The Origin of Music: A Brief History of Song Sharing

lummisrecordings

“We are the music while the music lasts.” – T.S. Eliot

In modern-day song sharing — what we think of as “music” — there are three participants: musicians, listeners and industry.

When music first originated, there was little if any separation between musician and listener. Certainly, there was no business of music upon which to build an industry. In prehistoric times, music was part of a holistic method of communication bundled with body movements and primitive utterances, which would respectively evolve to become body language and language proper.

Over time, however, the role of the music creator — once a role shared by all — became specialized. The musician was separated and exalted above the listening audience. And over the last few centuries, this relationship between artist and audience was rapidly commercialized, giving birth to the music industry.

Music — song sharing — happens between musician, listener and industry. It is through song sharing that music is born. Much like the observation of a quantum particle causes it to exist in a certain state, music only truly exists when it is shared. Music is not a thing, but an activity, something people do. One cannot possess music, one can only be possessed by it.

Song sharing is not just passing an MP3 across the Internet, though free access to digital music is unquestionably the latest major turning point in the history of song sharing.

Song sharing is any act that brings music into being. Composing, performing and recording are the ways musicians share songs. Listeners can distribute copies — such as MP3s shared online — but unless these copies were listened to, no song sharing really took place. The listener shares songs by playing them for other people, or getting others to listen. In a world where musical quality is judged in dollars and not sense, the listener’s role in music’s dissemination is grossly overlooked, though that is changing quickly.

For the last couple of centuries, the music industry has produced, distributed and marketed songs to be sold. They owe their existence to song sharing by musicians and listeners. As such, they have been cast in a gatekeeper role, mediating the relationship between musician and listener.

For the vast majority of music history, song sharing happened freely and naturally between musicians and listeners. The act of making and listening to music is hardwired into our brains, involving more cognition in a greater number of areas than any other activity. Music evolved over millennia without any mediation of industry, becoming the creative center around which cultures formed. Song sharing was, for most of its history, was the glue that bonded individuals together through shared expression, literally forming societies.

Four turning points in the history of song sharing forever transformed its nature. Not coincidentally, each turning point marked a major milestone in the formation of the music industry.

Each of these turning points centered (naturally) around one of the three ways musicians share songs with listeners.

Composition is the DNA of song — instructions for its formation. Performance brings song to life, the performance was the act of song sharing until the recording was invented a little over a century ago — a blip in the epic history of music. Before then, composition and performance were essentially inseparable. Music was an oral tradition, and songs were passed down in this tribal, cave-person folk tradition: sacred copies that nonetheless changed ever so slightly as they were reproduced throughout the ages, mimicking the process of human evolution. The music was not made by musicians but rather by cultures, and as such, there were no composers or performers, only traditions of sharing songs.

The role of musician became more specialized as the technology of music evolved. The voice is an instrument we all possess, and there are many things in nature, including our own bodies, which serve as readymade percussion instruments. The sounds of nature and the movements of our own bodies inspired and possessed us to create the first music. But as instruments became more sophisticated, the role of musician began to be more distinguishable against the listening audience. This was the origin of the composition and the performance as separate from a cultural tradition. The role of song sharing in the civilizations of antiquity was a sacred, spiritual one, and seen as the domain of the gods themselves.

The first major turning point in the history of song sharing has to do with Pythagoras’s discovery of the mathematics of music. Though his teachings were to be lost or ignored for many centuries, the revelations of Pythagoras eventually enabled music theory to develop, ushering in a new wave of musical technology to honor what early civilizations saw as the divine music of the cosmos.

Over the second millennia, we developed new instruments, new methods of composition and performance, new ways of notating and communicating musical ideas. These advances led to the final distinction of musician as separate from listener, and of composition as separate from performance. Thus song sharing came to be defined as a discrete activity, exchange and relationship between musician and audience.

The Romantic period ushers in the second major turning point in the history of song sharing, this one having to do with performance. In the hegemonic Western world, performance morphed from folk tradition to the work of art of an individual genius. This had a profound impact on song sharing, bringing about the classical period of composition. It removed music from the domain of the gods and placed it squarely in the hands of humans. This transition began with financial support of the arts by aristocrats but ended with the audience as patron. This fundamental transformation for the first time created a thriving market for music performance, and this capital infusion drove the evolution of music technology and theory to even greater heights.

