Apr 07
9
Last year, on FirstMonday, I wrote:
“Many bands and artists take
advantage of the net by using it to advertise their performances, at
which they sell their CDs. This can be very effective and the major
record companies are becoming less relevant to artists. However,
despite the apparent success of aggregators like iTunes, few
independent artists appear to be profiting from commercial downloads
and a business model based solely on pay-for-downloads is very
difficult to implement successfully.”
Lately, similar notions have been been discussed by bloggers, including Chris Anderson of the Long Tail, in his Give away the music and sell the show
post. There is also recognition of the need for sustainable business
models for online music in the blogsphere. Much of this discussion is
focused on economic matters and from the perspective of the music
consumer. This is, of course, legitimate, but implications for musicians
and music producers and aesthetic considerations are rarely discussed.
This is a significant omission. Music is an art form.
The notion that the best way for musicians to use the net is to use
their online presence to promote their performances is at odds with the
general trend towards digitisation and virtualisation. It is also not
good for many musicians and music producers. While some musicians are
great performers and while acknowledging the powerful impact of well
executed theatrical and improvisational performances, it should also be
understood that the excessive dependence on performance and its
analogues represents a failure of the online music market and the
aesthetic impoverishment of music generally.
Let me illustrate this with some personal history. In 1980, when my New Wave band Smig Zee
broke up, I purchased a TASCAM Portastudio, a Korg MS 20 Synthesiser and
embarked on an amateur career as a home recording artist. I was not a
natural performer and was glad to be able to simultaneously produce
music and and pursue a career in the Public Service, as well as an
interest in writing. I haven't performed since 1980 and if I had
continued performing and pursued a professional career in music I would
probably be as deaf as Pete Townsend and would certainly not have
accumulated a nice superannuation fund. I deliberately mention
superannuation to prick the romantic bubble that surrounds the meme of
rock and roll performance and to note that few professional musicians,
even successful ones, are adequately provisioned for old age and
retirement.
Gigging can be very hard on musicians, even those that who are good at
it and enjoy it. To musicians like myself, who are primarily interested
in composition and production, there is nothing more boring and
aesthetically arid that having to play the same songs over and over
again. There are also opportunity costs, time spent performing reduces
time spent composing and producing music.
As a home recording artist I was fortunate enough to participate in the
electronic music boom of the 1990s and had techno music released by
Volition Records and other labels as Alien Headspace and ambient music
released by Silent Recordings as the Trancendental Anarchists. I am
still producing music under these names and also electro-pop, by
FutureRetro and publishing this on the net via Qualia Recordings,
a virtual record company formed with my musical collaborators, Ross
Goddard and Mark Van Veen. To end this excursion into personal history,
I note that this approach is not at all unusual. There are millions of
amateur musicians who are producing music in home recording studios and
releasing it on the net and who do not perform.
Another salient point is that there are genres of music that are
entirely unsuitable for performance. If you've ever seen a techno band
attempt to simulate performance of their programmed productions, you
know what I mean. DJs largely replaced performers of techno and dance
music at dance parties and raves. Ambient music is so internal and
anti-dramatic, that ambient music producers hardly ever attempt to
perform it.
Despite the magnitude and significance of these trends towards the
democratisation and virtualisation of music production, the music
performance meme persists. Perhaps the most absurd recent manifestation
of this is the simulated performance of a number of bands in Second Life.
A more common manifestation is the simulation of performance in music
videos. This is often extremely ritualised. Singers lip-sync in front
of guitarists playing unplugged instruments, while the drummer hits a
lone snare drum. This represents a singular lack of imagination and a
depressing aesthetic failure. Music videos which attempt to augment the
music with narrative or abstract visuals, do exist, but are vastly
outnumbered by those that pay obeisance to the empty ritual of
simulated performance. A brilliant example of a lateral music video
which abandons the ritual of simulated performance is the Free Hugs video by the Sick Puppies. This was wildly successful and won a YouTube award.
There are also multitudes of bands and musicians who, while composing
and producing their music in studios, feel they have to perform to
promote it and produce income. In many cases, this is essentially the
live simulation of performance, where the musicians attempt to
replicate the studio production and arrangement of their music in a
live performance. They give themselves little or no latitude to depart
from the recorded version in the performance which is consequently
devoid of the immediacy and improvisation which characterises real
performance.
So what is going on here? Is this monumental failure of imagination,
simply a cheap and nasty way of using visual media and live performance
to a advertise digital music or is something more profound involved?
There does appear to be a popular prejudice against programmed and
studio production in favour of live performance. This involves the
notion that anyone can produce music in a studio, but only “real
musicians” can pull off live performance. The illegitimacy of this
prejudice is exposed if one attempts to apply it to cinema, the
canonical virtual art form. I doubt that anyone would seriously suggest
that the best way to promote movies is with theatrical performances.
Nor is the notion, that theatrical actors, directors and producers are
necessarily superior to their cinematic equivalents, seriously
supported. The movie and TV industries eclipsed theatre long ago.
This anomaly has puzzled me for some time. A possible explanation comes
from cognitive anthropologist, Steven Mithen, in his recent book, The Singing Neanderthals.
This excellent text examines the evolutionary origins of music and
posits the theory that one of the major evolutionary functions of music
is the promotion of social cohesion in groups of hominids and humans.
This makes a great deal of sense when one considers the history of
music making. Tribal societies clearly use musical performance, dance
and ritual to cement and enhance social cohesion. More recently, before
the development of recording technologies, the gathering of family and
friends around the piano for singalongs can also be seen as promoting
social cohesion. The emergence of concerts represents a move from group
music making to the group achieving cohesion, through the passive
reception of music performed by professional musicians.
Significantly, the same effect is achieved in raves and dance parties
without the live performance of music. It seems that the most important
factor is that the group is listening to the same music, preferably at the same
time.
If this theory is accepted then the social fragmentation inherent in
the virtualisation of music can explain the atavistic yearning for the
simulation of performance. It may also explain the apparent success of
social networking approaches to online music represented by such sites
as MySpace and LastFM.
As the emergent online music industry churns through business models it
seems that a number of factors are involved in determining what may be
viable and sustainable. I intend to write about other factors such as
the adequate compensation of artists and the pernicious and outmoded
nature of the Star Syndrome in subsequent parts of this series.
Meanwhile I hope I have elevated aesthetic considerations related to
the tension between the virtualisation of music and the traditional
role of performance, in the minds of those interested in development of
a market for audio/visual content of quality. There is the potential
for the transcendent combination of music and visuals, which currently
appears to be limited by an unthinking and aesthetically arid
obeisance to the ritual of performance.