The Future of Music

Despite the widespread criticism of contemporary music and predictions of its even more declining quality, I believe there are good prospects for music that come with technology and democratization of access.

In this essay I deconstruct the concept of “the future of music” in the following directions: economic future of music, technological future, and political future.All these directions are, with no doubt, interrelated.

As for economic future, one has to approach the music from the listener’s perspective, as well as the artist’s perspective. On the side of the former, with the advent of technology and Internet music is becoming more accessible. Accessible both in terms of financial costs required to get the music and in terms of expansion of the literal “access” to music. Half a century ago, in order to get to listen to “Under My Thumb” by Rolling Stones, the only two ways were either to go to their concert or to get a rare record (for which one needed a recorder). Not to say that hearing the music of not-so-popular groups was extremely difficult. Today, everything from latest Kanye West concert to a new single by some Serbian indie rock band is just one click away, and that helps listeners to learn about different music on a closer level. On the artist’s side of it, the advent of technology helped artists that experience problems with capital and cannot afford big advertisement to become known via Web-platforms. Overall, technology contributed and will spur even more in the future the musical diversity that is accessible to the public. In return, the public that would not otherwise have heard about some artists will have a chance to know and help them. Rapid liberalization of access together with globalization will help leaning more about music of other peoples, thus facilitating cultural exchange between different countries.

The downside of future facilitation of access to music is similar to the economic downside of globalization: local musicians and their music can be wiped out from the market by popularized American record studio brands. A Serbian indie rock band may get access to the international market via the Web, but the Serbian public may not even pay attention to it, because the TV and radio (and Internet social networks themselves) are preoccupied with American popular brands, who have more advertising power and this power is likely to grow in future. As Small mentions in his “On Cultures and Their Fusion:”

“It should be a matter of great importance to us … not to be instrumental in causing the diminution or loss of the culture of other groups of people who are not yet in a position to enjoy our culture... In addition to that it is of the greatest concern that those cultures should not be lost, because they represent the real musical reserves of the future…so it is important that we should strive to prevent any of the decline of true folk and native music...because... the music which our culture destines for them, that is to say commercial music.”[1]

Here we can see that Small predicts that globalization will lead to the deterioration of cultures that are less powerful (we can extend it to political and economic power), because of consumer-driven tastes. And even though different cultures and its music all have access to one-minute world-wide fame, the fear that globalization will just silence this music even in their home ground persists.

Hence, the overall content of the music I expect to be more diverse, but the most of the music broadcast might as well be actually more limited.

One needs to say a word about economic benefits of musicians in future: the economic disparity between majority of musicians and “superstars” is bound to grow even more. The rising musicians are having more and more trouble making money due to stiff competition. For example, even the best jazz musicians in New York, according to my friend and rising jazz-star Eugeny Sivtsov, can count to perform at best couple of times per month in a well-known bar. This forces them to give music lessons or even look for other jobs, distracting them from making and practicing their own music. On the contrary, the superstars are going to make more because of their increasing popularity, branding and rising “star-purchasing” power of China, India and other emerging markets where people are ready to pay for stars’ performance and brands they represent much more than in the Western world.

However, one has to mention that even superstars lose money from direct sales of their music due to the same notion of facilitated access: when music is available for free or virtually free on the Web, why bother buying CDs? In 2011, major recording brands in US reported suffering up to 10% declines in sales, and the trend will inevitably continue.[2] In a quite recent article in the Guardian, it is described how famous musicians need to adjust to the culture of music surfing in order to offset the losses from declines in physical music purchases. Exemplary is Radiohead’s online release of album in 2011 with different online packages adapted for consumer tastes. The article also points out that rising artists cannot count on using the same profit-maximizing online sale techniques to sell their music. And yet, my counterargument is that even though online revolution did steal revenues from physical sale of music, the Web was and will be very powerful in advertising and promoting artists, thus bringing attention to their music of general public (that will eventually pay for the music by either going to concert or buying online or offline) and investors and record companies.

