It amazes me to think that prior to the late 19th century every performance of every piece of music anyone had ever heard was not only live but purely acoustic, every sound heard originating from the actual beat of the drum, the strike on the string, the unamplified voice of a singer. In this perspective it becomes more obvious that things like orchestras and choirs were as much an invention of the necessity of acoustics (making a noise loud enough to reach the back seats of the house, in a nutshell) as to answer the requirements of the composer’s art. Amplification technology developed alongside recording - the first loudspeaker patent was received by German Ernst Siemens in 1877, the same year Edison made his tin cylinder recording.
We have never lost the taste for making live music, even just for our own pleasure (it’s interesting that karaoke, which came into American culture looking very much like the sort of wacky foreign fad that vanishes as quickly as it erupted, instead has become very firmly ensconced in our recreational spectrum). Still, when you consider a world where every time you heard music you know it was being created, performed, somewhere nearby... The changes that occurred over just a half dozen decades strike me as astonishing. I check in on the world I live in once again, real time, I’m here writing this to you right now on the computer, I open my computer’s digital jukebox, search “Flambards,” and just like that I’m hearing... some trace, some strange distant reversioning of a performance that certainly happened, some person whistled that theme, somebody played those horns back in 1978 or thereabouts (if it were a more recent recording I’d have more doubts on that score, but we’ll get back to the whole issue of synthesizing later). Getting to it took all of about 15 seconds: the tune was long done playing before I finished telling you about it. Twenty-seven years from that original performance: ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the time machine, now available at your local Mediocre Buy Megastore. From a purely live and acoustic world, to this, less than 130 years.
Information is evolving on all levels and maybe it’s too convenient to draw a couple of imaginary endpoints and say “wow!” From daguerreotype to digital cameras: one hundred and sixty six years. Wow, man, did I just blow your mind? But music is an interesting angle to look at it all from, something so constant in society and so rooted in the experiences of everyday life. It also has a way of showing up at the center of social transformations around information, as recent stages of information’s evolution are demonstrating once again. I also think music is providing a particularly clear look at how the inertial drag of industries built on obsolete technologies is obstructing the revolutions of digitization and networking from experiencing their true power.
Music is appearing at the center of a new realm of dispute over intellectual property. Since tape recording technology entered consumer price ranges, transgression of the theoretical illegality of duplicating copyrighted music has occurred so widely that it scarcely reads as illicit in the minds of most. The mix tape, the cassette recording of the older sibling's favorite LP, the top forties compilation recorded from the radio, these artifacts form a significant part of the whole frame of my history with recorded music. All illegal, unauthorized duplication and distribution, that it is noncommercial is irrelevant. “Home taping is killing music,” warned a British recording industry trade group, and around the world the industry applied legal leverage to get a piece of blank media business in compensation for the trade home taping was allegedly costing them. But in daily life making cassette recordings from LPs, other cassettes, broadcasts and CDs is completely decriminalized. There is no enforcement whatsoever. The technology was ubiquitous and impossible to make illegal, the crime victimless (in the eyes of most who had trouble seeing bloated and corrupt corporations as victims) and untraceable. The industry and law enforcement pursued professional bootleggers.
This situation changed radically in July of 2003 when another recording industry trade group, the RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) announced its plans to issue subpoenas against individuals trading copyrighted digital music files online. Clearly the industry believes the shift that has occurred in recording and duplication technology is significant. The original Napster, that shining exemplar of the sort of hot air that was inflating the fabled dot-com bubble, demonstrated to the mass public what had transpired technologically in the transmission of information. And what it meant: free songs! Certainly to the industry this is the only real bottom line about file sharing: above a certain threshold of technology it costs as good as nothing to exchange digital music. Napster did its business stupidly and was matter-of-factly clubbed to death by lawyers. But the genie is out of the bottle. The attempt to legally shut down Kazaa is still not resolved. The most direct descendent of Napster has managed, by carefully framing its service and agreements, to hold off being held legally responsible for the fact that virtually every one of its members subscribes to the service to access illicit duplications of copyrighted material. Whatever Kazaa’s fate, there will be no such easy resolution of the basic issue of file sharing. Transacting digital information on demand is all the internet is about. It is very difficult to muzzle the basic technology without violating free expression, and though some very ominous legislation has been floated in recent years this basic bulwark has held.
Seriously, we’re talking about the Hit Parade here, the Bandstand, the American Top Forty. Rock Around the Clock, Brittney Spears. Ninety-eight degrees (private joke, only, ahem, Patrons will get). Does this not seem a little light fare to be seeing legislation suggested that would require some sort of industry-government approved copyright violation filter on just about any digital information device (google hollings copyright legislation if you really want to know)? We are talking about the government taking a very active role in the media through which we practice free expression, with private industry being given an unprecedented level of preference and control. Now the movie industry is muscling it’s way to center stage in the battle over the wicked, wicked file traders, but the music business is managing to keep its struggles to nail jello to the wall in the news. One of the main legislative successes of the media, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, has managed to add a strange and telling new restriction to copyright law: it is now potentially illegal for the consumer of a piece of information to access that information in a manner contrary to the dictates of the copyright owner, regardless of whether they do anything illegal with the information they access. Particularly the legislation is meant to curb the creation and proliferation of tools that allow consumers to eliminate anti-copying technologies that the industry might place on their product to try to curb the amateur mass-production of their product. But see what the central issue is: control.
A serious dispute over the control of information should receive the close attention of anyone conversant with the history of societies.
Final chapter coming up in April: where we’re at and where we might go. The current state of affairs in making, recording, duplicating and exchanging music, the barriers of commerce and where their weakest links lurk, looking one more time to music to save culture and making all the legal guff above irrelevant in one fell swoop. Holy heck, keep reading!
this is what is up with this.
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