Music in the Digital Age

Making sense of the commerce & culture of popular music

Andrew Dubber

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/dubber

This version was published on 2018-06-24

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This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.

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© 2011 - 2018 Andrew Dubber

Table of Contents

1. Introductory note

2. Understanding Music in the Digital Age

1. This is a conversation

2. Music

3. The Digital Age

4. Continue reading

Introductory note

Hi. Thanks for downloading this ebook. What you’re reading is a work in progress. It’s not a short book, or an unfinished book, but an incomplete one. Knowing that you already have this book is part of my motivation for making sure a) that it’s good, and b) that it gets finished. I’m aiming to complete it this year.

You’ll get regular (but not too frequent) updates as I finish major sections of the book, and you’ll receive those automatically and always for free. I look forward to any feedback, corrections or comments you may have that might help me improve it as well.

Thanks for reading - whether you paid or not (but special bonus thanks if you did) - and if you find it interesting or helpful, please feel free to share it with your friends.

This book is released under a Creative Commons licence. That means that you CANNOT pirate it. Not that you mustn’t pirate it - but that you won’t be able to. You can copy it, give it away, stick it up on torrent sites - whatever. It’s all fair game, and it’s not piracy. Go ahead - knock yourself out. You’d be doing me a huge favour.

The only way you could actually contravene copyright laws is if you tried to sell this yourself - as if it was your work. Don’t do that, okay? At least - not without us having a chat and coming to some agreement first.

Otherwise - this is your book. So do whatever you like with it. Read, share, enjoy.

Understanding Music in the Digital Age

This is a conversation

I’ve been trying to write this book for about four years.

When I ran New Music Strategies as a blog about independent music business in the digital age, I released an ebook that had a degree of success for which I’m very grateful. Not that I made any money from it, as I gave it away for free, but I did make some money because of it, which is a different thing, but equally appreciated. It also took me to some fantastic and interesting places around the world and allowed me to meet and work with some really talented and amazing people - several of whom are now the other members of the New Music Strategies team.

New Music Strategies is now something quite different. What that something is, is something that’s still up for grabs. We do things that we think are interesting about music in the digital age. Things that are about participation, about community, about music as a tool for social change and about more music, by more people in more places. But that’s a pretty broad brief.

Pretty much the only things we’re not interested in working on are “Can you help make my 13 year-old niece a famous popstar?” and “We’re setting up a website to make the music business more like the stock market.”

In both instances, we’re likely to not only say “no, that’s not what we do” but also “we wish you every failure in your endeavour” - for reasons that I hope will become clear as you read this book.

In my job as Reader in Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University, and running the MA in Music Industries, a lot of what I do involves stepping back from the debates about music online, the changes to the music business and the arguments about copyright and technology as it relates to music business, and just examine what it is that’s going on. How does it all work, and why do people say what they say about it? I’m interested in analysing and understanding the music industries and popular music culture in the digital age more than I am interested in telling people how to run their businesses.

That said, this book does have helpful marketing strategy ideas in it that will help you bring your music to a wider audience if that’s what you wish, and it will help you find ways of using the internet that are manageable and productive for independent music business. Most likely, that’s why you’ve downloaded it. But I hope some of the other things I have to say will be both interesting and useful as well. Or at least not boring.

But allow me the indulgence of going back over that earlier book and hopefully, in my long-winded and meandering manner, that will lead us to the point of this book.

At the beginning of 2007, I wrote an e-book called The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online. I hadn’t planned to write that book - it just came out of a conversation. I was at a seminar alongside some notable local music industry types. I’d been asked to say a few things about the internet for music business, and so I had prepared a few notes. The notes were on cards, and each card had a topic written down on it. My idea was that I would say a few simple things about each topic, and then move on to the next one. There were about twenty- five cards all up, and I had about an hour to talk. I made it through three of them.

In the question and answer session afterwards, some people asked me to briefly summarise the main point of the rest of the cards. At the time, I couldn’t really do that. I didn’t know how to condense those main issues into a single idea. To me, these were all separate issues that needed unpicking. Each one was an important idea that needed discussion, explanation and clarification.