Overall, economically future of music industry is bound to stay oligopolistic in a sense the barriers and costs to entry to the industry are very high, and the small firms (musicians) barely survive in the stiff financial circumstances, where big firms (superstars) can spend a lot of money on promotion, expanding their share of the market.

Hence, in future and already now it is becoming easier to appear on the market via Web, but much harder to be noticed and to “be sold” as the musician.

One has to note the increasing politicization of music. The drums and other instruments were used throughout history to affect the fighting crowd in a certain manner, and the musicians started devoting their music and performing for social change in the sixties; closer to the end of millennia certain musicians achieved a level of fame that allowed them to speak on political agenda (e.g. Bono), but in the future the crowd does not even need the musician to use music and achieve political aims.

Recent two revolutions in Ukraine (2005 and 2014) serve as examples of the change in the use of music as political instrument. Whereas in 2005 both competing presidential candidates Victor Yanukovich and Victor Yuschenko spent millions of dollars on hiring Ukrainian starts to perform at their rallies; in 2014 the organizers of “Maidan” protest, were simply playing on stereos the songs of the most famous Ukrainian band “Okean Elzy.” Interesting fact is that the band itself refrained from performing before protesting crowd, and its attitude toward the protest remained unclear till the actual outset of the President. Moreover, the lyrics of their songs never contained any political agenda and very few patriotic motives. However, the fact that Okean Elzy was the most popular band in Ukraine adored equally in West and East, Ukrainian and Russian speakers, independent of occupation, age and class played the most decisive role. The band’s music and ultimately positive image of its leader Stanislav Vakarchuk was the uniting force between different groups that comprised the protest and that very often could not reach compromise in between themselves.[3]

I believe that in future the political power of music will only expand. Partially due to the persistence of “star culture” and stars’ public influence, but also due to the what I described earlier as “liberalized access” to music that makes it available instantly for use, and also available for interpretation, adjusted for political attitudes of the crowd.

Discussing the notion of music construction, I would like, furthermore, to discuss the “substantial,” organizational future of music. What will the music of the future sound like?

Despite the widespread sentiment that the future of music will be mostly electronic and could even be robotic, I do not believe this is entirely the case. The argument is two-fold: the music will, on the one hand, indeed use more post-production technologies and editing that willchange the final content, yet, on the other hand, the styles that are prevalent now and in the past will be revisited and have their place.

As for the production and editing technologies, Cox and Warner in their book “Audio Culture” in Intro to the Chapter “Music in the Age of Electronic Reproduction” mention who editing technologies created whole new music genres; they describe how Miles Davis changed jazz by recording “extended improvisations and then handling them over to the producer,” and how dub originated from reggae producers King Tubby and Lee Perry who “gleefully exploited the capacities of the recording studio to create…spaces by fracturing, magnifying and multiplying the vocal and instrumental moments of an original reggae track.”[4] No doubt, as technologies, specifically editing technologies, advance in the future, we are bound to see them applied to create new music. And if one could argue like Walter Benjamin argued in his famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”[5] and Cox and Warner implied in “Audio Culture” that editing and reproduction leads to the loss of “aura” and authenticity; one still has to admit the immense improvisation prospects the culture of editing and new technology in general opens for prominent musicians. I believe such technology-driven musical experimentation could, as the story with dub showed, really transform the world of the listener, even though they might indeed steal all the authenticity from the original voice and other instruments. The biggest drawback is that editing technologies m make commercial

As for the important tradition of revisitation of old music, Sachs in “History of Music Instruments” states:

“The reconstruction of ancient instruments … were symbolic of a growing interest in the music of remote epochs. Also originally an outgrowth of the romantic period, the historical movement in music gradually became a leading force in neutralizing the excesses of the later romantic style, such as its decomposition of form, its obliteration of distinct outlines, its harmonic and coloristic superrefinement, its calculated effect on the listener, its exaggerated subjectivity.”[6]

Sachs writes about how in mid nineteenth and early twentieth century the music of “remote epochs” was revisited and composed and played again. Sachs also implicitly suggests that music of the past, already distinguished and recognized, serves as escape when the music of the present seems to be losing form, harmony and structure. As we can clearly see, even more than a century ago what we can call “retro culture,” a tradition of coming back to the roots was strong. It seems that each time the public seems to be worn out by the contemporary music trends, someone goes back to earlier trends and discovers appealing beats and tunes there and the society as a whole picks up this good ole trend.

