Sounds Like Dystopia

"It's the year 2010 and you wake to a familiar tune playing softly. It gets you out of bed and makes you feel good. As you walk into the bathroom, your Personal Media Minder activates the video display in the mirror, and you watch a bit of personalized news while you get ready for the day. You step into the shower and your personalized music program is ready for you, cued up with a new live version of a track that you downloaded the other day. It is even better than the original recording, so while you dress, you tell your "Taste Mate" program to include the new track in your playlist rotation.

You put on your new eyeglasses, which contain a networked audio headset, letting tiny earbuds slip into your ears. You switch on the power, and the mix that your friend makes for you starts to play. Music pours into your consciousness. It becomes yours.

After breakfast with your family, you head off to work and the Personal Media Minder asks if you wish to finish the audiobook you started yesterday morning. You confirm and listen while you walk to the train that takes you to your job.

During the day, your headset and other wireless devices help you communicate across the network, with your friends, associates, network buddies, and "digital peers." The headset also keeps you connected to that hard rock collection that you really love to listen to. Meanwhile, a variety of new songs, new versions, and remixes of tracks that you truly dig, along with your old favorites, continues to come your way. Using TasteMate, you access and trade playlists, and recommend a couple of songs to your friend in Seattle, and they get added to his rotation. Music propels you through the day.

On the way home, you choose your usual dose of news, sports, weather, and the latest dirt on your favorite bands and movie stars. The headset syncs to the active 3D displays that project images just in front of your eyes, or onto the communal screens available on the train and at home. You decide what you hear and see, and who can share in the experience. The Media Minder blends and delivers the programming you select, along with whatever variety of new music you decide to explore. It also determines how that music is chosen, with the help of the TasteMate program.

Back at home, you cruise into the evening with the house system sending soft dinner jazz to various speaker systems in your house, as you serve up one of your culinary specialties, then pay your bills. One of these bills is your media and entertainment subscription, which includes your monthly music, video, network, and communications charges; it's always lower than your heating or water bill. Incoming calls from your friends blend into the programming that surrounds you, as you see fit. After dinner, you clean up, perhaps enjoy a couple of games with friends across your virtual network, and begin to wind down with some New Age derivatives of Mozart's original compositions, which you discovered late one night while cruising through the music sharing channels. . . . "

- The Future of Music (2005)

For those of you to whom, like me, the above seems like a vision of hell to exceed Dante's darkest fantasies, it may come as something of a shock to discover that it's authors, David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard, regard this is something to look forward to, something to eagerly anticipate and benignly encourage. Over some 190 pages, the authors expound their notion of "music as water: ubiquitous and free flowing" as the coming paradigm of all music consumption. No matter that almost every page displays their absolute stupidity with regard to music. They don't even understand water.

For when Leonhard and Kusek propose a model of music as water, they are evidently not talking about music as a publicly funded, state-run monopoly. No, their supposedly utopian vision of the future of the music industry involves the transformation of music into a privatized utility. "Do we feel that water companies have undue monopolistic powers, and do we consider water to be a "product"?" They ask rhetorically, as though the expected negative response was so obvious as to scarcely require thinking about.

But when three multinational corporations control the water supply of over one hundred nations; when water privatization in England and Wales has led to an increase in price, an erosion of working conditions, an increase in household disconnections, a deterioration in the service provided, and no increase in water quality; when the IMF-imposed sale of the water supply to the Cochabamba region in Bolivia led to the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco gaining legal ownership of all of Cochabamba's water supply - even its rainwater - and ultimately to the notorious Cochabamba Water Wars of 2000; perhaps we should start to question the "undue monopolistic powers" of the water companies, and perhaps we ought to question whether this is a model we want to follow for the provision of something as precious as music.