So instead, I offered to write a blog post about each one, then post it up on my website. Over drinks, someone suggested that it would be handy if they were all bundled up together into a single work, and I thought that was a good idea too. So I went away and turned those cards into a series of related blog posts. I narrowed the topics down to a nice round twenty (thereby getting rid of some repetition and overlap), and then I combined those blog posts into a book. By the time I’d finished, it was the middle of 2007.

I put the PDF up on my website for free. It’s still there. Help yourself. It’s still good and relevant, and it has some useful stuff in there you may wish to implement.

You don’t have to give me your email address or jump through any hoops to get it. If you’re so inclined, you can also give it away for free from your own website or email it to everyone you’ve ever met. Knock yourself out. It’s a totally free e-book containing what was, at the time, a distillation of my thoughts about the online music environment.

My best guess is that the 96-page ‘20 Things’ e-book has now been shared, downloaded, given away and distributed in excess of 300,000 times. That number is conservative, and it’s possibly much higher. But if I’d asked for so much as an email address, that number would probably have had several fewer zeroes on the end of it. If I’d asked for money, I’d have been lucky to sell a single copy, and - if you ask me - rightly so. Apart from anything else, the whole thing was already available as individual blog posts on my website.

But what’s interesting to me is that since May 2007, every single one of the people who have invited me to all sorts of amazing places around the world, and who have found money for me to talk to their students, staff members, clients, friends and fellow musicians all have one thing in common: they’d read the book. I suspect there’s a lesson in that, but you can make your own conclusions.

The thing is… the internet moves really quickly, and that was over four years ago. When I wrote that ‘20 Things’ e-book, and put it online, I was aware that I’d probably have to constantly update it. I certainly wasn’t expecting this many people to have it or know about it, but I was pretty sure I’d need to revisit it pretty regularly. After all, new technologies come along all the time.

Unexpected and disruptive platforms mean that the main ways in which we consume music may be different at any moment; massively increased download speeds and storage space alter our online practices beyond recognition; new services come along that make the old way in which we did things - just last week, even - positively quaint. Hell, it even has references to MySpace in it. Who uses MySpace?

So, since around November 2007, I’ve been trying to work on a re-write of The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online. A second, revised and updated edition.

I’ve tried to get it done quickly, by just tweaking and modifying bits and pieces here and there, and I’ve also tried completely different approaches to the same material.

One version turned the ‘things’ into specific strategies - and attempted to give a step by step ‘how to’ guide to independent music online. While such a thing might sound incredibly helpful at face value, I realised almost immediately that such a book would be pretty much useless, for reasons that will become apparent as you read this.

But at any rate, each time I’ve come up with a new way of revising the book, I’ve made it about halfway through, and each time it hasn’t felt quite right - and so I stopped.

Of course, there are lots of simple little things that could be changed.

There are, to my knowledge, four typographical errors in the original ebook. Two of them, naturally, occur in the section where I talk about how important it is to be careful about spelling and professional presentation. I did receive a few emails about that.

Moreover, there’s no need to be talking about the Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen in this context these days. They’ve moved on and so have we.

But these are the sorts of little things that would need constant tweaking if I just changed and updated those bits. And so I’ve been stuck, and I’ve left it. And any time the e-book has come up in conversation, I’ve felt a weird mix of nostalgia, pride and embarrassment. I can’t help but be reminded that it’s not what I want it to be anymore - but nor did I know what I did want it to be.

I haven’t been promoting it, particularly - and nor have I been bringing it up in conversation recently - but it seems to have a life of its own, and people keep passing it around and linking to it, which is nice, of course. And while helpful volunteers have kindly been translating it into different languages, making free (and very professional) audiobooks out of it and circulating it to more and more people throughout the world - I’ve been becoming increasingly uneasy about the book’s continued relevance. It’s not wrong as such - it’s just not as current as it could be.

And one week in June 2009, I found myself in Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. I was doing what I like to call an ‘Unconsultancy’ - which is simply me turning up and being as helpful (and affordable) as I can be to as many independent music people as possible in a short space of time - as opposed to a traditional consultancy, which is a more intensive, single-client affair.

It’s an interesting approach, because it makes the sort of thing I do much more readily available to a much wider group of musicians and music businesses that could really do with a few pointers to get them ‘unstuck’ and move them forward on their path - but aren’t the kind of people who can generally hire consultants.

Anyway, over lunch, I was talking to one such person - who asked the question:

“What would be different about the 20 Things book if you were to write it now?”