Moreover, quite recent article in the Atlantic talks about Simon Reynolds’ books “Retromania: Pop’s culture Addiction to Its Own Past,” where the author asserts not only that music, especially pop music, always was subject to “recycling” by the past trends, but also that “the vast digital advances of the most-recent decade have caused the amount of unimaginative and static retro culture to explode. He says we’re victims of a “crisis of overdocumentation,” facilitated by “YouTube’s ever-proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection” and the fatiguing amount of digital music history only a couple mouse-clicks away. Human beings need not rely on the foggy hard drives in their skulls anymore. Instead, they can simply Google a phrase, and spend an evening tumbling down the rabbit hole of not-so-old history.”[7]

Hence, the modern era is marked even more significantly by nostalgia and revisitation of the past. One explanation is purely psychological: it is essential for a human being who is often bored with the daily routine to be nostalgic about the attributes of the past, especially best examples of its emotional expression-music. Moreover, nowadays the technology provides us with immense data storage of past, available for close analysis and therefore open for reinterpretation and revisitation.

However, there is more profound attempt to explain the continuing interest to come back to the old ways: the same article in the Atlantic mentions the book “ Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World”, where anthropologist Greg Urban argues that “societies modernize when human beings start passing judgment on the culture around them, instead of passing it down through generations like traditions or myths. We start asking ourselves: What does this remind me of? What from the past is this building upon, or “stealing from?” What can I learn from it and incorporate into my own work?”

The article asserts that “Urban’s view is that looking backwards is the only way for a society to move forward.”[8] Hence, Urban states that past serves as the primary source of inspiration for the creation of the new. In music, the future stars build their legacy through comparison and succession of the old starts. NYU Abu Dhabi Professor Jason King repeatedly discusses in his lectures on “Fame” how both Beyonce and Lana Del Rey build their legacy by comparing themselves and often mimicking Marylyn Monroe and Madonna,[9] whereas Reynolds in “Retromania” states that Gaga is nothing but “Bowie + Grace Jones + Madonna + Marilyn Manson + Fischerspooner.”[10] Prominent Russian blogger and leading music critic of one of the Moscow university students’ Aesthetic Society, Grigory Fedorov in an interview to me said that, in many ways, Daft Punk now build their legacy through their own interpretation of eighties’ disco, whereas David Bowie keeps up his popularity because he uses his “same old Bowie” style.

Therefore, the tradition of establishing new and future stardom and legacy via reinterpretation and often simply reuse of the past is continuously persistent in music and unlikely to change. Fedorov argues and I agree with him that if, for example, Beyonce and Lana Del Rey manage to prove to the world their “greatness,” in the future they will be viewed, “revisited” and mimicked in the same way as Billy Holiday is now. And whereas the new technology certainly creates prospects for new music genres to appear, it will not diminish, but only expand, the persistent tradition of coming back to “good ole styles.” Henceforth, the music of the future will inevitably be based on music of the past and our present.

In conclusion, the future of music is inevitably intertwined with political abuse and economic inequality and consumerist culture that mark the modern age. However, the improvisation prospects that the technology opens and facilitated access to this technology as well as the reemergence of the past music trends and increased cooperation between artists and cultures does leave hope that music will keep transforming the emotional world of the listener and will not be a mere consumer good.

Works Cited

[1] Small, Christopher,1999. “Music of the Common Tongue.” Wesleyan University Press

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14