, but they don't need to use all the time. He also writes:

Pooling large numbers of small-scale contributions to achieve effective functionality—where transaction costs would be high and per-contribution payments must be kept low—is likely to be achieved more efficiently through social sharing systems than through market-based systems. It is precisely this form of sharing—on a large scale, among weakly connected participants, in project-specific or even ad hoc contexts—that we are beginning to see more of on the Internet ... "Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production." Yochai Benkler. Yale Law Review. Vol. 114: 273. 2004.

The paper covers far more than I have excerpted. I recommend you read it if you are interested in the topic. His work is also cited here:

In his book, The Wealth of Networks, Professor Yochai Benkler has developed some brilliant theoretical insights into why online commons can be so generative. He has explained, for example, that peer production is best achieved if a particular task is modular (meaning a complex project can be broken into discrete parts), “granular” (meaning it doesn’t take much investment for an individual to participate), and does not cost a lot to integrate the results. "The Commons as a New Sector of Value-Creation." David Bollier. On the Commons. 4/22/08.

Here are more suggestions related to online commons.

For the whole structure to work without large-scale centralized coordination, the creation process has to be modular, with units of different sizes and complexities, each requiring slightly different expertise, all of which can be added together to make a grand whole. "Chapter 8: A Creative Commons." The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. James Boyle.

In discussing commons, I have gone from commons as a physical location to commons as shared objects to commons as shared projects. Moving along that continuum, here's a list of factors that contribute to successful collaborations:

The following general, practical guidelines for collaboration resurface throughout much of the literature in the field of collaboration study:

Develop trust and mutual respect

Outline clear and attainable short and long-term goals

Define needs/self-interest well

Give reasons behind your thinking

Combine online collaboration with face-to-face meetings to speed up the process

Be concise, patient, and persistent

Get everybody involved in the process

Develop a clear process including self-reflexive loops

Stick to initially made commitments

Take a dose of humility

Develop good listening skills

Pay attention to scale in collaborative groups (production groups: 4-5 participants)

Put a stop to domineering interruptions and put-downs

Communicate frequently, clearly and openly

Acknowledge upcoming problems

Use facilitators for larger groups

Develop a long-term view

Learn when to let go

"The Participatory Challenge," Collectivate.net [from: Krysa, J., ed. (2006) DATA Browser 03. Curating immateriality. The work of the curator in the age of network systems. Autonomedia: New York.] Trebor Scholz 2006

What all this research on commons indicates is that people in a variety of disciplines are looking at alternative forms of property and work. And as ownership and sources of income blur, that filters down to those who make, or attempt to make, their living from the arts and other creative fields. The more that is shared, the less artists have to buy themselves, but also the less they might be able to sell.

Here are some resources:

On the Commons

What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

Shareable: Is Social Media Catalyzing an Offline Sharing Economy?

Guaranteed Basic Income
A number of people have come to the conclusion that providing everyone a basic amount of money every year to cover necessities is a better system than either providing no help for the poor or coming up with a patchwork of social programs. This money would also serve as a subsidy to allow some people (including artists) to pursue important but low-paying activities.

Among those who support the concept is Peter Barnes. In his book Capitalism 3.0 he covers capitalism's strengths and weaknesses.

When capitalism started, nature was abundant and capital was scarce; it thus made sense to reward capital above all else. Today we’re awash in capital and literally running out of nature. We’re also losing many social arrangements that bind us together as communities and enrich our lives in nonmonetary ways. This doesn’t mean capitalism is doomed or useless, but it does mean we have to modify it. We have to adapt it to the twenty-first century rather than the eighteenth. And that can be done. Capitalism 3.0: Preface

Barnes feels there is historic precedent for providing people with an annual stipend.

[Thomas] Paine therefore proposed a “national fund” that would do two things:

[Pay] to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

A century and a half later, America created a national fund to do part of what Paine recommended—we call it Social Security. We’ve yet to adopt the other part, but its basic principle—that enclosure of a commons requires compensation—is as sound in our time as it was in Paine’s. Capitalism 3.0: Chapter 2

Barnes says that giving everyone a little bit of money will actually make a better economy. As an example, he discusses Monopoly.

... Monopoly has two features currently lacking in American capitalism: all players start with the same amount of capital, and all receive $200 each time they circle the board. Absent these features, the game would lack fairness and excitement, and few would choose to play it.

Imagine, for example, a twenty-player version of Monopoly in which one player starts with half the property. The player with half the property would win almost every time, and other players would fold almost immediately. Yet that, in a nutshell, is U.S. capitalism today: the top 5 percent of the population owns more property than the remaining 95 percent.

Now imagine, if you will, a set of rules for capitalism closer to the actual rules of Monopoly. In this version, every player receives, not an equal amount of start-up capital, but enough to choose among several decent careers. Every player also receives dividends once a year, and simple, affordable health insurance. This version of capitalism produces more happiness for more people than our current version, without ruining the game in any way. Indeed, by reducing lopsided starting conditions and relieving employers of health insurance costs, it makes our economy more competitive and productive. Capitalism 3.0: Chapter 7.

There is even conservative support for a basic guaranteed income:

Support has now come from what might seem a surprising source: the US policy analyst Charles Murray (In Our Hands, American Enterprise Institute). Mr Murray regards himself as a libertarian but of a socially conservative kind. ...

His starting point is that in spite of well over $1,000bn (€810bn) a year spent on welfare services of all kinds, poverty in the US is still rampant. He comes out for an unconditional basic income of $10,000 a year for every American over 21. I was originally attracted to basic income as a way of divorcing capitalism from the puritan ethic and allowing young people or creative artists to opt out from the rat race. Mr Murray on the other hand finds numerous, ingenious arguments whereby an unconditional payment of this kind might help restore the work ethic and traditional values. "Surprising case for basic income." Samuel Brittan. Financial Times 4/21/06.

Michel Bauwens, creator of The Foundation for P2P Alternatives, also supports the concept of a basic guaranteed income.

... clearly we need a more durable macro scale arrangement and, as I said, it is my belief that it will require the introduction of a universal basic income. This is a logical outcome, but it is surely several decades away. "P2P: The very core of the world to come," Open and Shut? 9/7/06.