And that’s a very different question to the one I’d been asking myself, which was: “How should I update the ebook?”

So I gave it some serious thought. And I came up with what I think is the best answer I could:

There wouldn’t be 20 Things. There’s really only ONE.

That is to say: “There is just ONE thing you must know about Music (and, come to think of it, everything else) in the Digital Age - and all else follows from that”.

And if you really understand that principle and apply it to what you do as an independent musician, or an entrepreneurial music business, then everything will follow from that. Every decision you make about the online environment, every digital marketing strategy you come up with, and everything you say, make and do on the internet will be guided by this single, simple idea.

It is the one thing that updates, encapsulates and contextualises everything I’ve written online at New Music Strategies - and it’s the one single realisation about the online environment that I believe solves ‘internet strategy’.

Best of all it’s something that can be summed up extremely simply - but it’s extraordinarily rich, nuanced and complex.

This is a conversation. It’s human beings, communicating with each other.

That’s it. The whole message in a nutshell: This is a conversation.

And by “this”, I mean the whole thing - the music, the medium, the marketing, the technology, the relationship with fans, the branding, the community music workshops, the recordings, the live concerts, the social media profile pages, the improvisations, the downloads, the t-shirts, the BitTorrents, the ringtones, the status updates, the copyright laws, the CDs, the vinyl, the day to day work of being a musician, the inspired musical expression.

It’s human beings doing what people do: Communicating. Expressing. Sharing. Relating.

Culture is simply whatever people say, make and do. Music is Culture.

Music in the Digital Age is the creation and propagation of culture within a particular media context. A contemporary media environment. I think it’s important to understand what that means, why it’s different and why that’s important before you can start implementing strategies - whether it’s to make a sustainable career as a virtuoso nose bagpipist, to help kids to play Baa Baa Black Sheep on the piano, to start an online service that lets people listen to their favourite music whenever and wherever they want to, or to inspire political change through song.

We need to think about what music is. We need to think about what it means to be in the Digital Age. We need to put those things together and explore the implications of that. Because the simple fact is that it IS the digital age.

If you’re just strumming a nylon string guitar in your bedroom, you are making music in the digital age, even if your computer isn’t switched on.

I believe that’s significant, and warrants investigation.

Music

In order to talk about Music in the Digital Age, it’s probably helpful to actually start from the beginning and consider what those two concepts mean (‘Music’ and ‘the Digital Age’), both separately, and when put together.

I have no intention of trying to ‘define’ music. You probably already know what it is when you encounter it. I could say something about it having melody, harmony and rhythm, but actually, a lot of my favourite music has none of those things. I could say ‘intentional sound’, but then that would deny the musicality of chance acoustic events. I could go into a bit of a riff about perception and the rather interesting truth that the human mind ‘creates’ sound after the fact of its reception by the ears as simply moving columns of air. You don’t ‘hear’ music as much as your brain actually constructs it from the input from your auditory sense. And yeah, that means if a tree falls in a forest, it makes vibrations in the air, but unless there’s an ear and a brain in the vicinity - no sound.

Hell, even a series of dots on a piece of paper can be called ‘music’.

Christopher Small (1998) suggests we drop the idea of ‘music’ as a noun, and rather discuss the notion of ‘musicking’ - a verb. Music’s not a thing we can hold in our hands, or own. We can own a piece of paper, or a plastic disc, but those things aren’t music - and nor is, ultimately, what comes out of the speakers or emanates from the piano when the dots on the page are played by a pianist. Music is an activity that people do - and often it’s something that people do together.

It’s a social and cultural activity, more than it is a commodity. And he kind of has a point. Far more music is made for social and cultural reasons than for reasons of commodification. We sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to each other. We sing songs to our children to help them learn. We engage in music for celebrations, religious ceremonies and rituals.

Definitions of music are problematic at best, and need to factor in aesthetic, social, artistic, communicative, anthropological, philosophical and physical understandings of the phenomenon. Precise definitions of music are not the point when we’re trying to deal with the first principles that are important to us here. But we do need to know what it is we’re talking about when we discuss this stuff.

Your music is commercial

For the sake of simplicity, and because it’s the bit you’re no doubt most interested in, I’m going to be entirely culturally reductive here and simply talk about what’s confusingly known as Popular Music. The term Popular Music does not mean ‘music that is popular’ or even ‘pop music’, but instead refers to those types of music that are created, performed or produced in relation to the kinds of cultural exchange that are, in essence, commercial.

