“I…experienced disorienting moments of temporal suspension when I downloaded large files of music; these were long moments of isolation and boredom. Everything seemed to pause in the speeded-up temporality of cyberspace. I had similar feelings of separation in Java during Ramadan, when performances and many social activities were halted for a month of fasting and introspection. I tried to fill these times with reading and writing, but the days seemed to stretch into eternity. In comparison, it seems astonishing that on the Internet, such seemingly endless periods could actually be measured in seconds or minutes rather than days or weeks.”

Rene Lysloff (2003). “Musical Community on the Internet: An On-Line Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 18(2): 233-63.

It’s not just normal people–online immersion in musical networks causes fun-house-mirror time-shifts for anthropologists, too.  Next step: understanding how and/or why this phenomenon manifests itself as ravenous leak-hunting and complaining on message boards when downloads take 10 minutes instead of 4.

“When I had a dozen CDs I loved them all and that was enough until the next one arrived. When I had a thousand… I wanted more. I am now 26 and I have had enough. Almost.

Part of it, I’m sure, comes down to wanting to recapture that moment when I first listened to In Sides or Paul’s Boutique and sat with my eyes and mouth wide open in surprise, or that time when I dozed off during “Don’t Stop” and woke up during “I Am The Resurrection” and felt in another place, or when I first heard “Retread” or “Eye Know” or when I danced to “That Lady” in Brixton at 1am, but how did trying to recapture a moment of magic end up as such a greedy, frenetic hunter-gatherer rush to acquire? Why did I end up wanting to have listened to things rather than actually be listening to them? It’s not even like I relate favourite songs back to events in my life when they were significant, because I’ve never used music as an emotional battery like that; I’ve always loved it in and of itself primarily, a song or an album as a beautiful thing on its own that is perfect and that I can love and immerse myself in or use to paint my daily life with colour. It’s about the point of contact. I’ve said that before, I’m sure. I don’t want to know everything about 50s rock n roll or the key movers in postpunk, I can’t relate to grime when I live with the moors behind me and the sea in front, I don’t want to write articles on Miami bass or crunk or nu-folk or whatever the hell is being revived or invented this week. As nice as it would be, the practicalities of owning and knowing intimately, as LCD Soundsystem put it, every good record, ever, make it a ridiculous ambition.”

Nick Southall, “Soulseeking” from Stylus back in 2005.  I’d never read this before, and I can thank rockcritics.com (currently counting down the best stuff written this decade) for remedying this situation.  I too frequently find myself acquiring and storing, waiting for the proper moment to explore.  And when it happens, listening often feels like an assignment, or something to check off a list.

I feel like this sort of self-analysis would be a great theme for a big Turkel-esque oral history of music fans’ changing listening habits in the digital era.  The comments thread on that post seems like a tiny start.

Britt Daniel, on the rawer new Spoon record, to Spinner (also).

2. “’Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,’ says Partridge, ‘and there were all sorts of bad color separations and misspellings and wrong track listings. It was really heartbreaking. They’ve actually fumbled the ball, radically, twice in recent years. During the whole Britpop thing, they didn’t promote our back catalog despite all these bands like Blur, Pulp, and countless others that, to me, were shamelessly attempting to sounds rather like us. Then it came around again a few years later with another wave of bands like Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Hot Hot Heat, Franz Ferdinand, Maxïmo Park, the Futureheads, and Bloc Party. Everybody would come up to me in the street and say, ‘Hey Andy, that band blah blah sounds just like what you did in 1979!’ So Virgin fumbled it yet again, when they should have been promoting our back catalog there.”

Andy Partridge, acerbic as ever, to Wolfgang’s Vault.  A lot of good stuff here for XTC fans. And the good news: XTC reissues soon!  Maybe! (Vinyl plz.)

3. “I have nothing against one person sending a track to another person saying, ‘Hey, check this track out; it’s great!’ That’s like a fan-to-fan thing. But these big websites like Pirate Bay are just another corporation. It’s the future Clear Channel. They have nothing to do with good. They are just evil. It’s the worst. They take our music and put it out for free before we have released it to our record label. There’s no fanfare, there’s nothing, it’s just like ‘Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence. Click Here.’ There’s no sense of jubilation.”

Erlend Øye’s take on filesharing from this Prefixmag interview with Kings of Convenience.

4. “‘From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,’ he wrote. ‘And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.’

John Philip Sousa, railing against those confounded music machines.  Part of a neat little Arstechnica piece about copyright holders’ fears of new technologies. (Further reading: Mark Rose)

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”

This is Scott Plagenhoef’s response (scroll down to the comments) to my response to Maura’s response to that study attempting to causally link downloading habits to other forms of consumption. One of the things I wasn’t really able to get into in the ridiculously quick conversation I had with Maura over IM that afternoon is exactly the quandary that Scott raises above. Which can be answered pretty briefly, actually: The reason that no one really discusses why “people stopped giving a shit about music altogether,” if this is in fact the case, is because the sorts of research that end up in newspapers and on tech blogs aren’t designed, from the beginning, to answer questions like this.

I mentioned this in an earlier post here, but it bears repeating. It’s not an issue of a study being “longitudinal” or not. Both quantitative and qualitative research are both perfectly equipped to conduct research over time. What is the issue at hand is the questions and problems that different forms of research are equipped to address. This particular survey, like others that get picked up by wire services, seeks to place the messy, chaotic activities involved with mundane music consumption within a framework that reifies the market categories that we all find so frustrating to begin with. These researchers, from what I can tell, are interested in making connections between downloading and buying habits, and are thus asserting that those are the most important considerations to take into account when talking about music in everyday life.

