So that’s what they mean separately. What do they mean when you say them together?
You’ll remember that when I say ‘music’, I am not only talking about recordings of music. I’m talking about the whole medium of popular music and all of the stages of its production, distribution, promotion and consumption. Likewise, you’ll recall that when I say Online, I’m not just talking about web pages. I’m talking about the whole ecology of the online environment. The electricity into which we can plug so many internet appliances.
So having come up with something of a working definition of what I mean when I say ‘online’ and what I mean when I say ‘music’ it will hopefully be instructive to look at the two of them as a single idea: Music Online – or, to put a slightly different flavour to it, Online Music. Because the order in which you say those words gives a subtle shift to what it can mean, what you can do with that meaning conceptually, and therefore what you do as a result.
‘Music Online’ is music that has been put into an online environment. It’s music, first and foremost, and now it happens to be online. ‘Online Music’ is music that is characterised by its online-ness. What sort of music is it? It’s Online Music.
I’m interested in both.
Now, of course, this is an artificial distinction, and you can call these things what you like. Music on the Internet, Internet Music, Digital Music… these all have particular connotations, but essentially they’re interchangeable names that will suit most ordinary purposes. It’s only people like me who think the semantics are even remotely important — and who like to clarify the language in order to make these distinctions.
But if you’ll bear with me just this once, being pedantic in this way does lead to a broader way of thinking about what we do when we connect music up to the online environment… and what that might be leading us towards.
To most readers, what I call ‘Music Online’ will seem to be the thing to be concerned with. It’s the stuff of our everyday activities. We currently engage in the music world, doing whatever it is we do in order to create, promote, disseminate, enjoy and (hopefully) make money through music. And we live in a world in which the internet is an important component of our media environment.
So this is about taking what you do as a musician or independent music business, and putting it on the internet with the intention of enhancing, expanding or otherwise contributing to the reach and exposure of the music.
Putting music online is usually taken as a step to expand audiences, reach new markets, promote a recording or live performance, or make a sale. The music activity (from whichever part of the media production, distribution or consumption process it comes) exists independently of the internet, but the internet is deployed as a tool and a strategy in order to achieve whatever purpose the music had, more effectively, efficiently or perhaps profitably.
Take Music, add Online and hope for the best.
In other words, Music Online is Music, put online. You have a band – so you build a MySpace page. You’ve made a record, so you make sure it’s available on iTunes. You’ve got a concert coming up, so you use ReverbNation to make sure all of your fans know about it.
Online Music (for lack of a better term), on the other hand, is a different order of things. This is music activity characterised by its online-ness. I think this is the area that most people in the music industries overlook as a possibility, and it’s a conceptual leap that you tend to miss if you don’t think to put those two words together in that order.
Remembering again (and I’m going to keep reminding you) that when I say Music, I’m talking about all of the different stages from the production through to the consumption of musical texts, Online Music happens when the internet is part of the design process of key elements in that chain.
Normally, this will happen when music industries people partner with technologists to design the ‘appliance’ that will achieve the goal they have in mind (ie: to stop drying their hair with a toaster, and instead invent the hairdryer). This is a far less common approach at present, and there are only a handful examples of it around.
You’ll be familiar with Last.fm. Perhaps you’ll have heard of Novatunes. You might know SonicBids. These, and some other organisations and services you may happen to think of are music enterprises ‘built out of internet’. You may find some of them useful as part of your putting-music-online strategy.
But if you were to take a more radical, deliberate and forward-thinking approach to the new digital environment, you might instead wish to emulate their process. Rather than do something, and then squeeze it onto the internet, you could actually take that difficult translation process out of the equation, and simply build the thing you do as a native element of the online world.
This, to me, is the key to New Music Strategies.
Music Online, therefore, is essentially a transitional phase. It’s a way of adapting to a new environment. Where Online Music is about being native to that environment and creating music business ‘organisms’ with what you might like to think of as digital DNA, Music Online is about selecting organisms from the offline world, and transplanting them into the new environment, giving them new roles to fulfill, and making adaptations so that they can survive and thrive.
But even Online Music is not quite right to describe this new, native media category. It still smacks of something in transition, rather than something new. Of course music won’t be replaced or lost within the online environment. It is, rather, ‘made anew’. But if we were really being fussy with our semantics, we’d probably be looking for a whole new word at this point.
In fact, this stuff is still so new, that most commentators see the process of adaptation as the endgame of digital evolution. What we don’t see is that it’s part of the process towards being something else entirely. Think of this idea of Online Music as like being at the ‘horseless carriage’ / ‘wireless telegraphy’ phase of this medium. We understand what it is in terms of an old form (of course: it’s a carriage / it’s telegraphy / it’s music), but we’re also aware that it has some new, exciting – perhaps troubling – distinctive differences that we need to come to terms with (it’s horseless / it’s wireless / it’s online).