I know, I know - the term ‘commercial’ has all sorts of negative connotations. I’m not talking about the ‘commercialisation’ of independent, folk or other musical forms, but about the simple fact that pretty much all music we listen to is inextricably linked with commerce. As Simon Frith (1988) points out, without Music Business, no music.

“The industrialization of music cannot be understood as something which happens to music, since it describes a process in which music itself is made - a process, that is, which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical and musical arguments.”

Of course, you’re thinking ‘but what about people who just learn an instrument for fun, and only play for their friends?’ - to which the answer is that the music that they play - its form, structure and derivations - all stems from a kind of music that was designed to be played and performed in a commercial setting. I include classical music and jazz in this context. Most folk music too (I say most, because many folk musics are purely cultural and communicative expressions that exist to perform social functions independent of a performer/audience relationship where value is being exchanged).

There’s this widely held idea that music is this pure and natural expression that happens creatively and artistically among human beings, and then commerce comes along and corrupts it all. I say that’s obvious nonsense. Music and Commerce aren’t individual concepts or entities that exist ‘over there’, separate from People. Music and Commerce are both Things That People Do.

Sure, some music is ruined by attempts to reshape it for greater commercial acceptance, but in fact the more fundamental truth is without commerce, no music. If there were not concerts, records, marketing, patronage, equipment sellers, promoters, retailers, managers, professional teachers, venues, publishers and music press, there would pretty much be no music as we know it. At its simplest level, who’s going to form a band if we have no cultural reference for what a band is and what it’s for? Barring those musics that exist purely for tribal and community social function - and even these are dwindling as ‘World Music’ is captured and commodified for a willing commercial marketplace - music and commerce are inextricably linked.

So why, if these things are simply part of the same phenomenon, do we have this ongoing tension between the art of music and the commerce of music? Because clearly, there is a tension. The simplest way to explain it away is that people are a problem. Musicians are selfish and precious. Record companies are greedy and corrupt. Audiences are thieves. Promoters are crooks. Publishers are parasites. Retailers are unimaginative. The Music Press either regurgitates PR bollocks or has completely disappeared up its own arse.

We often rely on these simplifications and stereotypes to make sense of the fact that being in music (and, therefore, in the music business) is hard. Harder than it probably should be.

Your music is media

Instead of considering musicians as gifted and talented artistes (or self-obsessed primadonnas), and the music business people they have to contend with leeches (or tragically inept but lovable enthusiasts), I prefer to consider music and its business as Media forms.

Let me explain.

We think we understand media. We are completely immersed in it and it inscribes our daily lives. We have a fair idea of how newspapers and magazines work. We get that television operates in a certain way, and that radio is kind of similar. Film we have a pretty good sense of too. These things are clearly media. But we struggle to think of popular music, as I’ve described it above, as being part of that same media family.

But in fact, all popular music is mediated. And in fact, I’d go a step further - I’d say that all popular music is a process of mediation of what Small calls ‘Musicking’. Whether we have a CD, a DVD, a download, a stadium concert ticket, a magazine article, or front row seats at a small venue - there is a process of mediation at work.

Here’s one way to think about it:

Consider a TV Show. Let’s take the Sopranos as a case in point. If we think about it, we can see pretty clearly how a programme like that comes to be. Someone comes up with it. Someone writes it. Some people act in it, and other people direct it. Someone edits it and someone else distributes it. Somebody promotes it to the correct audience. It gets broadcast, and some people consume it by way of an electronic appliance in their home. This is, of course, a complete oversimplification, but in a nutshell, that’s the chain of events.

Even more simply put, I’d break that down into some main stages: there’s a Composition step, a Performance step, a Production step, a Distribution step, a Promotional step and a Consumption step. Map a Coldplay album onto that same chain, and you can begin to see why I think of popular music as media. But you see, the thing with media is that each of those steps is aware of, and takes into consideration the needs and parameters of each of the other steps in the chain. The writer of the Sopranos is no more going to write a 25-minute third act than the director is going to shoot on 70mm IMAX film, or than a publicist is going to target it at pre-teens. The whole Sopranos phenomenon, as a TV show, is made up of the sum of its parts, it fits into generally understood categories and fulfills certain technical and structural criteria so that it works as a media artefact.

