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"No media at all."

  
 
I, Libertine
11:33 / 29.08.02
And Mr. Bernoff of Forrester Research said the era of discs of any kind, whether they are five-inch or one-inch, may be coming to a close.

"Maybe the time for physical media is past," he said. "The problem is not with the CD, but with anything that is physical."

The long-term future of music distribution, Mr. Bernoff said, is in packets of notes, rhythms and lyrics winding through the air to be captured and played on wireless devices. "The format of the future," he said, "is no media at all."


Full text here: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/29/technology/circuits/29RECO.html

The article concerns the looming introduction of the DataPlay disc, basically a miniature CD that is copy protected and costs a few dollars more than the (already outrageously overpriced) CD. Record companies want more money--no surprise--but it seems the problem is not that they put all their advertising millions into crappy disposable music, but rather the annoying ability of consumers to copy CDs. This whole angle vexes me terribly.

But the angle that vexes me more is the above-quoted statement: "The format of the future is no media at all." [Granted, it's an ignorant thesis because if music were beamed straight from the company to your brain then the media would be "BrainPlay" and not "nothing at all." But let's put that aside.]

Monopoly is not enough. The record exec's wet dream is a world where you get nothing (not a "physical" nothing, like MacDonald's, but an "actual" nothing, a void) and they get your money. Platonic ideal of capitalism.

Of course, "More" is shorthand for "Capitalism," but I'm terribly aggravated these days. The "You-can't-stop-us-we'll-do-what-we-want" attitude of the Bush administration, corporations, et al. is really yanking my chain. DataPlay needs to go down in the same flames that consumed the BetaMax.

Ugh...I'm not making much of a cohesive statement here. Just hoping some kind of discussion can arise from the rant that is this post.

[Couldn't decide btwn. Music, Head Shop, etc. so I just dropped this one here.]
 
 
Jack Fear
11:48 / 29.08.02
Sounds like the "future of music" is a lot like the past--specifically the era before recording technologies, when the only way to experience music was performance.

The phrase "packets of notes, rhythms and lyrics winding through the air" immediately made me think of music played live--captured by a wireless device, the ear, with no recording but that in the memory: effectively, a one-time stream rather than a download. And if you wanted to hear it again, you had to pay the piper another groat.

The entire essence of music, in the pre-recording era, was impermanence--except for sheet music, which is a whole other issue and rather interesting: in the early days of mass media (i.e., the print era before the advent of recording), sheet music sales were huge business. A song could be measured a "million-seller" by how many copies of the paper music were sold.

With the advent of recording technology, a huge shift occurred: sheet music sales plummeted, sales of musical instruments declined (was a time when nearly every house had a piano), and music literacy--the ability to translate those little black squiggles on stave paper into sounds on an instrument--became something of an esoteric skill, even among professional musicians.

Before Edison's cylinders, the concept of "learning music by ear" was largely meaningless.

Just thinking aloud, here: what are the larger societal implications of this new mediumless paradigm?
 
  
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