And like the phrases ‘horseless carriage’ and ‘wireless telegraphy’, ‘online music’ is a term that hides from us the new and dominant form that is emerging. When we marvel at the horslessness of the carriage and the wirelessness of the telegraphy, we often miss the fact that we should actually be designing and learning to operate cars and radios.
Fortunately, all media go through these transitions whenever there’s a fundamental shift in the technological environment — and so there are precedents and helpful ideas that have existed for quite some time to guide us through the process.
That’s what I’ll talk about next.
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16 Comments
Very nice but..GET ON WITH IT
Three chapters of buildup and definitions feels like I’m reading DUNE or something
I’ve forgotten what the first chapter said now..
I concur with Julian.
Mr Dubber, you are one of a tiny minority trying to make sense of things relating to music’s interaction with commerce and your opinion is of high value. I have learned alot from you and respect your wisdom.
The thing is record labels used to make money by selling CDs and some musicians earned something from that; now that market is gone, what are those musicians going to do?
How are they going to promote themselves now the entire machinery of music commerce as we know it has all but collapsed? How are they going to earn money?
Yes, music is some sort of sound we make. Other people may want to listen to the sound. No, we don’t need to spend zillions at Abbey Road to make a record, or even make a record at all. None of the current internet businesses to do with music seem to offer a clear framework within which to generate an income.
Is it possible that the relationship between commerce and music is breaking down altogether?
Is it possible that the whole conundrum isn’t a conundrum ?
OK, you invest in publicity to promote your act so people come to the show and pay you for that. If you can fill the Roundhouse and sell some t-shirts and mouse pads, you might earn some dough. You may use online services to advertise your act. Maybe there isn’t anything more to it than that and you can build a business like that and there is no real mystery.
Is there an audience for live music in this country?
If it’s pointless to try and sell recorded sounds, what is it a music venture is going to charge for?
Sir, take a bite of the steak, don’t just talk about whether or not chopping onions will make someone cry!
Are you becoming a shaman?
Ha … Julian’s response is amusing, and I see what he means. I don’t agree with his sentiment, though. I think this definition-making process is hugely important. And totally agree with you on the power of semantics. But, then again, I would, being an English graduate.
The only way people (we?) are going to come up with brilliant, innovative online music strategies is to start at the broadest, most conceptual level, and work our way gradually down to actual tactics …
… and to question *every* assumption we make. To try and strip away *any* preconceived notions about how to approach online music. Starting with language itself seems absolutely the best way to do this.
I find it interesting (polite way of saying; amusing) that some folks just want it handed to them…”It” being success. I thought the point of this site was to learn more about the music-online environment and to explore the possibilities of that environment.
I know that the words I have chosen may be subject to semantic dissection but I hope I made my point. Just in case I did not I will try to be a bit more blunt; The first two comments above sound like a couple of spoiled children waiting to be handed their next unearned prize.
My opinion is that if you are coming here in hopes of being told exactly how to go about being successful, then you are most likely doomed to fail as you are unwilling to use your own brain.
Keep the data flowing Andrew, continue to explore and explain as you do so well and many of us will continue to digest your ideas and try to come up with our own strategies.
Thanks for all you do!
It’s an important post. Speaking of the importance of words, my personal reading of “New Music Strategies” is “New-Music Strategies”, new music being sometimes called “art music” or “contemporary classical music.”
One of my projects has been a one-hour composition, 60/60, that I have been composing in interaction with readers of my blog. By the way, “New Music Strategies” has surely been part of the process that led me to this work.
One important thing is that I love this experience! Readers of my blog have participated, brought part of their personalities, made suggestions, and this is great.
The creative aspect can now be shared with fans at any stage of a creation. An artist can propose fans to upload recordings of their voices to be later used in a tune, to vote for content of an upcoming concert or album, to make their own remix of a tune to be incorporated in an album, etc. This is happening. If the “classical” living composers accept to join this flow, it will maybe really challenge the well-spread romantic prejudice that a composer must be a lonely genius. Most of 20th century “contemporary classical” composers felt quite comfortable with being geniuses.
Yes to Music Online! Yes to Online Music!
And more than ever, yes to Live Music!
I can see the point of the first 2 comments because this blog has changed quite dramatically over the last month, some blog readers want instant gratification which I suspect they’re now not going to get here. I’d be interested to see what kind of subscription and visitor stats you’ve now got after such a drastic shift.
I also agree with the final few comments too, I’m looking forward to the journey here this year and starting with a few definitions is a perfect place to start. Try calling a major record label, speak to one of the label managers and ask them what “online music” is? then wait for the long pause…
Love the ideas, Andrew.