Before I am accused of taking a metaphor too literally, however, let's examine what Kusek and Leonhard actually have to say about music, about the kind of music we might be listening to in this bright future of theirs, and what it might sound like. Precious little, as it turns out. The sound of music seems to be of little concern to these self-styled futurists. In the above-quoted paragraph they offer us some "familiar tune playing softly", a little "hard rock", a touch of "soft dinner jazz," even "some New Age derivatives of Mozart's original compositions," (I particularly like the way they had to point out that Mozart wrote "original compositions" - such a novelty will it be to actually compose in the coming era of endless re-versions, remixes, and derivatives).

They trumpet themselves repeatedly as champions of the "niche", the "emerging", "new music" and "indie labels". All the exciting new marketing tools of the digital age - from video game syncs to corporate sponsorships - are framed as opportunities to smash the prevailing hegemony. And yet, when it comes to providing examples, we are faced with an array of staggeringly familiar names: U2, Blink 182, Sting, Phish ... Hark! What refreshing new sounds be these coming up from the underground? The confluence of the names of all these rock dinosaurs with Leonhard and Kusek's shiny new tools is not merely contingent or coincidental. The fact is, far from breaking the hold of the major labels, opportunities like having your song in the latest EA Sports game are only available to artists already deeply embedded in major label structures.

The authors never tire of chanting how this brave new world will increase the "diversity" of music available to the listener, and yet almost every means they chart to do so will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. They may criticize the traditional radio DJ for following playlists, but at least live radio with live human presenters offers the possibility of a maverick emerging who will bring strange and unusual acts into a sort of mainstream - John Peel being the classic example. On the other hand, expecting diversity to emerge from the algorithms in a web store like Amazon which tells you "people who bought this may also like ..." can only be folly. There is no John Peel algorithm. Such automated software will never surprise you (unless it's broken), only ever offer you the same sounds under different proper nouns.

Futurists have form on this matter. Kusek and Leonhard are not the first to mistake more stuff for enlarged real choice. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, wrote of the "incomparably more diverse" wares to be found in the new supermarkets then fast becoming ubiquitous. Even as Toffler criticised the "architectural sameness" of the supermarkets, he boasted of their "gastronomic diversity" - and even architecturally, he was convinced that, given time, "Uniformity will give way to diversity." As the term "futurist" ceased to refer to a type of artist or political thinker and became a kind of profession in itself, from Toffler's course at The New School to net evangelists like Leonhard and nanotech prophets like Ray Kurzweil, it seems to have necessitated an almost total neglect towards precisely those disciplines in which the future was once most at home: aesthetics and politics.

Lies, Damned Lies and the Rude Health of Pubs and Records

William Burroughs once claimed that the purpose of science was to make people aware of what they already know and the purpose of religion to stop people from being aware of what they already know. In recent times, this latter role may have been overtaken by statistics. Stats travel well on the web, they are small compact, aerodynamic, fit snugly into tweets and headlines and they have a certain punctive, so there force to them, that makes them seem convincing, even when they blatantly contradict what seems to be staring you in the face.

So, in this Observer article about the mooted extension of the smoking ban to cars and parks, the penultimate paragraph states what appears to be a paradox: the Office of National Statistics claims a a 3% in people going to pubs (incidentally, I had a look on the Office of National Statistics website and couldn't find this particular report - but I did find a report stating a 2.5% drop in the output of the hotel and restaurant trade, of which, "The largest contribution to the decrease was public houses and clubs."), yet Simon Clark of the lobby group Forest claims, "The evidence is staring people in the face. Thousands of pubs have closed since the ban was introduced." Now, Forest is a front group for the tobacco industry with little to no grassroots support, but his contention is not entirely without ground. As this Times Business article shows, with some 2,400 pubs closing between the summers of 2008 and 2009 alone, "local pubs serving small communities" have been the worst hit, while major chains like Greene King see their profits rise.