This may be a controversial thing to say, but if you have ideas to engage in your bit of the music media chain that resolutely ignores all of the other bits, then you’re going to encounter tensions. These tensions might come when a recording artist wants to make a five-album song cycle as a first release, or when a publicist wants to get a political punk band to pose for a Smash Hits! magazine foldout. In other words, misunderstanding the cultural and commercial parameters of any of the other parts of the chain causes the problems. Thinking of music as the art (or the ‘product’ to be exploited), and commerce as the necessary evil (or the whole point of the exercise) automatically starts things off on the wrong foot.

But when you think of Popular Music Media as a single phenomenon, you can start to arrange the parts in a holistic and intelligent way, in which all of the parts are compatible, and can both understand and deal with all the other pieces of that same thing.

Perhaps most importantly, media tends to factor its audience into the design, all along the chain. Of course, there are television programmes that are made simply to amuse or challenge the writers of the show, and a group of people who happen to think along those same lines may discover and appreciate them, and form its small audience. There are television programmes that are completely constructed to appeal to as many lowest common denominator viewers as they can find. And there are television programmes that respect and challenge an intelligent audience, but completely understand the parameters of the media business and consumer relationship they form part of.

I think there are helpful parallels that illuminate the condition of popular music in there. Chances are, what you personally happen to do in all this falls somewhere in the Composition, Performance, Production, Distribution, Promotional and Consumption parts of the media equation. You may even take care of a few or even all of those bits yourself. Personally, I’m down here at the end of the chain, listening to, collecting and loving the music. But although you have to think about us, you also have to think about the whole media ecology you’re part of.

So, when I talk about Music Online, that’s what I mean by the Music bit.

The Digital Age

We are living in what I would call the fifth media age (and just to underline how important I think that is, let’s capitalise it: ‘The Fifth Media Age’).

In order to understand what I mean by The Fifth Media Age - and why that’s significant to someone who just wants to make a living playing music and is reading this book for clues - let me take you through the five ages so you can step back for a minute and see what’s really going on.

For this, I take a leaf out of the work of Herbert Marshall McLuhan. In his books – in particular, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) – McLuhan talks about different periods of history as they relate to the primary media forms that characterise them. He speaks about these as if they are evolutionary phases: for instance, he talks about the age of the printing press as being a specific period of humankind’s development – “Typographic Man”.

McLuhan died in 1980. He didn’t, as some people suggest, “predict the Internet”. However, one of the things he did do was to provide a useful framework for thinking about ways in which our media environment changes the way that we think and also has a profound impact upon the ways in which we communicate and express ourselves.

The Five Ages of Media

The central premise of this is that media are environments. That is, we don’t consume media - we inhabit them. That sounds a little needlessly obtuse, but it’s really quite simple: throughout history, we have lived in a world saturated by one media form or another, and that changes over time. And by ‘media form’ I mean ‘the main way in which we take in our information’.

Our brains get information about the world through our senses. Our senses are connected to whatever the main media happen to be at the time. And when those media change, we change. And like a frog slowly boiling, we generally don’t realise it’s happening to us while it’s happening.

We have been through five main ages of media, each with its own unique characteristics. As we move from one age to another, the media environment alters, and the organism of our brain has to adapt to its new environment. It evolves. Not metaphorically - it actually changes. Our wiring is different in response to the different technological context we find ourselves in.

This isn’t complex, but it is important - in particular when it comes to everything I have to say about music and the Internet… but also in general. It affects culture, society, law, politics, art, commerce and our own fragile psychologies.

I’ll take you through it.

1) The Oral Age

Human beings are hardwired for narrative. Always have been. As soon as we figured out how to make words, we’ve been telling each other stories - and some of our most compelling and enduring myths come to us from the Oral age.

The medium was speech. It was the campfire storytale. The oratory of Homer. The story was present before us, and we could interrogate it as it played out.

And in the oral age, the main way in which music happened was communally. As part of celebration or mourning, gathering or ritual. In this context, music’s an extension of speech. In many oral societies, there are actually no musicians, because music is just something everyone does. It’s not a profession.