Collective Ordering
As technology allows more people to connect and work together, this has given hope that at some point they will be able decide in advance what they need and then how to produce or acquire it. That will allow more efficiency than the current market system.

A key insight into the altruistic economic model is that a limit on the number of an individual's direct relationships need not limit the number of their indirect relationships, since computers can efficiently establish and use multi-step relationships such as friends of friends. "Altruistic Economics & The Internet Gift Economy." Robin Upton. Altruists International. 7/7/05.

Environmenalist Dave Pollard explains it this way:

Now, in a process called Peer Production, the local people interested in becoming suppliers, customers or investors of the offering that will fill the unmet need from step 1 above, self-organize and become partners in the enterprise, and co-design the offering to meet their specific needs. This is not rocket science; the reason it isn’t done in traditional economy companies is that it doesn’t scale well up to the multi-national level that traditional enterprises need to grow to to continue to exist.

The partners now decide which of them will work how many hours in the enterprise and what they will be paid (dependent on their time availability, personal income needs, and the needs of the enterprise — but with little differential between highest and lowest hourly rate, and with an appreciation that the enterprise is not for-profit and must manage its costs prudently). "How a Community-Based Co-op Economy Might Work." Dave Pollard. How to Save the World. 7/29/10.

The ideal is that if people have a guaranteed basic income, they won't have to work at jobs they hate and will be free to contribute in ways and to the extent that they wish. According to Bauwens:

In the context of P2P, equipotentiality is the assumption that the individual can self-select his contributions, which are then communally validated. "P2P: A blueprint for the future?" Open and Shut? 9/3/06.

Here are three other advocates of using networks to realign labor.

The essence of the long-term goal is to reduce the workweek to its minimum, so that the work we have to do to survive [pay rent, eat food etc] is no more and no less than what is needed for our survival. The remaining time is then freed up to pursue work that we want to do. It’s a shift from a must-work economy to a want-to-work economy.

Work that people want to do is inherently useful. It’s a gift economy. I want to teach: so I teach, I want to learn: so I go to school, I want to bake cookies, I want to help kangaroos who are being badly affected by our activities, or maybe I want to become a doctor and heal people. As the workweek gradually decreases, our time to do positive contributions increases, and the net-output of the human-system becomes ever more increasingly “positive”.

The beauty of such a system is that if someone is working 2 days a week, say: farming their own vegetables, and then they decide to do nothing for the remainder of their week, this is not only completely acceptable, it is preferred to them making something they didn’t actually want to do. "Gift economy: a viable economy," Sebastian Chedal. 3/12/09.

What about the jobs no one wants to do-like cleaning a public bathroom?
With the mentality encouraged by the gift economy, we would all understand what needs to be done and help where help is needed. Meanwhile, our sense of fairness would help balance the work that needs to be done on a case by case basis. If someone cleaned a public bathroom once a week, then because it is unpleasant work, perhaps they wouldn't be expected to do anything else all day. Or perhaps people would take turns doing easy-to-do yet unpleasant duties like cleaning public bathrooms. There wouldn't be any strict rules about it - people would just be held socially responsible for their role in maintaining a healthy and harmonious society.

What if people don't want to work at all? What if they just want to mooch?
If we lived in a society where people are looked down upon for not contributing their fair share to society, then no one would choose laziness and risk losing the respect and love of their community. And in the case that there are still people who don't contribute, community members could influence each other by refusing service to those who don't seem to be contributing. "Transition to the Gift Economy." Russell Jelter. March 2010

To escape from the fetters of competition, we need to develop an economy that is based on giving rather than trading: a gift economy, in place of this exchange economy. In such a system, each person could do what she wanted to with her life, and offer to others what she felt most qualified to offer, without fear of going hungry. The means to do things would be shared by everyone rather than hoarded up by the greediest individuals, so each person would have all the capabilities of society at her disposal. Those who wanted to paint could paint, those who enjoy building engines and machines could do that, those who love bicycles could make and repair them for others. The so-called “dirty work” would be spread around more fairly, and everyone would benefit from being able to do a variety of things rather ^J than being limited to one trade like a cog in a machine. "What's So Bad About Capitalism?" SF Bay Area Gift Economy - tribe.net, 12/17/05.

Douglas Rushkoff goes a step further and proposes that we take money away from those people/companies that don't do anything and give it to people who do something.

A majority of the money earned under our current currency system is earned by people who don't actually do anything. As such, all this speculation is a drag on the system. Speculators just bet on various companies' ability to pay back what they have borrowed. ...

The way out —— as I see it —— is to begin making our own money again. I'm not talking barter, but local currency. Money is just an agreement. And the more a community trusts one another, the more efficiently the moneys they develop can function. We can create units of currency based on anything; if we don't have grain, we can earn it into existence instead by babysitting, taking care of the elderly, or teaching in a charter school. Every hour worked is an "hour" of currency credited to your account. "Hacking the Economy." Douglas Rushkoff. h magazine. 3/19/09.

But we can take it one step further than creating local currency.

An Economy without Money
The most extreme reinvention of the economy is to eliminate money altogether.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias. "The Dropout Economy - 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years." Reihan Salam. Time. 3/11/10.

One reason people think a cashless economy is possible is that abundance will replace scarcity. It's just a matter of making sure it is distributed in an equitable manner.

The future will be shaped by three interlocking trends: imploding capital outlay requirements for production, reduced transaction costs of networked organization, and eroding enforceability of artificial property rights. Taken together, they will render the propertied classes' privileged access to large amounts of land and capital irrelevant, act as a force-multiplier for bootstrapping the alternative economy, drastically lower the revenue streams required both for households to subsist and microenterprises to stay in business, and shift a large portion of consumption needs into the category of Free or virtually Free as embedded rents on artificially property rights are washed out of the price of goods. "The Abolition of Scarcity." Kevin Carson. The Future We Deserve.

A group that is rapidly spreading around the world is The Zeitgeist Movement, based on the ideas of Jacque Fresco.

Simply stated, a resource-based economy utilizes existing resources rather than money, and provides an equitable method of distribution in the most humane and efficient manner for the entire population. It is a system in which all natural, man-made, machine-made, and synthetic resources would be available without the use of money, credits, barter, or any other form of symbolic exchange. ...

