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

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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.

The Steady Decline of the Professional Musician

The professional music career is in decline.

We could start with the RIAA’s debunked statistics painting a worst-case scenario, but that only tells one side of the story.

I’d rather look at Google, the “do no evil” company and thorn in the side of the few corporations that control the majority of the US music industry.

Search terms can’t be gamed and framed the way U.S. Bureau of Labor data can… Google Trends searches are like Shakira’s hips, they don’t lie. Let’s take a look at some common terms associated with aspiring music professionals:

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The search volume for music career, learn music, music business, songwriting and music sales are all noticeably down since about a decade ago. Seeing these and other terms on a downward trend paints a clear picture of a future with less professional musicians.

Who’s to blame? Depends on who pays your bills. If you’re an old school music business person, you probably blame the content-devaluing “information wants to be free” tech sector. If you’re a new school musician, you probably have a chip on your shoulder dug deep by the exploitative, self-destructing record business which is ineptly responsible for the scorched earth you have to Mad Max a music career on these days.

Before we seek blame or solutions, let’s pause for a moment to consider what this means. Back to Google Trends. What about search terms concerned with more modern, everyday music practices?

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Search volume for how to remix, mashup, garageband, how to record and how to make music are on their way up. There are more “musicians”, but less of them qualify for the “professional” distinction. You might call it the “amateurization” of music. More musicians, less music careers.

This is fun, let’s take another look at the “old way” of doing things:

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Yup, interest is flagging in music publishing, music job, artist management, music copyright and music law.

So there must be a huge explosion of amateur musicianship, huh?

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Hmmm… less people seem to want to go the traditional route of learning guitar and song composition through formal experience in training. This would seem to jive with less musicians going pro. Also jives with all the time those damn kids play video games on their mobile phones.  They probably have a much more direct relationship to music creators, right?

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Wow, crowd funding is exploding in popularity — there are clearly less careers these days built on exploitation and more facilitated through patronage. And lots of people seem to be picking up the habits of aspiring music professionals (Facebook pages, merch, albums). Perhaps we’re just in a slump, and there’s a digital music baby boom waiting to happen?

Of ourse, the situation is not as simple as I paint it here with the Google Trends graphs. For one, Google search terms are very broad in both scope and depth. If Kickstarter had an IPO, that might spike traffic, despite no correlating spike in user activity. Second, statistics can tell almost any story you want them to if you know how to frame them.

I’m not here to spew propaganda. I’m here to form solutions. Can this trend be turned around? Should we even care?

On the one hand, I believe we need more of a culture of entrepreneurship among musicians. The art/business divide is increasingly one of unsustainable, apathetic detachment from reality. It’s a cultural anachronism from a time when creative work found its utility in exploitation. Put simply, we musicians could use a little entrepreneurship with our sex, drugs and rock and roll. Everyone is creative nowadays — in a sense, creativity is getting more competitive. Those with the entrepreneurial skills have more and more opportunities for exposure than those skilled only in composition, performance or recording.

On the other hand, the music industry is growing, and while huge challenges remain (largely around copyright issues), it doesn’t seem as if the music market is in a downward trend. In fact, more people are listening to more music than ever before.

I think what’s happening is clear — we’re witnessing the dawn of a new creative class and a new type of creator-consumer.

We should continue to strive to figure out ways the old guard won’t lose all the value they invested in the music world these past few decades. But royalties — so-called “mailbox money” — are like a musician Social Security system, and just as unsustainable. Old rights owners (or their heirs) who no longer create anything are bogeying the music economy pie, leaving only tiny slices left for emerging, independent artists. This is why Spotify royalties are so low. I bet they love artists and would love to pay them, after all, they’re Swedish.

The purpose of copyright is to promote the production of creative works — how is that accomplished by giving the George Gershwin Estate millions of dollars? It may be a radical concept, but I think we need to divert some of this money into funding programs for the next generation of musicians. And we clearly need shorter copyright terms.