Now, that’s not universally true for all cultures, of course, and over time, there are some oral cultures that turn music making into something else. They are the troubadours and buskers. They show up and they entertain with songs and stories from their travels - and they are rewarded for their craft.

The oral age pretty much starts at the dawn of human civilisation, and unless you want to make the case for a gestural age before it (grunting and pointing to communicate), it marks the first media age. The first period through which human beings had a means by which they tended to communicate, and take in information and form an understanding of the world in which they lived.

The Oral Age lasted, to make it a crudely round figure, about 10,000 years.

2) The Scribal Age

And then we invent writing. Writing’s great. We can now take those stories, and we can preserve them. No longer do they have to be passed down from generation to generation by painstaking repetition and rote learning. Now they can be captured in a permanent form and recalled at will - brought back to life from the page.

Writing was more complicated than mere speech though. For a start, it required the skill of literacy, and that wasn’t evenly distributed for the most part. Besides, there were very few texts.

In order for a copy of a text to be made, what would ordinarily happen is that some scribes and monks from my monastery would come and visit your monastery in a different part of the world. It would take them months to travel there, they would copy a book by hand - character by character, line by line - and then they’d make the journey back to my monastery where it would sit in my library, where only my monks were allowed to read it. And only the important ones at that.

Sadly, when texts are so precious and rare, sometimes great calamities can befall them. Like the fire that wiped out the Alexandrian Library, taking hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable scrolls containing a large chunk of all recorded human knowledge with it.

But writing allowed for stories to be captured, studied and repeated faithfully in one telling to the next. The guy with the literacy could stand up the front and read in sermons to a congregation of illiterate and accepting attendees. After all, you can’t question a text. It says what it says.

And there were, of course, musicians who not only possessed this skill of literacy, but were able to compose and create works by making marks on paper. And so the profession of composer emerges - and before long a man named Bach is making copies of his works, handing them out to his assembled team of musicians, and they would perform for the entertainment and dancing of the guests at the party of Mr Bach’s rich patron.

Roughly speaking again, the Scribal Age lasted around 1,500 years - depending on which continent you happen to live.

3) The Print Age

So, along comes this Gutenberg guy and makes a machine that uses the concept of movable type (hundreds of years after the Chinese first think of it, as it happens) and before long, he’s mass-producing books.

This turns out to be the biggest revolution in human history since the development of writing. Because not only can speech be captured in text on a page, it’s now almost a trivial exercise to make and distribute multiple copies of that knowledge.

Now everyone can have their own Bible. Everyone can come to have a personal relationship with their saviour - or print and distribute leaflets suggesting that perhaps they don’t need one… or that the saving that needs doing is one of political reform, or an intellectual and cultural enlightenment project.

At any rate - the message is now in everyone’s hands. Literacy spreads like wildfire. Before long, people are nailing their edicts to church doors, or sitting in private taking in information at their own pace - the words going into their brains like beads on a string.

Our brains change radically. We develop an unprecedented sense of the individual. We discover sequential logic and cross-referencing. And with mechanical reproduction, we invent the industrial age.

Music, as a business, of course, flourishes - and before long there is a real industry. The industry is called music publishing - and the main way in which money is made from music is through the creation, distribution and retail of dots on pages. People can go into a shop, buy a famous song, take it home, and play it badly on the piano in the parlour.

The Print Age lasted a good 500 years. You’ll notice that number keeps getting smaller.

4) The Electric Age

Then suddenly - Bam! Marconi, Edison, Franklin, Faraday, Volta, Tesla, Morse and Bell change the world again with their magnets and sparks and whatnot.

Not only can culture be mass-produced, it can now be captured as audio or images - and mass broadcast. It’s one thing to read a book that someone else is also reading and be able to have a conversation about it. It’s something quite different again to simultaneously witness man setting foot on the moon along with millions of other people all across the globe.

The radical shift in media environment that the Electric Age brings about is what exercises McLuhan the most. The effect of that media shift on our minds is something that he is now perhaps best known for: “The Global Village” - which is not, as you might think, some sort of caring, sharing ‘hands across the water’ thing (villages can be quite problematic and claustrophobic collections of people).

At any rate, the Electric Age completely transforms our media environment again. The main way in which our brains take in information about the world in which we live and how we can make sense of it is fundamentally altered.