Cybernation, or the application of computers and automation to the social system, could be regarded as an emancipation proclamation for humankind if used humanely and intelligently. Its thorough application could eventually enable people to have the highest conceivable standard of living with practically no labor. "Resource-Based Economy." Jacque Fresco. The Venus Project.

Here's more: "What are some of the central characteristics of a 'Resource-Based Economy?'"

So now, we have finally reached a point where a gift economy makes sense. If there is abundance and if people trust that their needs will be met, they may feel free to give away what they want to give away and what they don't need.

In various ways Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Jean Baudrillard have all argued that societies are grouped around the notion of excess (and acts of generous gift giving) rather than resource scarcity (Coyne 2005: 99-150). "The Participatory Challenge," Collectivate.net [from: Krysa, J., ed. (2006) DATA Browser 03. Curating immateriality. The work of the curator in the age of network systems. Autonomedia: New York.] Trebor Scholz 2006

My personal opinion is that all the discussions about giving away music and then selling scarcities is way too limited. Most of the proposed ways for musicians to make money are based on consumerism. Should we be encouraging them to sell anything? Or should we find ways to help them, and others, survive in a new economic system? As we move more toward user-generated creativity and participatory society (in art, journalism, networking, and so on), finding ways for everyone to live fully and creatively rather than just finding ways for elite artists to sell their works seems to be a good goal.

Here are two extensive gift economy resources:

Regenerosity

Anarchism and Gift Economy

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 11/20/10
A recent article on the subject: "To end poverty, guarantee everyone in Canada $20,000 a year. But are you willing to trust the poor?"

Hypercompetition, Scarcity, and the Economics of Music

I saw this last week and decided to pull together a blog post on several topics I've been thinking about:

About 1 million design students in China, compared to about 40,000 in the U.S. Implication: your competition for jobs is about to expand exponentially. Welcome to the flat world. ...

The supply is currently outstripping demand, so compensation for things like logo design is going to be low. "Crowdsourcing & Disruption Event at Pratt: Realities & Denial," eyecube, 3/11/10.

And also this:

There are too many films out there, there are too many filmmakers. "SxSW: Nobody Wants to Watch Your Film: Realities of Online Film Distribution," Magnet Media, 3/14/10.

Because of the Internet and global competition, we're seeing declining income in a number of creative fields (e.g., design, writing, music, video). People are competing for these jobs even when there is little or no payment.

RU Sirius, former editor of Mondo 2000 summed up the problem at a recent Net 2.0 conference in Amsterdam: “Get people to work for free.” That has essentially become the motto of the post-scarcity economy. "NET 2.0: Post-Scarcity Economics and the problem with Google," Medialternatives, 2/2/08.

One line of thinking is that if you give away your digital content, you'll gain exposure, build an audience, and then sell "scarce" goods and services. Here are two posts on the subject:

The Technium: Better Than Free

The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free

While I am not going to argue the rightness or wrongness of "free" (it's already a reality, so I don't think there is much to be gained by exploring the concept here), I am skeptical that there are a lot scarcities to sell. At least not in the areas related to creative content and to human labor. Pretty much anything you offer as "scarce" in these areas can and will be duplicated. Once people see there is money to be made, they will begin offering their own versions until the price is driven down. This is what is now commonly referred to as hypercompetition.

You may think your business offers rare and valuable goods and services. But the chances are that, somewhere, a recent entrant or potential competitor is preparing to do something similar, for a lower price. As the author says: "Everything becomes a commodity eventually." "A more virulent form of hypercompetition," FT.com, 12/16/09.

Here's a definition:

Hypercompetition:
A situation in which there is a lot of very strong competition between companies, markets are changing very quickly, and it is easy to enter a new market, so that it is not possible for one company to keep a competitive advantage for a long time.

And two more explorations on the subject:

From our financial models, such as using net present value analysis to value projects, to our investment models, which presume more or less predictable and long life-spans for given business activities, we have built a lot of operating frameworks on the idea that our lines of business will be around for a while. And not only around, but profitable.

All this began to change in the early 1990's, when a number of scholars, such as my colleague Ian MacMillan and his co-author Rich D'Aveni, started talking about a phenomenon they called "Hypercompetition." In hyper-competitive environments, to paraphrase Hobbes, the life of a competitive advantage is nasty, brutish and short. In other words, advantages don't last for very long before competitive entry, imitation and matching erode their edge, or customers move on, or the environment changes in such a way that the advantage becomes irrelevant. "Competitive Advantage Is Fleeting (And It's Okay to Admit It)," Harvard Business Review, June 2009.

"Welcome to Hypercompetition—Competitive Advantage at its Fastest"

Barriers of entry have kept some competitors out, but technology is reducing some of those. For example:

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously. "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits," Wired, January 2010.

The revolution that is brewing now will get us much closer to another seemingly impossible Star Trek technology: the Replicator. You won't be able (for some time) to press a button and get a whole meal synthesized on the fly, but we are at the stage where a short time after pressing the button you can have a wide variety of objects appear magically. These range from tiny, fully functional gears to large, colorful pieces of art and cover materials as broad as glass, ceramics, metal and plastic. Yes, glass, ceramics and metal! "Communicator: Done. Replicator: Next. The Future of Making Stuff," usv.com, 3/22/10.

The music industry used to have significant barriers of entry, but now that everyone can cheaply record and distribute music, the flood gates have opened. There are still some barriers (e.g., getting on broadcast radio), but artists are being told there are many opportunities for them these days. Sure, they may have to give away their recorded music to get some attention, but to make money they can offer fans goods and services that aren't easily duplicated.

However, I'm saying that just about everything an artist or band can offer can be duplicated:

Develop some interesting merchandise, and it will be copied.

Representatives for the jam-band Phish are due in federal court this afternoon to argue that it should be allowed to stop bootleggers from selling T-shirts, jackets, bumper stickers and other merchandise bearing its trademarked name during its upcoming reunion tour. ...

The issue isn't necessarily about money, the lawsuit says. The band says the unauthorized merchandise sales "threaten" the band's reputation because it relinquishes control over the quality and appearance of the merchandise, according to the suit. "Phish in court this afternoon to block bootleg merchandise," The Virginian-Pilot, 3/5/09.

Create a great live act, and that can be copied as well.