I’m quite struck that your suggested ideal is when music industries and technologists collaborate to create “native” Online Music apps. It strikes me as the same problem we discussed in the first chapter regarding the co-mingling of the artist/business person.
If going to a zillion music industry conferences over the last 4 years has taught me anything, is that there is a fundamental breakdown in communication between these two groups, especially among the old guard – Look at Doug Morris! Ian Rogers recent talk about the future of music online (http://tinyurl.com/2r8evh) was so laden with meek apologies about being too “geeky” that it started to get on my nerves.
But on a more normal scale, there is a serious deficit between both camps – just as LastFM or SonicBids demonstrate how to make Online Music work, there are countless examples of either camp going it alone and running into serious problems.
Tech companies that have gone into “Online Music” alone include Imeem, SomaFM, Pandora and countless others who use music as a primary driver of traffic, while completely ignoring any idea of a business model that fairly compensates artists for their work, something that’s primarily because of their lack of industry experience or advice. The results? GREAT MUSIC SERVICES are on the chopping block as soon as they’re mature enough to start making a “profit” (e.g. Imeem has paid MILLIONS in advances to the majors for the use of their catalog, and there are good arguments that their model is simply not sustainable long term (check out Michael Robertson’s post about Imeem/Universal – http://tinyurl.com/2e9un5), SomaFM is in congressional limbo as to licensing rates for 2009 and beyond and Pandora has had to suspend UK service for similar reasons.)
Music industry folks who’ve taken on Online Music alone have simply vanished into the ether :-) OK, that might be a generalization, but I’d like to hear of any really successful companies run solely by ex-Label or industry folks.
Maybe an ideal might be to grow an Online Music business that has a “music industry” dept., just like an accounting dept. or legal dept. People with insight into how, why, where and when music itself is grown and are dedicated not only to the delivery of content, but function as a sort of “micro-label” within the company itself.
Keep it going, my friend. You’ve certainly got my wheels turning :-)
Funny – Seth Godin has a post – http://tinyurl.com/2umj64 – which I’d like to excerpt here:
“Here are three things that are true:
1. Digital technology, especially computers and cell phones, can dramatically increase productivity.
2. More and more users of digital technology are small firms or individuals.
3. The vast majority of users of digital technology are totally lame in getting the most out of the investment of their time and money.
“Oh, I didn’t know I could do that.”
“You mean I don’t have to manually type my address book in by hand?”
“There are graphs in Excel?”
“Gmail is free?” ”
I’d add something like:
“I can use BitTorrent to disseminate my music?”
“I can allow my USERS to add value to my music/project?”
“I should leverage the scale of the web rather than attempt to create scarcity?”
Imagine a tech-consultant (like the ones Seth is encouraging) giving the above advice to a label CEO (indies too, not just majors!), and then imagine the CEO’s reaction and you have some idea of the problem you’re facing with the technologist/musicindustrybloke hybrid.
Semantics are always important…
Hey, I am not dissing il proffesore.
I guess my comment was a long-winded request for some punditry. I don’t think any reader is going to expect a formula for success out of this site. But, and I know this is a new start for the blog, I felt the urge to remind the writer that beyond the abstractions one might occasionally venture to make a prediction about the possible mechanics of that which is to come.
For those who don’t appreciate Dubbers’ careful laying of the goalpost, it is an necessary strategy to anybody who remembers the level of misinterpretation and superficial analysis that greeted McLuhan as he first suggested that there is more going on here that meets the eye. In the meantime, those who insist a concrete set of instructions can chew on this for awhile . . .
“It’s like the fish in water,†he said, “we don’t know who discovered water but we know it wasn’t a fish. A pervasive medium is always beyond perception.†– Marshall McLuhan
Tee hee
I’m glad I got in first as it caused some debate
yes Andrew’s tone has changed as he goes into ‘book mode’ and semantics are important
I’m just talking from the point of view of someone who is in the thick of it, and yes I do want answers instantly, from multiple sources, one of them being me :)
When you’re ‘out there doing it’ you just want to leave the coffee house and start handing out virtual flyers, not talking about what it means
On a personal note I would love it if Andrew kept this book form going, while shooting from the hip in the ideas section some more
‘cos by the time this book is done (by the end of the year at this rate) then the internet will be made of custard and we will be making money selling music to aliens
Making money from alien music sales? That will only take a year? Nice.
Well I’ve got the distro sorted already
Again, a very interesting position.
This whole Music Online definition is really interesting.
One thing I would take into account for the future of the book and the definition of the “market” (which consumers? etc), would be the TIME FACTOR.
What I mean is that in this society, the BIG issue in the future will be the free time that will be available to listen to new music, and how we can make things less time consuming, or create a real value for people to “spend time” on music, whether it be a song, an album, an anthology, a live gig, etc.
Time is key, more than ever.
I understand the first two comments but I’m waiting to see where things are going.