And for music - with electricity, of course, comes recording. Now you can not only have a famous song in your living room on a piece of paper - you can have an idealised performance of that song, by an international artist… and unlike the piano in your parlour, it will sound the same every single time you play it.

Of course, this was a massive challenge to the music industry that came before it. The sheet music publishers WERE the music industry - and these recording companies threatened their livelihoods. Besides, how were local musicians going to make any money in concert halls if a single artist in another country could record one performance of a song and sell it all over the world?

And the answer is - pretty much everyone had to adapt. The old sheet music industry fought the recorded music industry tooth and nail. Hell, the recorded music industry even fought radio. Who was going to buy records if people could hear them for nothing on the wireless?

But just as the previous models of music business had survived in some marginalised form from one age to the next, it’s still possible to buy sheet music today - and it’s still possible to make money making and selling it. It’s just not the main way that happens anymore.

The Electric Age is characterised by TV shows, radio airplay, records, tapes, CDs, retail stores with display shelves, top 40 charts, superstars, the dream of being signed to a major label and the album and single as the main ways in which music is produced and consumed.

The Electric Age lasted for about 100 years. It’s over. We think it’s still the main thing, but it’s not. We’re in a new age now.

5) The Digital Age

We’re in the Digital Age now. This is an epochal change, just as the other ages represented fundamental differences in our media environment and - more importantly - who we were as human beings.

We can’t see how different it is yet, because of what McLuhan called the ‘Rear View Mirror’ effect. We always look at our media environment in reverse - and certainly in the early days. We see where we’ve come from - and not where we’re going, or even where we are.

The content of any new medium is its predecessor. We might think we’re watching TV online, listening to Internet radio or reading newspapers on the web. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re on the Internet and that’s different. More on this soon.

A shifting of ratios

You could fill another book - even a whole shelf (or e-book reader) full of them - with all that’s different about the media environment in the digital age. It so profoundly and radically impacts upon everything we do that it’s once again changing our brains.

The ways in which we take in information and how we make sense of the world around us is increasingly digital, rather than broadcast or print. It’s quite literally reshaping us and rewiring our brains.

From mobile phones to laptops, sat navs to digital cameras, YouTube to Skype, iPods to USB keys - what we surround ourselves with - the media environment we’re immersed in - has fundamentally changed.

And while the record industry, the film industry and the publishing industry remind us that we are consumers and they are the content providers - we have the opportunity to remember that it wasn’t always this way, and it needn’t be a characteristic of the Digital Age. In fact, it probably can’t be.

Like sheet music when recordings came along - recordings are now becoming marginalised. CD sales are not declining because of piracy, but because CDs are the last hurrah of the electric age.

But don’t forget: you can still walk into a shop and buy sheet music - it’s just not the main way in which music is produced and consumed anymore. This is a shifting of ratios, not a ‘death of’ anything. Not even CDs.

I saw data last week that showed that the record industry now represents the economic value of just less than a third of the music industry overall. And that’s the countable and counted music industry, which is far from the full picture.

But we have a choice. Despite the fact that it seems I’m saying that technology makes us what we are - in fact, if we understand the process, we can choose the adaptations that we make, rather than simply have them happen to us. This is not an entirely deterministic process.

That’s a much longer discussion. The point I’m trying to make here is that digital is different. It’s as revolutionary and game changing as writing, print, or the discovery of electricity.

The Internet is not a marketing platform for bands and nor is it merely a marketplace for content. It’s the current media environment.

The way to make meaningful musical content in the 21st century is not simply to make records and then point the internet at them - any more than you would put on a play in a theatre, point cameras at it, and call it a TV show.

Of course, people still want recordings of music. People still want broadcasting. People still want sheet music. It’s just not the main way in which music is produced and consumed anymore - and increasingly so. Make an album, by all means - but do consider the fact that you’re deciding to operate in an increasingly shallow end of the pool, economically - and even culturally - speaking.

We’ve been in the digital age for about 20 years. Our media ages are getting shorter. History’s speeding up. So whatever it is you’re going to do to adapt to the Digital Age - do it now.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating - the shift to the online environment is not a shift in format. This is not like the change between vinyl and CD. It’s more like the shift from printed sheet music to recordings and broadcasting. This is a complete transformation of the media environment, and of the ways in which people behave, adapt and operate in that media environment.