... the sheer number and variety of tribute bands has exploded, branching out to modern-era acts such as Pearl Jam, the Dave Matthews Band, and even the Arctic Monkeys. "Tribute bands are music to fans’ ears, wallets," The Boston Globe, 3/6/10.

Even relationships aren't perceived as scarce. While it's nice to think that artists/bands will hang on to their fans for life, the reality is we're a society where people too often change friends, even spouses, when they see someone better. Toss in commitment phobia and you have a situation where relationships aren't a sure thing.

Given all of the above, I question the usefulness in talking about scarcities as a music business strategy. In addition, much of what we buy has little to do with scarcity anyway. Sometimes it just comes down to being in the right place at the right time. For example, if we want a cup of coffee, and we see coffee vendors on all four sides of the street, the reason we pick one over the other isn't a scarcity issue. Similarly, if every girl on our block is selling Girl Scout cookies, we may end up buying from whomever comes to our door first. Or maybe we'll buy a box from each one of them.

Buying behavior is much more complicated than saying people will pay a premium for scarcity. Here are a few resources that outline the many factors which determine why we buy what we buy:

Factors Which Influence Consumer Choice. If you want the PowerPoint version, go here.

Buyer Behaviour: Stimulus-Response Model.

The Black Box Model of Consumer Behavior.

So I think talking about "selling scarcity" can be the wrong strategy. As I have already mentioned, hypercompetition suggests that as soon as you have an idea, someone else will copy it and drive down the price. For musicians, that means being on an endless treadmill trying to find scarcities to sell. As soon as you come up with something fans will pay for, many other bands and artists will try it too. There will be a glut.

You may make money in music, but I doubt that offering scarce goods and services will be the key. For virtually every option that an artist/band offers, there already is or will be someone else offering something similar. And it won't take much effort for fans and potential fans to find it. All anyone has to say is, "I want ... " and the marketplace will provide it, often in multiple ways. Think of the various "saleables" that artists/bands currently offer (e.g., entertainment, merchandise, community, engagement, celebrity access) and there are equivalents both within and outside of music.

We're running out of scarcity. ...

It seems as though once a category becomes successful, the headlong rush to knock it off is stronger (and quicker) than it ever was before. ...

While there are almost half a million lawyers practicing in the United States today, there are (gasp!) more than 125,000 in school right now. ...

The same thing is true for doctors, Web sites, T-shirt shops, sushi restaurants, thumbtack manufacturers, and brands of blank CD-ROM disks. ...

If it's remotely digital (like music), then it's easy to mimic. And if it's easy to mimic, someone wins if they can knock off the original--the sooner the better. When someone starts to sell exactly what you sell but for half the price, how long does your good-service, first-mover, nice-person advantage last? "The Scarcity Shortage," Seth Godin's Blog, 8/27/07.

And even the fallback argument, that talent is scarce and people will pay for access to it, doesn't really hold water because making money in music and having the most talent do not necessarily go together.

SUCCESS = SOME TALENT + LUCK
GREAT SUCCESS = SOME TALENT + A LOT OF LUCK
Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman quoted in "FORMULAE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY," Edge.org, 10/13/07.

Godin acknowledges there might be a few scarcities, but even those may not confer a lasting advantage.

So what's scarce now? Respect. Honesty. Good judgment. Long-term relationships that lead to trust. None of these things guarantee loyalty in the face of cut-rate competition, though.

Some people are even suggesting that we're surrounded by so much abundance that now we want less. J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich Inc., lays it out in an article, and then Mike Heronime, Partner/Strategic Services Director, Numantra, expands upon the idea in a presentation.

Enough of Too Much

Marketing to Consumers in a Post-Abundance Economy

However, these models tend to benefit people and companies that provide filters rather than artists trying to sell their music and music-related products. It would be a bit like having a musician say, "Pay me to go away."

So let's jump ahead and envision a world where there's more stuff than any of us can consume. Imagine a scenario where people are making a ton of music and art, but there are few economic transactions. So how do artists (or anyone for that matter) make a living in the post-scarcity society?

In the post-scarcity world, technological advances will facilitate decreasing costs until conceivably almost everything is “free” to the consumer. Scarcity will no longer exist in this world, and, without scarcity, the concept of charging a price to consumers as a means of generating revenue will be unworkable. The post-scarcity world will put tremendous pressure on current business models, potentially rendering them irrelevant and obsolete in the future. If traditional businesses do not adapt to this emerging “free” world, many of the strong, traditional organizations of the early twenty-first century will cease to exist over the next 50 years. "The Post-Scarcity World of 2050-2075"

If products are no longer scarce, does this mean that the only jobs left will be service positions? Are there enough service positions for everyone? Or do people do the services that they find fulfilling, leaving others to lounge around and/or be non-productively creative?

I'm not a regular Burning Man attendee -- the schedule rarely works out -- but I have gone. My first time wandering the playa, visiting the various camps offering gifts of art, services and/or more physical forms of entertainment, I was struck with a realization: this is one model of what a post-nanotech world might look like. Assume your material needs for food, water, shelter and toys were met, and that you no longer needed to work; what might result is a world where creativity, mutuality, and the gift economy ruled... or a world where sex, drugs and sleeping until 2pm ruled. Or, as with Burning Man, both. "Abundance, Scarcity and Beta-Testing Tomorrow," Open the Future, 9/12/06.

How are we to survive as producers and creators in an age, in which value is no longer determined by scarcity, but rather the accumulation of bits and bytes, the 1s and Os that describe information?

... We figure out a system of revenue sharing, in which the exchange of information is granted value. ...

One day we will awake to find the proverbial Google cheque in the mail. It will be a dividend in which all the clicks on the internet have been divided by the total population of the world and squared with the amount of money earned by the earth’s service providers. The legend will say: You are user # 51 298 123 187 here is you ten-cents (US$) for the 8kb of data we actually siphoned off your site. We know its yours, because the IP number says it’s yours.

The result, I predict, will be a practical and infinitely rewarding utopia in which everybody would have a guaranteed income, courtesy of Google Corporation. This is the kind of error, which could make life worth living. "NET 2.0: Post-Scarcity Economics and the problem with Google," Medialternatives, 2/2/08.