With composition and performance clearly defined and ascendant in profitability, the third and perhaps most transformational turning point in the history of song sharing is the invention of recorded music. At the turn of the 20th century, the phonograph quickly ushered in an exponential increase in the market for compositions. At the same time, performance began to take on a completely different role, being more of a means to the end of recording or marketing recordings than valued for the music itself. New broadcast technologies and recording/playback electronics fanned the flames.In what had now become a familiar cycle, music technology and industry advanced hand-in-hand on exponential scales, forever altering the culture of music and the roles of musician and listener. How quickly we forgot that prior to recordings, performance was the only way to hear music.

Toward the end of the 20th century, an imbalance in the relationship between musician, listener and industry started becoming apparent. As the market for music grew, the music laws and technologies governing the market for music were increasingly co-opted by large corporations, causing a net negative effect on culture. Both as a counter-reaction to this corporate hegemony/homogeny — and as a consequence of complacency and nearsightedness of the the record industry elite — song sharing technologies were re-appropriated by listeners en masse as they sought an equilibrium between culture and commerce. The industry responded by doubling down on restrictive laws and technologies of control, casting its customers as thieves, which brings us to something of a modern-day impasse in the evolution of song sharing.

The history of song sharing can put into in perspective some very important questions about the origin, meaning and purpose of music. These vital issues are all too ignored in our modern-day appraisal of music as entertainment product, of musician as celebrity, of profit as purpose. This perception is itself a product of the music industry, and as the market for music came to dominate our culture, we lost sight of the true meaning, power and purpose of music.

The true purpose of music is to bond humans together in shared emotional, physical and spiritual experience. As such, music has the power to make us better people, improve our relationships, and make our society better. It has the power to help us connect with and heal our bodies. It empowers us through creativity and enriches us through a deep understanding of the human condition.

All these powers of music that we lost sight of are returning, thanks to the fourth turning point in the history of song sharing — free access to music. This is not the death of the music industry, but rather a long overdue re-balancing of the relationship between musician, listener and industry. Though the industry fights this change with all its legal and financial might, the ancient power of song sharing between musician and listener, amplified by digital technology, is too great to suppress any longer.

Today, listeners are the new patrons of music — neither mass audiences via industry gatekeepers nor aristocrats have the power alone to sustain modern music culture. The separation between musician and listener is disappearing as technology democratizes composition, performance and recording. Music’s fans become DJs, remixers and mashup artists — musicians in their own right. The gatekeepers are a disappearing vestigial tail that had largely evolved simply to grab hold of money — the deep-seated and long-evolved power of song sharing transcends the market to speak to the soul. We are rediscovering music’s incredible power to heal and to change ourselves and society for the better, rather than pigeonholing the most divine human expression to mere sonic product.

As an epilogue, a fifth and final turning point in song sharing is on the horizon, again driven by the exponential progress of technology. In many ways this turning point marks a return to the original, prehistoric role of music as a central component in a holistic expression which allowed us to survive in a challenging landscape, joining us together in the tribes that would become the first societies. The lines are blurring between musician, listener and industry; between composition, performance and recording; between culture and commerce; between technology and law.

Our modern-day music universe sets the tone for this final and total technological transformation of music that will take song sharing beyond the audible and directly into the brain. The cutting edge of neuroscience and music theory points the way to a culture is based on computation. Perhaps then we will return to the reality of music as the sacred essence of all things, the song that we play by living. Life is a song we are sharing, and song sharing is the way in which we harmonize with ourselves, with others, and with the Universe at large.

What Rushkoff’s “Present Shock” Reveals About the Future of Music

presentshock

I’ve been a huge Douglas Rushkoff fan ever since he predicted the future of viral media in his influential 1995 book Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture.

I was just a teenager then, trying to figure out whether I was Gen X, Gen Y, or whether it even mattered. As I grew up reading his books, Rushkoff was one of the few voices telling me not only did we matter, but we were going to change the world.