And this new media environment is not set up in a broadcast, mass production paradigm. This is not a one-to-many medium, like radio, television, newspapers and so-called ‘traditional’ music distribution.

An evolutionary process

Our brains are evolving again. As our new environment envelops us, we become involved in the biggest conversation our world has ever known. That’s different and it radically changes who we are, and what we say, make and do.

There are only two types of content of any value online: conversation, and the things about which the conversation takes place.

Stop making Electric Age media - start doing Digital Age stuff. Stop making records, start having conversations.

I’m convinced that we’re living in a Digital Age, in the same way we were living in an Electric Age, and before that, in a Print Age. We were once in a Scribal Age, and before that - an Oral Age. I believe that this dominant form of communication absolutely shapes the way in which we understand the world around us.

I know that we are not uniformly living in this Digital Age, and that there are economic and social barriers to it. I’m also aware that the benefits of that age are not evenly distributed. However, digital technology - both online and off - are increasingly the dominant modes of communication.

Dominant modes of communication shape the ways in which we think. In a literate society, we read books. We learn to apprehend the world in a linear, logical and sequential fashion. Through the printed alphabetic language, we take in information one word at a time, like beads on a string - rather than in the surrounding all-at-once fashion that oral cultures are immersed in.

The way in which we get information, culture and media completely transforms the way in which we experience the world. Media are, as McLuhan put it, extensions of the senses. The fact that online (digital) media are different from electric (analogue) media doesn’t just change those media artefacts - it changes us.

Because we only experience the world through the information that comes in through our senses, the input to those senses - visual, sonic, etc. - completely inscribe our world. Changing the nature of those inputs changes the nature of our experience, and thereby our selves.

And it’s for that reason that the technological shift encountered by the music industry is significant. Changes to our media environment don’t just change the economic, legal, social and consumption aspects of our lives. They change us.

But as McLuhan pointed out, we have difficulty seeing our current environment for what it is. In fact, we seem to always act as if we’re living in the previous media environment (seeing the world through a ‘rear-view mirror’) - and this causes problems. By acting as if we should conform to the rules of the electric, broadcast, mass-production, analogue media world - even in the face of radical technological and environmental transformation - we fool ourselves into thinking the world should be other than it so plainly is. And this causes tension, lawsuits and confusion.

To me, the digital world is the online world. It has characteristics that I’ll explore in more depth as we go along. Some of these processes are clear and obvious, some are obscured and unexpected. But all of them shape the new media environment, and challenge our ability to adapt and evolve.

By understanding these shifts and accepting them for what they are, we are offered new opportunities to specialise and thrive, rather than pretend that the world continues to be, or should act as if it still is the way it was in the previous media environment.

So, when I say ‘Online’, I mean connected, digital, discrete, abstractly mathematical (rather than concretely physical) and environmentally transformative. Where ‘music’ is media, ‘online music’ suggests a profound shift in terms of what music is, how it is composed, performed, produced, distributed, promoted and consumed.

I realise that this seems all very theoretical and abstract, but by following this much of the argument, you can begin to see how and where very practical and pragmatic new strategies can be developed and deployed to take advantage of the characteristics of this new environment. And that’s what we’re working towards here.

Continue reading

Thanks for reading these sample chapters of Music in the Digital Age. I hope you found them interesting and helpful. And I hope you’ll feel free to send this PDF to as many people as you think might find it useful.

There’s a lot more to this, of course - and you can read the whole book at http://leanpub.com/dubber

The book is available as a “Pay What You Think It’s Worth” download.

You can get the book for nothing if you wish, just by typing $0.00 in the box when you purchase it. Be my guest. Please don’t feel that you have to wait for payday to go and download it. You can have it right now. You can always come back and pay something later if you’d like to. Lots of people do that.

But if you can pay a little something, that would be hugely appreciated. I’ve recommended $5 as a standard price. About 60-70% of people pay that. Some choose to pay more. Somewhere around 20% of the people who do pay, choose to pay $10. Some pay even more that. A few pay a bit less than $5, which is fine of course. But it’s entirely up to you. Whatever you think it’s worth.

And naturally, it’s available in Kindle and Apple iBooks format as well as a PDF. Whatever works best for you.

Thanks again for checking this out - and I’d love to hear what you think. I’m @dubber on Twitter.