The above scenarios, where EVERYTHING is abundant, are still in the future. But the world where music (and everything associated with it) is abundant is already headed our way. The oft-proposed solutions, based on some sort of scarcity, are going to be hard to sustain. So I suggest we look beyond that.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 4/4/10
This article says that there are now so many photos online available for licensing that the price paid per photo has gone down significantly.
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

UPDATE 7/14/10
This article talks about how museums sometimes pay a great deal of money for something that turns out to be fake. The value isn't in the object itself, but in the perceived artist. Therefore, if you can produce a copy and convince someone it is real, they may pay you the same amount as if it is real.
Testing Art for Authenticity at London’s National Gallery

UPDATE 10/17/10
I mentioned in the post that as a society we will even replace personal relationships if someone better comes along. Here's a recent article on the same subject.

[Writes sociologist Eva Illouz in Cold Intimacies,] "Romantic relations are not only organized within the market, but have themselves become commodities produced on an assembly line, to be consumed fast, efficiently, cheaply, and in great abundance.” In other words, as dating (or ersatz love) has migrated to the internet, it has undergone the same changes as everything else that has moved online: it has been remade by the ethic of convenience into something more solipsistic and disposable. "Love Worth Fighting For," The New Inquiry, 9/30/10.

But Is It Art?

Recently Tod Machover, whose work I discussed in a recent blog post, wrote a guest editorial for The New York Times.

It fits in with a topic I have been wanting to cover anyway, the increasing use of electronic tools to easily create music.

As a point of reference, let me say my personal tastes skew toward acoustic music with minimal production. Give me a solo voice or a solo instrument, as unadulterated as possible, and I'll savor the purity of it. I'm partial to warm, uncompressed sounds. Here are two examples:

Danielle Ate the Sandwich She has recorded herself in her apartment playing either guitar or ukulele. It's her voice that I love.

Chet Baker A great example of emotive jazz.

However, I've been reading some very thought-provoking discussions about how new technologies are or aren't good for music and decided the topic was worth exploring. Let me start with this:

Gary Jarman, singer and bassist for UK indie rockers the Cribs, believes some of the passion has gone missing now that anyone can record and release a song.

"It shouldn't be easy [to be a musician], you know? Nowadays it's just like everyone's got a laptop, everyone's got GarageBand, everyone's got a MySpace page," Jarman tells Spinner. "People can have a band or do a song as if it's a vanity project." "The Cribs Think It's Too Easy to Make Music," Spinner, 1/11/10.

In contrast, the people pushing the technology think the ease of creating music is what is valuable.

Most of the skeptics I talk to aren’t upset by the use of computer software or programming in and of itself; in fact, many of them are artists and composers who use technology in their own work as well. What upsets them about my work is the way I give up control over the creative process to people who are not necessarily trained musicians and are often complete strangers.

My response to these critics is to clarify my focus in many of these works: the creative process rather than the creative product. Many of the most exciting, fulfilling, and spiritual experiences of my life have been about creating and performing music. I am trying to share the experience of those moments, not the music that resulted from them, in my own works. "Interview: Jason Freeman," Networked Music Review, 3/11/07.

A lot of singers I know don’t like Auto-tune. They grumble that they shouldn’t have bothered to do all that practicing and studying. Auto-tune makes things easier in the studio, and increasingly on stage, no doubt about it. This bothers people who care about how difficult music is to make. Auto-tune threatens some of the myths we have about musicality: that it’s a special talent possessed only by an exceptional few, and that there’s something noble and admirable in the lifetime of discipline it requires. When Lil Wayne goes into a recording studio, smokes a blunt or three and freestyles an Auto-tuned melody off the top of his head, it calls our European-descended assumptions about romantic musical heroism into question.

In my opinion, this is all for the best. Music isn’t fundamentally about technique. It’s a transmission medium for emotions. A confident and definite performance comes across, accurate pitch or no. When you have a singer do take after take after take in search of technical perfection, you often end up with the sound of a bored and annoyed singer. ...

It’s way too late in the history of technology to be worrying about authenticity. What’s so authentic about recorded sound to begin with? ... What’s so authentic about multitrack recording, compression, EQ, pop filters, artificial reverb, or selecting from multiple takes to find the best one? All that matters to me when I listen is how the music makes me feel. "In praise of Auto-tune," Ethan Hein's Blog, 12/3/08.

Music Creativity Through Technology is dedicated to music educators working with the "Other 80%" of students in our schools who do not participate in the traditional performing ensembles and music classes. With the latest tools in music technology, these educators are finding ways to unleash the creative potential of many of these students....

The impact that GarageBand had can be seen in the overnight emergence of virtual composers sharing their GarageBand creations on the web and reaching out for comment and guidance. As a music educator, I found this especially exciting as it renewed my interest in finding ways to reach those students in our schools that drop out of the traditional music programs as they progress up through the grades, the traditional programs where more and more emphasis is place on traditional performing ensembles and performance expertise of selected repertoire (see Williams 1987). Through lectures, presentations and keynotes, and the work of my graduate students, I began to focus on what I termed the "non-traditional music student (NTMs)," the other 80 percent of students in our school programs that are disenfranchised from music education in one way or another. "The Other 80% Music Home," Music Creativity Through Technology (www.musicCreativity.org).

I watched people go through the same dilemma with online writing. Back in 1998 or so, (a few) people had elaborate personal sites built by hand that would update once a month or so. Then blog software came along and they all thought it was the death of online publishing because anyone could do it, and update not just daily but several times a day.

And that attitude has been shown to be pretty much total bunk.

There are now millions of people writing online and if you know where to look, you can find plenty of great things. That also means there are millions of sites that one might call "crap" that don't interest them, but it's worth it to increase that 1% of really good stuff.

I see the same parallel with music and movies. It's great that things are getting easier. I wish anyone with an idea would write down the idea and have software completely form that into action. I know people invest years in learning tools and they kind of hate it deep down when some kid can pick up the same techniques in ten minutes that took them ten years, but get over yourselves.

Seriously, the mass democratization of everything is one of the crowning achievements of the Internet. In the long run it will mean tons of great music and tons of great short movies and tons of great writing. Don't worry about the problems of millions of people making music -- there are already tools in place to filter out just the best music (like garageband.com's rating system).

posted by mathowie at 8:28 AM on December 4, 2004 "Is Reason and other programs making music production too easy?" Ask MetaFilter.