Is this not precisely analogous to the commonly repeated canard by members of the file-sharing lobby that piracy cannot possibly be bad for record sales when last year reported a rise in singles sales and the biggest selling single of all time? All around us we see record shops closing down, record labels folding, distributors collapsing, but we can merrily blind ourselves to this obvious reality because a small handful of major label mega-stars posted a record year (and the market - and its stats - is of course always the final guarantor of truth).

Thought I might share with you my latest, probably ill-advised, intervention into the pages of Comment is Free on the Guardian website:

When the evangelists of the net and digital music talk about the big bad "music industry", they're not talking about the major labels at all - they can't be, just look how happy BitTorrent and so forth are to make cosy corporate deals with Fox, Paramount, etc. No, what they are talking about, what they really hate and fear is, precisely, musicians and songwriters. When they talk about music without the music industry what they really mean is music without musicians, without writers - just pure marketing (which let's face it, is the only thing the net is really good for - sure you may argue that the internet is very useful for spreading information and chatting to friends and so forth, but is it not the case that in the age of the internet, spreading information and chatting to friends comes increasingly to become indistinguishable - or almost so - from marketing?)

"The secret of life is honesty and fair-dealing - if you can fake that you've got it made"

It is easy to be shocked by the stupidity and lack of understanding shown by much of the commentary on the current dispute between YouTube and PRS for Music over licence fees paid for music videos, but the problem lies in the way the situation has been framed, and by the way Google (YouTube's parent company) has been allowed, practically unquestioned, to set the terms of the debate. In the press release issued by YouTube at the time of their unilateral and entirely unprompted decision to remove 'premium content' music videos from their U.K site in the middle of ongoing negotiations with PRS, as well as in the first Guardian article to report on this P.R. statement, the issue is presented as a clash between, on the one hand, the 'old' exploitative music industry, and, on the other, the brave new world of Web 2.0, offering direct unmediated access between 'artists' and 'fans'. It is essential in these circumstances to problematise each of the terms in this debate - 'the music industry', 'artists', 'fans', and what might be seen as the increasingly invisible mediator between the three, the internet and the various hardware and software companies that have come to colonise its virtual highways - but first of all this opposition between 'the music industry' and 'web 2.0' must be dismissed as false, and perniciously so.

There can be no opposition between the internet's principal software developers and the major multinational record companies, they are joined by ties of common ownership (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, for instance, owns both MySpace and several recording and music publishing interests; Time-Warner-AOL owns, of course, both AOL and the Warner Music Group, as well as holding considerable shares - to the tune of $1 billion - in Google, not to mention the fact that the present CEO of AOL is former sales director of Google) and have frequently colluded in deals, tied by non-disclosure agreements, to share their profits, to the exclusion, by and large, of any actual music producers. The move on the part of YouTube to present the debate in these terms then, lacking any positive content in reality, must be seen as purely tactical - a somewhat specious attempt on the part of a massive global corporation, with annual advertising revenue to the tune of $16.4 billion (in 2007) and close financial and personnel ties to an even bigger corporate behemoth (Time-Warner), to present itself as 'the little guy'.

Part of the problem lies with this idea of 'the music industry' and the ease with which it can be manipulated. There is a perception that there is this thing called 'the music industry' which intervenes in, and distorts, the relationship between two mythical entities called 'artists' (a term which elevates music's producers to the romantic status of geniuses starving in garrets, outside the social, and beyond the dirt and cynicism of circulation) and 'fans' (a term which reduces music's consumers to the hysteric victims of Beatlemania, blindly following the Pied Piper to their doom). Although there is of course a grain of truth in this, it is certainly no more true than it is of the fashion industry, the potato industry, the furniture industry, the software industry, or the telecommunications industry. The music industry is, in this respect at least, no different from any other under the capitalist mode of production - except for this romantic ideological spin which sees producers as 'artists' who are today inevitably compromised by their financial dealings and were at some mythical point in the past somehow unconstrained by such concerns. The debate must then be reframed in terms of a conflict between, on the one hand, the global corporations which control BOTH the production and distribution of recorded music offline AND the web applications used to distribute music online, and on the other hand, music's consumers and producers (with PRS - a not-for-profit organisation that collects licensing revenue from businesses and distributes it amongst songwriters, without the intervention of any kind of record label, and with a membership of which over 90% earns, in royalties, less than £5,000 a year - very clearly on the side of the producers and consumers).