I just finished reading his latest book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Rushkoff is no longer talking as much about the future. This is probably because, as his book explains, the future is disappearing. In a society of always-on, interconnected devices, a market of infinite choice, and an economy that commodifies attention, regard for the future is being replaced by an obsession with the present.

Present Shock’s five beefy but breezy chapters are easy to summarize. Rushkoff makes his case by illustrating the collapse of the traditional narrative, the temporal schizophrenia of digital omnipresence, the “short forever” of today’s compressed timescales and the need to differentiate patterns to make sense of information. The book closes with a short chapter on America’s cultural obsession with zombies and the apocalypse (close to my heart as the leader of an apocalyptic rock band).

Rushkoff doesn’t so much change the way you see things as help you make sense of an increasingly interconnected world of complex relationships and “big data.” It’s an illuminating, lively read, if you have the attention to spare, of course. It’s not just a book that will hone your perception of the impact modern media and technology are having on our culture and society — it also serves as reminder of the value in occasionally escaping this Present Shock to enter long moments of focus and concentration. In the “meta” sense, reading this book is a perfect example of such a fruitful escape.

OK, that’s the Amazon review — so what does Present Shock have to say about how music is changing?

I could offer a lengthy narrative of my own, but I know you don’t have the time or attention for that. So allow me to comment on a few quotes from the book — those that resonated with my own experience analyzing music media and technology trends, a practice which continues to be inspired by Rushkoff’s books:

“The word ‘entertainment’ literally means ‘to hold within,’ or to keep someone in a certain frame of mind. And at least until recently, entertainment did just this, and traditional media viewers could be depended on to sit through their programming and then accept their acne cream.”

Corporations are losing control over the market for and culture of music. Their apparatus of control for the past century has been technology and law. But now technology is evolving too fast for law to catch up. Culture is on the leading edge of this evolution. The market is struggling to remain relevant. Professional musicianship is on the decline. Through all of this change, a big picture is emerging: music is not just for entertainment (and through correlation, for profit). This is a huge realization that has yet to dawn on the defenders of the “old” music business. But it’s second nature to digital natives. The commodification of music depends on its being perceived primarily as an entertainment product. But music’s true purpose is to bond us socially in shared experience. Context is the new commodity. Attention/time is the new scarcity. Entertainment products are no longer enough. We want to make our own experience. We don’t want to be ‘held within’ someone else’s meaning. We want to create our own meaning — the semiotic democracy in action.

“The Occupy ethos concerns replacing the zero-sum, closed-ended game of financial competition with a more sustainable, open-ended game of abundance and mutual aid… It is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that — like a massive multiplayer online game — is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going.”

I’m a huge champion of the “amateurization” of music. All signs point to a world with a greater quantity of music, being played and listened to with greater frequency, with a greater diversity of styles. We may be losing a certain subjective “quality” of music as defined by big studio budgets, virtuoso performances and mass appeal. We may be losing a “depth” of listening as defined by repeat listens, compositional literacy, and attentiveness to the nuances of performance and recording. Change is going to be both bad and good, but when contrasted with the “zero-sum” game of the “old” music industry, I see a clear net benefit to our culture and market where “more people get to play.”

“When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and iTunes, the entirety of culture becomes a single layer deep.”

One of the biggest tensions in IP law is between third-world cultures whose ancient traditions have fallen into the public domain, and the first-world exploiters who appropriate this collective creativity from indigenous societies for profit. Both sides too often miss the point: So-called “traditional knowledge” must and will be free to appropriate for future creativity to flourish. Conversely, the profit in appropriating the work of others is rapidly shrinking as we culturally assimilate a truth we too often deny in our Western Romantic concept of authorship: the creative act is based on appropriation. This is second nature to the creators of remixes and mashups — the idea may never resonate with older generations. But believe me, when culture is “a single layer deep,” we enjoy the ultimate creative freedom, swimming in the sum total of humanity’s creativity. All existing meaning at any time can be appropriated, remixed or transformed to create new meaning. We still have to watch out for the dangers of hegemonic, corporate monoculture on the one hand, and lazy, uninspired copycat music on the other. But “Present Shock” means our attention is too fleeting to be “held within” either the traditional cultures we grew up with, or the co-opted, for-profit cultures sold to us. The cultural playing field may not be equal, but it certainly has been “leveled” by technology.