Finally, to wrap up the pro-technology folks, let me cite a reader comment on Tod Machover's editorial.

... think about musical instruments. How much time does a violin student spend learning to play in tune? Imagine a digital violin that always plays in tune. That frees up hours and hours of time the student can then devote to higher-level exploration of musical expression. (And, yes, the intonation of the instrument can be made contextually 'aware' - q.v. Hermode tuning, an algorithm that tunes digital instruments on the fly according to the harmonic context they are in). ...

So this is the future I hope we see: digital instruments imbued with context-aware, programmable and customizable musical intelligence. Having tools like that will free people to create music we can't even imagine.
Paul Henry Smith

Smith's comment led me to his website where he posted an interview he did.

This is one of the most exciting and important contributions digital orchestras can make in our musical life. They enable composers to get their music played without the cost and resistance of an acoustic orchestra. My hope is that this new-found avenue for orchestral composition will result in a flowering of activity supporting innovation and refinement in orchestral music, necessary to keep this mode of expression alive and thriving for both acoustic and digital orchestras. In my view, then, acoustic orchestras ultimately benefit from the emergence of very good digital orchestras. Just as interest in acoustic guitar music has been immeasurably increased by the emergence of the electric guitar. "Paul Henry Smith Interview in Beat Magazine," Paul Henry Smith, 9/23/09.

And this:

Which brings us to now. The digital instruments are still limited, but they’ve gotten much better than they were even in 2003, and they’re still improving. They are improving faster than acoustic instruments. My five-year investment in learning how to play them, how to master them, is paying off. And within the next ten years there is no question that I will be able to follow my musical imagination anywhere it leads with more suppleness, expression and ease than the current generation of digital musical instruments allows. "Can digital orchestra instruments be musically compelling?" Paul Henry Smith, 8/10/09.

Among those who do accept technology, they sometimes make a distinction between technology used creatively versus technology used in a banal manner. Here's what Machover said in his editorial.

Technology has democratized music in ways that are surprising even to me, revolutionizing access to any music anytime with iPod and iTunes, opening interactive musicmaking to amateurs with Guitar Hero and Rock Band (which both grew out of a group I lead at the M.I.T. Media Lab), providing digital production and recording facilities on any laptop that surpass what the Beatles used at Abbey Road, and redefining the performance ensemble with initiatives like the Stanford iPhone Orchestra and YouTube Symphony. ...

But we can’t take such freshness for granted. Musical technology is so ever-present in our culture, and we are all so very aware of it, that techno-clichés and techno-banalities are never far away and have become ever more difficult to identify and root out. It is deceptively challenging these days to apply technology to music in ways that explode our imaginations, deepen our personal insights, shake us out of boring routine and accepted belief, and pull us ever closer to one another. "On Future Performance," Opinionator Blog, NYTimes.com, 1/13/10.

Influential musician/producer Brian Eno says that the reason we don't always get great music from technological tools is that, unlike the piano or violin, we haven't worked with them long enough yet.

On the synthesiser: 1

"One of the important things about the synthesiser was that it came without any baggage. A piano comes with a whole history of music. There are all sorts of cultural conventions built into traditional instruments that tell you where and when that instrument comes from. When you play an instrument that does not have any such historical background you are designing sound basically. You're designing a new instrument. That's what a synthesiser is essentially. It's a constantly unfinished instrument. You finish it when you tweak it, and play around with it, and decide how to use it. You can combine a number of cultural references into one new thing."

On the synthesiser: 2

"Instruments sound interesting not because of their sound but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments which is what you like and respond to. If you were sitting down now to design an instrument you would not dream of coming up with something as ridiculous as an acoustic guitar. It's a strange instrument, it's very limited and it doesn't sound good. You would come up with something much better. But what we like about acoustic guitars is players who have had long relationships with them and know how to do something beautiful with them. You don't have that with synthesisers yet. They are a very new instrument. They are constantly renewing so people do not have time to build long relationships with them. So you tend to hear more of the technology and less of the rapport. It can sound less human. However ! That is changing. And there is a prediction that I made a few years ago that I'm very pleased to see is coming true – synthesisers that have inconsistency built into them. I have always wanted them to be less consistent. I like it that one note can be louder than the note next to it." "On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno,", The Observer, 1/17/10.

Musician Jonathan Coulton says that new technologies allow for more experimentation.

I’ve recently become very interested in all sorts of electronic gizmos and gadgets and composition and performance tools because you can only do so much with a guitar. And I love to play the guitar. I love to listen to the guitar, but there’s really something satisfying about putting it down and picking up a ridiculous piece of equipment with a lot of buttons that’s going to make a lot of noise and also inject a lot of chaos and randomness into what happens. The Zendrum in particular, when I play that, it’s always a little bit different. That’s because I make mistakes and some of the buttons go off by themselves, but you can feel the audience getting sort of excited when that happens. That’s what live performances are about: that process by which you accidentally find something awesome. So for me that’s what I love about those devices and that’s what I love about technology and music: the potential to sort of shake things up and bring you to places you wouldn’t otherwise get to. "Jonathan Coulton Talks Music, Technology and uPlaya.com," The Blogs at HowStuffWorks, 10/28/09.

In this blog post, producer/composer Spencer Critchley explains why he likes one musician's use of technology, but not another's.

Thomas' use of technology was creative, taking things apart and reusing them in imaginative ways. His music presented technology through an emotional filter, such as affectionate parody, as in 'She Blinded Me With Science', or a haunting nostalgia, as in much of The Golden Age of Wireless. ...

The Rhinestone Cowboy's use of technology wasn't creative, just productive. He was simply saving himself the expense of hiring background singers. The harmonizer didn't add anything new to his music, apart from the slightly creepy effect of hearing two perfect clones of the Rhinestone Cowboy. "More Creativity in a Can: When Thomas Dolby Met the Rhinestone Cowboy,"
O'Reilly, 3/4/09.

Ethan Hein, who I already quoted above, had this to say about sampling.

DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success. "Copyright Criminals," Ethan Hein's Blog, 1/25/10.

In summary, music technology appears to be either a positive (allowing more people to create music) or, at worst, a neutral (delivering music that may not be artistic, but isn't the fault of the technology).