Which is fine, don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of utility in this sort of research, namely the capacity to accumulate data from nearly 2,000 respondents in a quick amount of time. But this sort of research also tells us little to nothing about the myriad other functions and roles of music in people’s everyday lives. It tells us nothing about the ways that people engage with music in situations that have nothing to do with market ideologies. We don’t hear the voices of individual Norwegian 15-year-olds, whose responses to questions about what they think of music’s purpose or utility might address Scott’s above question in illuminating ways. But also in ways that don’t necessarily travel well through venues like newsapers and tech blogs, which, even though online, are still burdened by the tyranny of word-count and simple, easy-to-follow facts. Quantitative research travels well because it’s easily translatable into dichotomies, because it can be made to hew closely to simple arguments about right and wrong.

This is a research topic I’m preparing to embark upon in the fall, and a topic I will summarily blog the fuck out of, either here or elsewhere. At this point, I’m inclined to disagree with Scott’s assertion, but only because it’s predicated on the assumption that there’s one particular way to “give a shit about music”, and that it’s also possible for everyone to suddenly stop doing that. Talking to people about what music does for them when it’s mediated through the Web and Internet will hopefully reveal new paradigms through which we can understand how people invest meaning in art that’s become infinitely accessible, replicable, and freshly sedimented in the most mundane of everyday activities (answering one’s phone, for instance).

Scott’s been thinking about this stuff for quite some time, and has even expounded upon his ideas in a very entertaining book. But let’s think about the data he’s using to support his claim:

“dwindling shelf space given to music at big boxes, the number of indie or chain record stores closing, the relative amount and variety of music on U.S. TV/MTV/radio vs a decade or two ago …plus the factual and quite striking shrinking record sales.”

If “not giving a shit about music” means “not buying or engaging with music in the ways we did in the 80s and 90s,” then yes, his point is fine. But it’s also tautological. We need to consider the vast amount of other ways that people are imagining their connections with music, occasioned by the new technologies through which they’re experiencing it. Once audiences have broken an imaginary tether to the traditional musical commodity, what new forms of relationships are going to emerge?

“An approximate and complicated visualization of an idea invariably precedes the industrial discovery which alone can open the way to its practical use” — Andre Bazin

Comments by esteemed colleagues Wes and Kevin on a recent post of mine have spurred me to offer some specific thoughts of my own on Rob Horning’s recent PopMatters article on mp3 blogs. I posted a link to his article based on the fact that it marked the first time I’ve seen such an analysis of mp3 blogs posted that critically engaged with the subject matter. I don’t, however, agree with all, or even most of what Horning wrote. Let me explain.

First, it’s impossible not to take umbrage at the elitist tenor of Horning’s approach. By focusing too much on the superficial differences between the internet and the traditional model of music collection instead of the myriad, deep likenesses between the two methods of music accumulation and distribution, he misses the major point in the discussion; that any technological advance is only a reflection of established social processes.

Horning offers that the “prestige” of collecting is diminished now that the musical texts have receded into the realm of ones and zeroes, arrogance masquerading as critique. His leap into value judgment (file sharing is “worse” than the old style of collecting) is rash and falls back on the tired dialectic between “old” being better than “new.” Becoming a “curator to the world,” as Horning defines mp3 blogging, is only a reconfigured version of what music lovers (geeks) have done since the advent of the distributed/recorded musical form: we play music we love for other people, with the goal of them liking (or even just acknowledging the existence of) the music as well. Many mp3 bloggers are former Hornings themselves that have merely harnessed the technology. Sure, there are tons of horrible blogs out there [maybe this is one--sorry ], but that changes nothing of my opinion of the really good ones, which are important.

Elsewhere in his article, Horning laments the quick accumulation of music through p2p, bittorrent and mp3 blogs without really attempting to distinguish the first two from the third. It’s very important to note that mp3 blogs—the good ones at least—offer much more than decontextualized files for mass download. They offer, to varying degrees, a description of the music and, more importantly, some personal rationale for its appearance on the site. It’s important that Horning doesn’t mention any specific blogs by name, because it doesn’t appear that he’s spent any significant time thinking about them and the impact they’ve had not only on the distribution of music, but the opportunities for new and theoretically endless creation of meaning. I’m sure Horning would cringe at hearing what a Midwesteren college freshman kid thinks of The Sonics, but personally, I’m interested. It might be a crude, untutored reading to Horning, but it’s still important nonetheless, if for nothing else than to offer insight at the broad appeal of formerly “protected” musics.

Finally, the “gatekeeping” mentality of haughty record collectors is one that could disappear without being missed by most music fans. It’s ridiculous and counter-intuitive for an individual to hoard a cultural object that was initially created for mass consumption. I’ve said before that rock music is first and foremost commercial art and the vast majority of its creators wish it to be enjoyed by as many listeners as possible. Pop music is meant to be distributed, and the internet exacerbates that, adding myriad new and interesting meanings in the process. These old-school curators Horning writes about are attempting to ascribe aura to items whose material essence demands the exact opposite.

If the internet does anything to eradicate this mentality, which I doubt it will, it’s a good thing. Horning’s article was well-written and nicely presented, and I have no doubt of his intellect, but this piece is nothing more than a lament for an unfortunate sub-era in pop history that cannot disappear quickly enough.