“The great peer-to-peer conversation of the medieval bazaar, which was effectively shut down by the rise of corporate communications, is back.”

The ‘cathedral’ represents a top-down, hierarchical approach while the ‘bazaar’ is a bottom-up, open-source approach. Jacques Attali’s brilliant, essential, but painfully dense Noise: The Political Economy of Music is perhaps the best exploration of the relationship between the cathedral and bazaar in the context of music. It also happens to be a central theme in the book I’m writing: what is the nature of the relationship between the ‘top-down’ architects of our musical culture/market, and the ‘bottom-up’ flow of musicianship and musical creativity/productivity?

By invoking the bazaar, Rushkoff’s sentence here immediately reminded me of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a foundational open source essay by Eric S. Raymond, published in 1999. While his essay was mostly about software engineering, he proved a core thesis that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” — in other words, the collective authorship power that digital technology provided was, at least in software engineering, a vast improvement over sole authorship of the kind encouraged by the IP industry since the inception of copyright. I believe the same to be true of music.

Of course, the cathedral started out not as a metaphor but literally as church control over the culture, market and technology of music. Over time, this gave way to corporate control over music, which retains a firm but tenuous grip on our auditory culture and market to this day. Rushkoff’s acknowledgement that we are returning to the ways of the bazaar should be wind in the sails for anyone who loves music and prefers a productive culture over a profitable one.

All one need to do is listen to a few mash-ups to hear the sound of the bazaar approaching loud and fast.

Copyright Law Robs Us of Political and Social Power of Sampling

Sampling is a political and social act. Requiring permission and a license -- particularly without a fair mechanism to facilitate that -- is a form of oppression. (Photo by John R. Southern)
Sampling is a political and social act. Requiring permission and a license without a fair mechanism to facilitate that is a form of oppression. (Photo by John R. Southern)

It is difficult to name a court decision that has had a greater negative impact on recorded music than Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Film. The de minimis doctrine, with respect to digital sampling of sound recordings, effectively disappeared after the court’s decision, summarized as: “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.” From the perspective of culture theory, the court could not have made a more erroneous statement.

At the time, there was abundant social and political energy associated with hip hop, a genre based on sampling. Hip hop was and still remains an important social and political institution. The appropriation of mainstream culture by the “underground” through digital sampling was a direct, progressive response to disempowerment among the hip hop community. Bridgeport crushed this culture overnight. Samples became the province of the minority of rights holders who owned songs of licensable value, and the minority of musicians and labels who could afford their licensing fees.

Arguments in support of Bridgeport primarily appeal to labor/desert and personhood theories of copyright. Mandating all samples be licensed decimated their widespread use and was a failure from the perspective of cultural theory. But under theories of fairness and personhood, it’s a small price to pay to ensure the original author is compensated, remaining in control of granting or denying permission to sample.

Samples chosen purely for their aesthetic quality are the easiest samples to recreate in a studio, at far less cost than licensing. This is often invoked to defend Bridgeport, but it misses a critical cultural point. Popular songs carry the greatest political and social meaning. Generally speaking, the more popular the song sampled, the larger the audience with whom the meaning will resonate.

In practice, many musicians have transferred their rights to a record label by the time they achieve popularity that warrants being sampled. Particularly with less established artists, a label will avoid the risk of investing in a sampling license when a musician’s sales potential is unproven. Most unsigned musicians can’t afford to license samples at all. This is a chilling of creativity for dubious rewards.

We are compensating yesterday’s musician by erecting a prohibitively expensive barrier of creative entry for today’s musicians. It seems rather contradictory to appeal to the labor/desert theory by raising the cost and bureaucracy of entering the market.

Hip hop adapted and continues to evolve as a central part of our musical culture, but its development as an art form was unquestionably arrested. The near-disappearance of unauthorized digital sampling between 2005 and 2010 has been interrupted by an explosion of creativity. In much the same way hip hop did 30 years ago, mashups and remixes rapidly emerged over the last few years, challenging the sound recording status quo and facing an arrested development of their own.