In any case, let’s push toward patronage and leverage the creative value in all of us to protect the independent class of musicians that represent our future. We may very well live in a world with more musicians and less professionals for a long time. But that doesn’t mean music is any better or worse off. Music is always awesome no matter how much we screw up the business side.

What is happening now is a redefinition of what a musician is (which is good because none of us can agree on a definition at the moment). We’re figuring out new ways (or rediscovering pre-phonograph ways) of doing business.

But as most fans and musicians would tell you, “Who cares about definitions and business models — turn up the music!”

What’s Important To Musicians? Analyzing Reddit for Insight

Reddit may boast the largest community of amateur and professional musicians on the web. Its thriving WeAreTheMusicMakers “subreddit” thread had 55,321 subscribers at the time of this writing.

I’m not going to explain to you how reddit or crowd sourcing works, but suffice to say the conversation going on is lively and enriching for any type of musician. So what are all these music makers talking about?

I scanned the last month of WeAreTheMusicMakers posts to gain some insight on what’s important to the community. I would have liked a larger sample size of posts but reddit’s archives stop after one month. However, the community itself is a huge sample size, and I was able to see a few trends emerge. Here’s the data I ended up with after counting and categorizing each post that received 30 or more upvotes:

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Tips, techniques and resources for digital recording, mixing and mastering represented nearly a quarter of the most popular posts. While it’s true anyone with a laptop can produce a great-sounding record these days, it still takes a considerable amount of skill and experience to properly record, mix and master. Many of the most popular posts were links to free resources to learn the ins and outs of digital recording, followed by information on the hottest plugins for “in the box” recording.

The next most popular category was career advice. Clearly there is a lot to talk about here with the big changes happening in the music world. It seems the WeAreTheMusicMakers crowd tends toward the amateur end of the spectrum — musicians that have been playing for a while and are looking for advice on how to begin establishing a career. Luckily there’s a good number of professional musicians in the fray to provide quality advice.

Along that same line, there were robust discussions of the music industry in general — mostly around unfair, exploitative business practices we’ve become too familiar with. But there were also a few posts that looked to gain lessons from the industry success of other artists.

Also popular were requests for specific feedback on non-career issues. These were usually creative ideas about new websites or resources for musicians, and the posters got an enthusiastic response.

Anyone who’s hung with musicians knows they can’t shut up about gear, and the prevalence of gear porn and gear advice among the most popular posts was unsurprising.

The rest of the most popular posts focused on humor, inspiration and commentary on miscellaneous issues important to musicians. There were also appearances by music apps, exhibition videos, requests for collaboration and allegations of copyright infringement.

While these insights may seem self-evident, to me they powerfully illustrate how musicians are taking their fates into their own hands. And that’s a really, really good thing. The odds and benefits of winning the major label lottery are disappearing more and more each day. We’re replacing the old, corrupt system of exploitation with a new do-it-yourself, direct-to-fan attitude.

Digital recording has made every musician a producer. We’re now culturally cool with a lower-fidelity standard of audio quality. We may never individually learn how to make recordings shine in the way an expert mixing engineer can — but as long as we can make the music we hear in our heads, the tradeoff in fidelity is more than worth it. Old folks like Neil Young and Flea might complain we’re a generation of overly-compressed, earbud-isolated kids who don’t know what we’re missing, but it’s clearly the old folks who are missing the point.

Likewise, artists are taking on management and marketing roles for themselves. Again, most of us can’t create amazing music and manage ourselves to six-figure salaries at the same time. But we’re trying because we realize that the first step to “making it” is taking an entrepreneurial attitude and realizing we’re managing a small business. It’s exciting to see that realization dawning after decades of musicians pathetically waiting to be “discovered”, creating great music that dies in obscurity.

I’ll continue to keep my ear to the WeAreTheMusicMakers thread, and even try and get a conversation or two going myself.