The notion that the World Wide Web (or perhaps 'Web 2.0') offers the chance of unmediated, direct access between producers and consumers is, similarly, a myth that requires exploding. All web applications like MySpace, YouTube, etc. do is exchange one form of corporate mediation - that offered by a record company - for another - that offered by a telecommunications/software company. Yes, it is possible for a band to buy their own domain name, webhosting, and all the rest of it, set up their own website and distribute their music directly online - but scarcely more so than thirty years ago, when a band could, and frequently did, press their own records, print their own artwork, and take them direct to shops (like Rough Trade) and sell them at gigs. And the simple fact is that the network of websites and applications that have come to be brought under the umbrella term 'Web 2.0' does not increase the possibilities of this happening, but has, in fact, decreased them, as bands increasingly don't bother with their own websites, and audiences scarcely bother looking for them, when they get all they want for free on MySpace. If the idea of a 'bad' major record label is one which gives producers little control over their labour power and what happens to the products thereof, and pays them little or no reward for their work, then MySpace and YouTube and so forth should be seen as the 'bad' mediators par excellence.

There is, however, a third party in this debate, and that is the role played by the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, from Bit Torrent to Pirate Bay. Although the people who set up these networks will undoubtedly overlap with the previously defined group of music consumers, and music producers have a tendency, seeing the file-sharing networks as a thorn in the side of 'the music business' and thinking in terms of 'my enemy's enemy must be my friend', to regard them with a kind of affectionate leniency, peer-to-peer software, no matter how good the intentions of its designers may be, has had three almost immediate material consequences, none of which are unambiguously positive. First of, file-sharing has helped sustain the growing feeling that music, as though it were some sort of naturally occurring resource like water or oxygen, should be free to all (thus inviting the question of whether there is room in society for any 'professional musicians' at all, and, if so, where their income is supposed to come from); secondly, the existence of file-sharing has in fact increased the leverage and bargaining power that major record labes have over their acts, and the more the media talks of a crisis, the more the major labels can give musicians the impression that any kind of deal is something of a miracle at the moment and that they should therefore immediately accept the most restrictive and financially unrewarding contracts, with the sharp rise in the "360 deal" (where labels control a stake, not just in a band's record sales but also in their merchandise sales, publishing rights, live revenue, and so forth) just one of the more prevalent and immediate consequences of this; thirdly, file-sharing networks have contributed greatly to a massive change in listening habits, due to the free and immediate availability of practically all the music ever recorded. Though some may wish to celebrate this last point as a marvel of the modern age, it comes with something of a mummy's curse attached, for it would seem that the more music there is available for us to consume, the less we really listen.

As a child, I would save up my pocket money to buy an album on cassette perhaps every three or four weeks and then listen to that tape over and over again until I knew it inside out. This kind of dedicated listening is, by now, practically unheard of, not to mention the fact that, with the ever-decreasing sound quality of music formats (from vinyl to tape to CD to minidisc to mp3 to mobile phone...), whenever we listen to music today, we are literally listening to less of it, i.e. to a greatly reduced band of that music's frequencies. So, though I am not necessily advocating the criminalisation of file-sharing networks and the people who use them, I still have a problem with their typical self-presentation as global Robin Hoods, robbing from the rich 'music industry' for the good of all. And when Limewire, for instance, is owned by a man, Mark Gorton, who also owns a hedge fund and a stock brokerage, and Bit Torrent has corporate partnerships with such companies as Fox, Warner Brothers and Paramount, one should maybe pause for thought before assigning them any oppositional position, or liberatory potential, whatsoever.