Today’s sampling musicians lack the history of commercial success hip hop enjoyed. In a way, they don’t know what they’re missing. They feel more entitled to appropriating sound recordings, and less entitled to compensation. They’re participating in what Lawrence Lessig calls a “read-write” culture, similar to the culture of amateur performance that existed prior to the invention of the phonograph and the industrial commodification of music. They’re involved not just in a semiotic democracy, but a new culture of creative consumption that’s productive, not passive. This has numerous implications, not the least of which is that less labor/desert incentives and personhood assurances are needed to stimulate creativity — it now happens as a corollary of consumption.

Nothing changed in the law to enable this trend, it’s simply another case of technology racing forward. Songs can now be produced from samples on a tablet in under an hour. Music tastes and popular songs change in weeks, not years. Culture moves at speeds that copyright law can’t keep up with anymore. This creates large financial challenges for “professional” musicians, who are rapidly being offset by an exponentially larger pool of amateur and “semi-pro” musicians.

We must also acknowledge that sound recordings are themselves a platform for music discovery. Sampling can be a way for fans to discover new artists. Having one’s sample appear in the remix of a famous mashup artist can generate huge exposure for an emerging artist. Licensing chills this kind of spontaneous creative reuse, and if one demanded compensation, one may not be sampled. Well-established musicians whose music has demonstrated value do not share the same view, but from a welfare and culture perspective, the greater good is best served by free appropriation.

This is a messy situation, and reform to copyright is needed. A compulsory license for the sampling of sound recordings seems an appropriate solution. The specific mechanisms by which such a license would function are surely more complicated and contentious than, for example, compulsory performance licenses. However, they would be based on well-established legal precedents.

The deadweight loss experienced by our culture when the cost of licensing samples skyrocketed from zero to thousands of dollars was staggering. Cultural theory guides us toward compulsory licensing as a way to foster a more diverse, democratic and equal creative landscape. It encourages us to make works more freely available for creative reuse so that the next generation of musicians can make the next generation of music, while sustaining their livelihoods long enough to pass on their musical traditions.

Creative Commons offers a fine stopgap solution, allowing artists to license music such that it can be freely shared and remixed, yet protected against unauthorized commercial use. As access to music becomes free or nearly free, musicians will need to rely on revenue streams and methods of discovery outside of traditional music retail settings. Today it is more important to live the creative life than achieve the American dream with all the labor/desert it entails. I think that represents the triumph of culture and cultural theory over the increasingly anachronistic theories of copyright which address pre-Digital Age creativity.

21st Century Recording Means Less Studio Time: Deal With It

It's sometimes hard to tell if a producer is depressed or just concentrating. Photo by Saucy Salad.
It’s hard to tell if a producer is depressed or just concentrating. Photo by Saucy Salad.

This is a long comment I made in response to this Trust Me, I Am A Scientist blog post which was Facebook-shared by friend and record producer extraordinaire John Naclerio at Nada Studios. I lump the ‘Scientist’ blog in with the Trichordist folks who basically try to complain the old music industry back into existence. They think music is devolving, I think it’s evolving… I guess that makes us sworn enemies. But I don’t want to fight, I want to find solutions, and all I hear from them is complaints.

This is addressed to John but could really be addressed to any professional career producer/engineer worth their salt.

John –

Sorry, I’m going to be the guy that points out this article is BULLSHIT!

John, we’ve had these discussions before so I know you know I appreciate the work of a professional. You made our record sound 1000% better than it would have sounded fresh outta my basement.

I disagree with the main point that “It always takes longer than the band expects” to finish a record… I mean, I’ll take your word for it if you think this is a good article. I’ll accept that most or a growing number of bands think this, but I believe the true professional musicians understand the process and understand it takes time.

I totally disagree with his implication that somehow technology has had a negative effect on the recording process simply because a few people are impatient. Technology has made it possible to have a studio on every laptop — we should be celebrating that!

Yeah, from a producer/engineer standpoint it sucks because culture is getting lo-fi, there’s less money in the music economy and budgets are smaller. We’re never going back to Led Zeppelin locking out a studio for a year, nor was that ever necessary to make a good record. It was important for doing lots of drugs though.

What about the black market for drugs? With musicians spending less time in the studio, they have more time freed up to do drugs. Maybe you should consider a career as producer/dealer?

Seriously, I think I can understand why producers and engineers would be totally fucking annoyed by bands coming in and expecting to have a great record in a few days. Maybe that happens more often than not these days. It must frustrate the hell out of you to want to do an awesome job but the band only has the budget to do 4 songs in 2 days.

This blogger offers no solutions whatsoever, just complaints. How about thinking about ways musicians can have bigger budgets? How about thinking about “fuck the album” because people listen to singles, and just take the time to do really good singles until you get financial backing for an album? How about record it at home because listeners are cool with lo-fi as long as they’re getting a type of music they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten because the musician couldn’t afford to be in a studio? How about celebrating home recording as a gateway drug to valuing professional production/engineer services?

It’s not that bands don’t value the professional recording process or how long it takes… they just don’t have the money they used to, plus they can do a C+ job at home… that’s just reality. They’re not going out of their way to be assholes about it, but they are fair to expect that recording technology has evolved to the point where yes… it actually does take a shorter time and is much cheaper to make a great record than 5, 10 or 20 years ago. All of the sudden you CAN record an LP in a few days for $1,000. Will it be awesome? 99% of the time, no. But your odds don’t get much better with a professional recording… it’s not about the art, it’s about the business.

John, you are one of the most respected professionals I know in the music business — not just from me but from the hundreds of musicians who have come through your studio. You don’t complain about any of this shit, so I’m not directing this at you. I just want to say that 99% of musicians have never been able to afford a $20,000 recording budget, so nothing much has changed there. It’s the label situation that’s changed. And good riddance. Patronage beats exploitation. It sucks for producers/engineers, there’s less money. But it’s better for musicians and they are the ones ultimately keeping you in business.

We’re just going through a rough, awkward patch in the industry where the old players are dying but throwing every dollar and lawyer at holding on to paid access to music. But access to music is already free or nearly free, and we’ve yet to adapt the music economy to it because these assholes are preventing us from finding new solutions.

Recording technology will continue to get cheaper and more efficient. Digital editing means there’s no reason for a musician to play the track 47 times. Recording time is getting shorter and that’s a good thing for everyone but the people who are paid based on recording time. So for those folks, like you, John, and the countless other producer/engineers struggling against this wave of amateur musicianship and production — let’s start talking about business solutions.

Let me close by saying I think that you, John, are a shining example of a producer talking solutions. You started a label and are now taking backend interest in some of the bands you produce. The producer/engineer becoming more of a part of the band or their management is probably the most promising avenue for talented studio professionals right now. But there will be more, and I’ll work with you to help find the money!

How Google Glass Will Change Music

See the guy with the MacBook Air? Yeah, that's not weirder than wearing glasses or anything...
Wave your Macbook in the air like you got AppleCare.

We’ll be remembered as the awkward generation that carried around small glass-and-metal bricks, pointing them at things of interest.

Seriously, have you been to a concert lately? Half the crowd is holding up an iPhone or Android device, taking the same grainy video with crap audio from a slightly different angle than the other three thousand people holding up their devices. It looks ridiculous.

Before I come off as some sort of elitist snob or luddite, let me say I celebrate those three thousand people and the video they take, however unwatchable I personally might find it. Who am I to declare someone’s creativity ‘crap’ just because it doesn’t relate to me? So what? 99.9% of everything ever created doesn’t relate to me!

So many technophobe critics make the embarrassing mistake of uttering something like: “More people that ever are creating, but most of it is crap.” When has that not been true? Crap has far outnumbered substance for as long as I can remember. Why not celebrate the fact that everyone is creating their own meaning? To the people in the crowd and their friends, that grainy video of their favorite artist is the coolest thing ever — not because it’s an amazing work of art but because it encapsulates a personal experience. There’s a wide range in between and it’s all valid creativity.

Like Douglas Rushkoff points out in his new book Present Shock, we are a generation that’s actually heeding the advice “live for the present” — perhaps a little too much, in fact. We are in our own little bubbles of curated niche content, and you can look at that as good or bad. Withholding our judgements for the moment, let’s allow that mobile devices allow this to happen and it’s only going to accelerate as we enter the “Google Glass is kind of a glimpse into the future.

Let me say right here that I think people who regard Glass as a fad are fools. Comparing Glass to the Segway or the Bluetooth headset may make haters feel better, but there’s really nothing new about the Segway or the Bluetooth headset. We’ve had motorized people-movers and wireless earpieces for decades. We’ve never had the ability to record visual and auditory memories as they are perceived. Our devices come close, but we have to hold them up in front of our faces and point them around. The hand will always be utilized for finer control — it’s not like hand-held devices are going to vanish. But for the purpose of recording pure audiovisual memory, Glass is the penultimate experience before our brains get jacked directly into the Web.

Glass is like a “selfie” of the soul… and you see how popular those are. “Selfies”, I mean, not souls.

Anyway, if you think people will be laughing at Glass-like devices in ten years — when they’re indistinguishable from regular glasses — you’ve got another thing coming. You’re the one people will be laughing at, pointing your glass brick around the room like a senior citizen, blocking my view at the Rolling Stones hologram show.

glassgu

We get it, Glass looks silly and stupid now. So did the World Wide Web!

Okay, we got that out of the way: Glass is here to stay. So, the question I’m most interested in asking is: how will it change music?

We will certainly look back and cringe at the photos and videos we took of 100 other people with their arms up taking photos and videos of a tiny, blurry blob that might be a musician. When we go to a music festival 10 years from now, there may still be a few hands in the air with a handheld device trying to get a better shot. But plenty of people will prefer to capture the entire experience as they experienced it — not just the stage but the epic fight through the crowd to get to the front. Not just the hit single but also the cute person you met in the beer line. The music — as always — will be the thing that brings all these people together, and the technology will facilitate the connections.

It’s also going to offer an incredible window into the musician’s lifestyle. Fans will live vicariously through their idols — it’s the logical progression from the celebrity-worship happening on Twitter right now. Hordes of amateurs will quickly realize they too can live broke and free like a musician, listening to records and jam all day, party all night, and sit in a van for eight hours. That last part will probably not be Glass’d.

Musicians will evolve as well. What we’re really talking about is wearable devices with long battery lives and cloud-based storage with Wi-Fi access. That’s a very specific (and first-world) combination, but it’s happening with greater frequency. In 10 years it ought to be commonplace in developed nations. For musicians, that means never losing a musical idea, because any time your device detects you playing music, it’s going to automatically record. Every musician reading this just had a huge lightbulb go off. How many great songs are lost forever in the folds of our brains when we don’t remember the tune?

For those familiar with copyright law, a musical “expression” is “fixed” when it is recorded, and you are immediately granted copyright protection. Anyone with Glass and a guitar will be a walking copyright machine! The copyright industry can’t handle today’s complexity, they might just buckle under the weight of this new Glass-enabled consumer-creator.

Music discovery will become visual as well. All you need to do is look at the logo on a band T-shirt and say a simple voice command, and you’re watching their music video. If one of your friends mentions a band you haven’t heard, within 60 seconds, you have. It’s possible now with our mobile devices, but the amount of tapping it takes to get the end result isn’t worth it. Are you beginning to see the true power of Glass? That it’s not so much the things it does but how it does things?

To be sure, there will be Glass experiments that don’t work. I wouldn’t want to watch too much of a show from a musician’s point of view — it’s all hot, bright lights and awkward, sweaty faces. Too much access could demystify artistry, which to an extent is awesome and democratizing, but artists need to retain some sort of mystique to distinguish themselves from the herd.

You’ll never use Glass in a casino or while taking a final exam. It’ won’t be socially acceptable in every place at every time. Neither are today’s mobile devices.

But everyone will be wearing them at the concert, backstage, at rehearsal, in the studio — wherever music composition, performance or recording is being done. Not everywhere every time. But it’s undeniable that wearable devices like Glass and its ilk will become a big part of the music culture.

A lot can happen in ten years, but everything I mentioned here has an analogue in the way we use our glass-brick mobile devices today to record our musical experience. Through the Glass, exciting new rabbit holes will appear through which we can dive deeper into the music we love.