Is it bad that technology enables people who might not have talents in the traditional sense to make music? No. If "untalented" people create musical careers because the technology provides a "crutch," then so be it. If the quality of music has gone down as a result of production tricks, then perhaps the solution is to provide exposure to a broader range of musical influences, which does appear to be happening.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE, 1/30/10
Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny is going to tour with an orchestra of 40 musical robots. They are specially created musical machines which he programmed to play.

Not only does the visual spectacle of robots playing along with Metheny’s always-impressive guitar work hypnotize the viewer, but it sounds great for the same reason live orchestras sound so much better than CDs: They’re essentially 100-point surround sound speaker systems housed in a massive acoustic space with its own resonances, and no home theater (well, no home theater without robot or human performers) can duplicate that sound. ...

These musicians may be machines, but their performance varies significantly each time. “Even if you wanted it to be exactly the same every time, it’s not,” said Metheny, adding that subtle variations are caused by the robots’ mechanics, timing and the room in which the machines are playing — and that he can toggle musical parts between the players to switch things up. "Robot Band Backs Pat Metheny on Orchestrion Tour," wired.com, 1/28/10

Tod Machover and Musical Innovation

The MIT Media Research Lab, started in 1985, has fascinated me because it creates the future, or what the future could be. It brings together designers, engineers, artists, and scientists to work within research groups, which are then further divided into projects.

Here are the 25 research groups.

There are two research groups devoted to music:

"The Music, Mind and Machine group is working towards bridging the gap between the current generation of audio technologies and those that will be needed for future interactive media applications."

The other group, Opera of the Future, is headed by Tod Machover, whose ideas I want to discuss in this blog post.

The Opera of the Future group (also known as Hyperinstruments) explores concepts and techniques to help advance the future of musical composition, performance, learning, and expression. Through the design of new interfaces for both professional virtuosi and amateur music-lovers, the development of new techniques for interpreting and mapping expressive gesture, and the application of these technologies to innovative compositions and experiences, we seek to enhance music as a performance art, and to develop its transformative power as counterpoint to our everyday lives. The scope of our research includes musical instrument design, concepts for new performance spaces, interactive touring and permanent installations, and "music toys." It ranges from extensions of traditional forms to radical departures, such as the Brain Opera, Toy Symphony and Death and the Powers.

There are 16 projects in this research group. These are the ones that interest me the most:

Hyperinstruments

The scope of our research includes music instrument design, concepts for new performance spaces, interactive touring and permanent installations, and "music toys", and ranges from an extension of traditional forms, to radical departures such as the Brain Opera and Toy Symphony. (Here are some of the creations.)

Personal Opera

This development is based on two guiding principles: first, that active music creation yields far more powerful benefits than passive listening; and second, that increasing customization of the musical experience is both desirable and possible, as evidenced in our group's development of Personal Instruments (see Music, Mind, and Health) and Personal Music. Personal Opera goes a step further, using music as the medium for assembling and conveying our own individual legacies, representing a new form of archiving, easy to use and powerful to experience.

Hyperscore

Hyperscore is a graphical computer-assisted composition program intended to make composing music accessible to users without musical training as well as experienced musicians. The software maps complex musical concepts to intuitive visual representations. Color, shape, and texture are used to convey high-level musical features such as timbre, melodic contour, and harmonic tension.

Machover's work allows average people (who I have labeled "people formerly known as fans") to become more involved in music creation and participation.

Because not everyone is familiar with Machover, I wanted to do a blog post devoted to his ideas. I've pulled some quotes:

On giving untrained people easy-to-use tools.

Music exerts its power when we are actively engaged, not when we listen subliminally. For this reason, I have been working with my group at the MIT Media Lab to create musical tools – often with specially designed technologies – that enable everyone to participate directly in music-making regardless of background....

In my view, a prime example of the kind of new musical ‘ecology’ that we should seek is found in our culture’s relationship with cuisine. We all enjoy eating at three-star restaurants and admire the achievements of the world’s greatest chefs. At the same time, we do not hesitate to dive in ourselves to prepare special meals of high quality on special occasions. We also put together daily meals for ourselves, improvising content that reflects our personal styles. We enjoy eating and even studying the most ‘expert’ cuisine we can find, but are not scared to make and invent our own. In turn, the fact that we constantly prepare food ourselves makes us better understand and appreciate other food that we encounter.

Music – and most of the arts – has come very far from such a ‘healthy’ ecology, and it is this that we need to reinvent. Technology can help, as it can act as a bridge to each of us depending on our background and experience, taking advantage of our skills and compensating for our limitations. Even more importantly, we need to establish a fundamentally new partnership between all of the potential participants in our musical culture, including individual artists, all parts of the music business, technology, lifestyle, health and social organisations, music presenting and broadcasting entities, research institutions, artists-as-mentors and – last but not least – the music-loving public. Only in this way can we establish a culture that will allow music to reach its full potential in shaping and transforming our experience. Doing so will allow music to exert its most powerful possible influence on society at large. Surely we can imagine a world where music is at least as nourishing as a three-star meal? "Beyond Guitar Hero - Towards a New Musical Ecology," RSA Journal, January–March 2009.

"I think most people, given the opportunity and the right context and maybe the right tools, have far more ability to express themselves and to do original things than (1) they’re given credit for and (2) than they realize themselves,” he says. “One goal should be to help anyone who has a natural inclination to a certain kind of thing go as far as they can.” ...

“You want everybody’s talent to be developed to the fullest extent,” he says. “Even Mozart’s -- you want to find a way that, through the tool, the experience, and the culture, the person has every possibility to go further than he or she ever expected. But you want that for everybody."

... Machover says that he isn’t helping people become prodigies; he’s helping them become active amateurs. And raising the bar for everyone -- from virtuosos to those who sing in the car with the windows rolled up -- is nothing but beneficial. The good will continue to get better, and the general populace’s ability to appreciate the good will improve too.

“Right now, we have a culture where if there were a Mozart, you’re not sure that some large percentage of people would recognize it or know the difference, really,” Machover says with a laugh. “So there’s a real advantage in just having as many people as possible be open-minded and aware and pushing themselves as far as possible.” "Manufacturing Greatness," American Way Magazine, 1/15/09.

