Most people won’t do that because they are afraid. They want a proven business model, they want facts. I find that a non-creative way to do things. Because ANYONE can change the world.

Since a few months I am creating a new track once a week on friday, I call those KlankBeeld Raaphorst (sort of SoundImage Raaphorst). You can find them here:
http://www.marcoraaphorst.nl/tags/klankbeeld/

Bit of self-promo you might say, but please let me continue. I feel that doing so have brought me a few new good things:
- I will publish over 50 tracks a year
- people love it and the fan-base is growing
- I have my own platform, my blog(s) and I can do whatever I want to do with it
- I can feel the freedom this is giving me and new business opportunities are happening as we speak because people can listen to my work and when they like it, re-use it or hire me

Bottom line: create the music you want to create. If you like it, probably some other people like it as well. Simple.

I am a huge Creative Commons believer and user (for 5 years now). Sharing is a huge part of my work, like remixing is a huge part of our culture. As it has always been the case. And we need to adopt these old rules to the modern world. It all starts with good music which people love. All you need is a blog and start publishing.

You don’t even need a MySpace account. I deleted mine some time ago. My blog is myspace. My domain, my archive, my home. No more other MySpacers spamming me with their spam-comments. People who come to my blog want me, not the others. There’s a place for anyone, but my blog is about me.

Andrew, hope to see you soon at the Lopend Vuur Pitch here in Holland! Thanks for all the good words. Passion!

JBluevibe raises an interesting aspect of on-line culture with this point. I would say that the native style of on-line music is remix culture, though it has yet to be defined as anything beyond an amorphous tag cloud of genres without a cohesive narrative to legitimize the content. Right now I can do a remix, post it on a site like ccmixter and tag it as ‘Rock n Roll’. Well it may be my definition of rock n roll but is it anybody else’s? And does polluting the tag cloud with subjective and self-serving attempts to attribute a remix to appeal to anybody and everybody result in a watered down experience that blunts the potential of remix as a culture? I think it does.

In the old analogue world, styles would be a means by which marketers created a filter to target consumers. The marketers had the clout of mass media to enforce interpretations (sometimes to the chagrin of musicians who found themselves pigeon-holed) but there is no compelling on-line equivalent to this. This is an opportunity for those who are interested in inserting themselves as tastemakers in the digital realm for fun and profit. Right now there is a type of soft enforcement at some remix sites like ccmixter but, for me, the experience of clicking on a tag like Jazz and getting a list of tracks populated by a few choice remixes and a lot of wildly diverse approaches to playing a ninth chord is kind of a lame experience. Disclaimer: I should point out that ccmixter has a playlisting capability that is starting to take the site in the direction I’m talking about.

I believe that in the digital realm, content creators should be the last people allowed to tag their own contributions. I think that tagging is the essential currency of online content. It has the potential to be the chief means by which to determine visibility and raise content above the noise. A tastemaker/media filter role will be one that will ultimately become an added-value experience. What’s needed is the adoption of open standards like XSPF – a way to describe collections of media objects (playlists) in order to create a formal structure upon which this role can be legitimized.

We’ve got a new culture, and new dictates of its dominant medium. That’s all I’m saying.

Thank you, that’s much more eloquently put than ‘we can all just make internet now.’ As always and forever art and culture will be continually influenced and built upon by one another.

However, listening to music is always going to be an analog experience, unless there’s a dramatic change in our bodies’ in the near future our brains’ sound capacity will always be mediated by our ears. What I’m trying to say is that musicians should be more concerned with making meaningful modes of expression rather than focusing on intermediary mediums such as the internet. And you’re right, at some point music can be contextually put inside the boundaries of a song, an album, the radio, or even the internet. Now sometimes these types of limits or boundaries can spark innovation, as Julian had pointed out above, that the Album had eventually led to Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. However, forever limiting yourself to one medium or another’s boundaries will eventually lead to a cookie cutter type of experience and will start to hurt the music in itself as an artform.

Now I think what you are trying to get at is that we should look forward as musicians and innovate by putting our music into the context of a new generation’s — a digital generation’s — daily lives.

However, you could take this one step futher and suggest that rather than catering to an already existing culture, you should try to create and evolve your own culture based upon the experience that your music already provides.

To put the matter completely in perspective, Xeno’s paradoxes are in their essence an expression of a digital (discrete) world. And he didn’t even have vinyl in his day.

Besides, isn’t your digital world in fact becoming MORE analogue? Before the Internet, a book wasn’t a record, a record wasn’t a game, etc. Discrete. These days everything is interconnected (which is the point you’re making), meaning that you can start off with one medium and gradually shift into a completely different one. Continuous (=analogue).

The points you are making are valid, but I’m afraid you have the basic premise completely on its head. What digital does isn’t differentiation (discrete) but homogenisation (continuous). That’s what makes combining seemingly radically different media possible.

To sum up: I believe we should grasp the new opportunities offered by changing times. You are completely right there. I will caution most strongly however, against jumping to rash conclusions based simply on the fact that things have become different. People are still people and, for all the talk about the digital age, they’re still simply doing what people do (and for the most part always have done). This is something we should never, ever forget.

So without the ‘album’ there would be no Dark Side Of The Moon and the history of recorded music (and prog rock) would have taken some other turn.

Technology will always influence art that is dependant on it, as will distribution, either directly or indirectly.