On the subject of stars and heroes and virtuosi, Machover accepted that every society naturally wants to help exceptional artists succeed, but that in our own, an unhealthy gulf exists between great artists and everyone else “just making things” and very visible on My Space. Not only now, he argued, but in the renaissance time of Byrd and Downland, their “genius” flowered in a rich culture of lots and lots of people able to make music. Similarly, Mozart and Beethoven were the best of a deep strata of musicianship. His final analogy was cuisine. We need, he declares, a new “ecology of music”, in which we have access to the 3-star, the takeout order, the home-made dinner and the quick-fix sandwich. This ecology depends on awareness – on teaching kids where music comes from “because if you made something yourself, in the right context, you really learn something about the value of doing it well” – and on stars and experts who “keep the level up” with their insights and skills. "The future of music and the future of design," Design & Society, 1/16/09.

On giving children more tools.

"It's so difficult, physically to learn a traditional musical instrument,'' he said. ''The smartest kids take a lot of time just to master the interface -- to say nothing of creativity -- before you're expressing something, and way before you're expressing something individual.

''I think that what I've tried to do in all this work is to emphasize creativity over virtuosity.'' ...

[The following is a comment in the article by its author, James Gorman.] When I tried the Beatbugs and Music Shapers I felt a tactile surge of pleasure more than an intellectual one. The instruments are, of course, less demanding than traditional ones, and in the end might be less enriching. But they are not designed as ends. They are designed to offer the pleasure of music before the pain of making fingers do unheard of things. "Playing Music as a Toy, and a Toy as Music," New York Times, 6/3/03.

He was inspired to develop Hyperscore after discovering how few music-instruction options existed for his young daughters. Although children are encouraged to tell stories without knowing grammar and to paint without study, years of rigorous training typically precede Junior's Opus 1. ''There seems to be a deeply embedded sense that you have to learn a lot before you can write music,'' he said.

So he set out to create software that would convert expressive gestures -- lines, patterns, textures and colors -- made on the screen into pleasing and variable sounds. The goal, he said, is to let children have ''the direct experience of translating their own thoughts and feelings into music.''

''Then music becomes a living, personal activity, and not a given which is handed down from experts or from history.'' "From a Few Colored Lines Come the Sounds of Music," New York Times, 5/27/02.

On creating an interactive presentation.

We are searching for something between top-down authority and complete anarchy--the interesting balance in between. We live in a very fragmented world in which people often feel out of control. What we are doing here is more than putting together notes of music; we are trying to touch people's lives. The hope is that art can provide a model for how people can come together and interact in other aspects of their lives.

The traditional concert model has all the work done on stage, finished ahead of time and then organized by the conductor--it is like the traditional model of the mind. As a result, of all the arts, music requires the most work because the imagination has to fill in all the details. The seriousness with which people approach music is frightening; we need to do something because people are forgetting how to listen." "Interview with Tod Machover,"Scientific American, 7/29/1996.

On making the world more musical.

I imagine musical instruments built into our environments - our furniture, clothing, walls, handheld objects - that will project our conscious and unconscious intentions onto our surroundings. A concert then would not be a special occasion but always around us, meaningful sound responding to our subtle commands, mirroring our attitudes, enhancing our actions at some moments, providing counterpoint or contradiction at others. Perhaps five or ten years down the line we will have developed a Home Opera, designed to be experienced in the place where one is most comfortable, completely vivid and theatrical, yet personalized for and by each individual.

[Glenn] Gould went even further, predicting that "in the electronic age the art of music will become much more viably a part of our lives, much less an ornament to them, and that it will consequently change them much more profoundly." Our goal is to figure out how - in technological, musical, and human terms - to turn Gould's fabulous vision into reality. "The Brain Opera and Active Music."

Two of Machover's former students, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, founded Harmonix, which created Guitar Hero and Rock Band. They applied Machover's concepts.

When they formed Harmonix, their goal was to develop games that could make people feel like rock stars—in their living rooms. "The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band," IEEE Spectrum, 9/2009.

Machover would like to see them take their games even further.

"Imagine if [Guitar Hero] were truly expressive, truly personal, truly creative. The wonderful thing about Guitar Hero is that it opens up the door for everybody to be not just a passive listener but a real active participant in music," Machover says. "I think that is the future of music: music that is a collaboration between what we traditionally think of as composers and performers and the audience." "A Composer At The Edge Of Sound."NPR, 11/16/08.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

The Evolving Definition of Talent

I just ran across this blog entry.

The Economics of Creativity, Ooga Labs, July 12, 2008.

The author explores how musicians with different skill sets have been rewarded over the years. In the 1800s, the classical artists who played live in front of the European elite were the rock stars. Then radio lessened their value. Once recorded music hit its peak, those who did well in a recording studio moved up the value chain.

He doesn't discuss the shift to the video age, but as many musical history writers have noted, that's when appearance became especially important. Janis Joplin would probably not have been signed to a major label contract had she tried to make it in the MTV era.

And now, social media and the ability to create communities around your art have become important "creative" skills.

While music has been important for centuries, what elevates a subset of artists into stardom has been in flux. As technology changes, so does the definition of desirability. Within any given culture, what becomes valued are qualities perceived to be rare.

Let me start by illustrating my point with some non-music examples. Back in the day when commoners worked in fields and could barely get enough to eat, the upper classes were pale and plumb. That's what people aspired to.

Then when the lower classes turned pale from working inside factories all day, the status look was to have a tan, signaling that its owner had spent time at the pool, on the golf course, or on the tennis court. Thin became the desired shape because the poor were eating cheap food that made them overweight.

In terms of music, there was a time when being able to play and sing on key was important. That became less of an issue with the introduction of studio tricks which could fix flaws. So then, when everyone could do a decent recording, appearance became the determining factor setting the top stars apart from everyone else.

But now that we have an overabundance of sound-alike, great-looking performers, we're shifting back to artists who exude more authenticity. Amy Winehouse is distinctive because she is the antithesis of the pretty, packaged pop star.

Currently the new technology in music isn't in recording or performing, but in marketing and distribution. Those who excel at using those tools may be the next rock stars. It isn't that music performance has become less important. It's that we're looking for different filters to separate the good from the great. Talent now includes being able to relate to your fans in a more intimate way. Think of it as a new version of stage presence.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter