Open Source

Bart:

"You make some interesting observations and points, some I agree with, some I don't. I don't want to know what Trane studied 10 hours a day. I don't think the creative process must be laid bare for all to see. I think he who wants to know should work for the information, like students centuries ago going to monasteries to seek wisdom. Another thing is that I don't want to know everything about how things are made. It's a bit like the extras on a dvd. Knowing to much about how a movie is made can distract you (me) from what that movie is about. The problem is you don't know what information is helpful, and what info isn't."

Doug Wamble:

"Hard to get past the first paragraph, really. Your entire premise is kind of false. I think artists have been at the forefront of utilizing the internet. Where is the evidence for this "stiff resistance?""

"Besides all that, you're making these grand proclamations that aren't really based in anything specific. What is art music? What is boldness of concept? What is confrontational honesty? Do you just know it when you see it?"

Response:

First of all. Thanks for taking the time to attack my half-formed ideas. As I'm still not quite all together, I hope you'll forgive my approach of being somewhat deliberately provocative even when my arguments are not well-formed enough to support the conclusions.

Bart, concerning your idea that the extra information detracts from the whole, that's a very good argument and I have no great answer for it. In fact, I don't think that I want all art to become open in the way I'm suggesting. I think what I'm putting forth is more of a crude first stab at one particular view that I think will become more prominent as a consequence of the way technology is affecting the experience both of art and of life in general.

Secondly, Doug. I don't think that artists have been at the forefront of using the internet. I think if anyone, software developers, computer scientists are way ahead, granted they have an unfair advantage. The things happening in the open source movement are pretty remarkable. That said, I think you guys here (www.mydamnforum.net) are probably among the best examples of artists really taking advantage of technology. Perhaps not as portals for the public to access your individual art, but in the sense of information sharing.

Concerning confrontational honesty, boldness of concept, you are right, I have been horribly vague. These ideas need to be fleshed out. I should point out that they do not come from music. Rather, they come from what I perceive as general characteristics of communication through the internet.

People seem to be captivated by the quality of being exposed. Look at some of the blogs that have commanded millions of hits solely on the basis of the bareness with which people lay out their lives. I think this is one of the defining characteristics of our times and that it will necessarily in some ways become manifest in art. The way in which I envision the manifestation is the loss of the pretension that art springs forth fully formed, the separation of artifact from process. I see people accepting humanness even in higher art in a way that is, in my opinion, new.

Thanks to Bart and Doug Wamble for their thoughts and challenges.

The internet is the new media. This may seem obvious, but for most it has yet to sink in. Surely, for encyclopedic content, the internet's primacy is unchallenged by even the most philistine. But for art, particularly music, the internet and its culture of information sharing have been met with stiff resistance. Among more serious artists, at best the internet has been used to moderate effect as a marketing tool. Only among kitschier musicians is the internet seriously contemplated, engaged.

I should clarify that I am referring in this essay to the mechanisms of distributing and communicating about art, not the intrinsic properties of the art itself. I do not suggest that the future consists of technologically driven concept art produced through artists' dynamic interactions with an audience in cyberspace. I do, however, assert that the internet is the new media. It is not simply a marketing tool; it is the product.

The Business Model is Dead

I will not attempt to hazard a guess at the exact ratio of mp3s that are obtained illegally as compared to those uploaded from CDs or purchased legally on the internet. But I do not feel squeamish about assuming that it is a lot to a little. Still, despite the overwhelming proportion of distribution occurring on the internet, the majority of revenue is still captured in the conventional ways. Record sales. The music industry finds itself in the same position as AOL found itself at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than capture the traffic by distributing the music themselves, artists cede influence over their audience to peer-to-peer file sharing services. It is holding on to dying product, preferring to die slowly rather than quickly. In this essay, I will not address the future business model for music; I believe that the business model and the direction of art, while related, are determined by different sets of factors. Here I will focus on what the growing convergence of technology and art means for art, specifically music, irrespective of the business model.

For a long time, technology facilitated the dominance of music as commodity. Specialization of labor, mass media in the form of television and radio supported the model. Find a niche product for a niche market. Put it in a clearly labeled box. Sell it through the appropriate channels. The pressure on artists has been to define themselves as narrowly as possible. What television and radio did to make us stupider, however, the internet is beginning to reverse, allowing us at least the option of choosing a more intelligent course. With access to billions of sources of content, rather than a few tailored to the lowest common dominator, the discriminating audience, however small, can find the deeper good. Additionally, from the artists' perspective, the internet provides an unprecedented opportunity for growth through more robust communication.

Sure, one can point to the videos of pandas making hand-farts while playing the flute that dominate Youtube as an indicator of the 'internet culture.' But these are distractions. The existence of inanity on the web has no bearing on its potential as a medium for art. Plenty of people wrote stupid things down on paper in the past. This would never be taken seriously as a condemnation of books. The internet has brought the world information sharing, both in and out of academia, in a way that has never been seen before. It spawned the open source movement: collectives of software developers collaborating with no profit motive to accomplish some of the greatest feats in software engineering. Think of the Linux operating system, which is dominant in the cloud, powering the majority of most people's computing experience, whether they realize it or not.

Myspace is not the Answer

Musicians suffer from a variation on Stockholm Syndrome. They've been liberated. The record companies are dead. And while the internet has yet to produce a great business model to replace them, the channels of distribution, the capacity to share knowledge, method, process, and product are all there. What is our response?

“Well, it's comfortable in the box.”
“We've learned how to market ourselves, this is how it's done.”

In the presence of a technology that allows us to share everything, the entire creative process, where do we go? MySpace. We express who we are as artists through a short, self-congratulatory bio, a list of influences, and who our “Top Friends” are. Some are so enthralled with MySpace that they forego the luxury of an independent website.

Other musicians flock to the Dynamod web portal. Here the information from a MySpace page is thrown into a Flash application. In a world driven by text and search, musicians post unsearchable content. This is not only a failure to realize the internet's power in exposing the artistic process, it is also bad marketing.

Open Source Art

What is the alternative? Now I stumble onto more nuanced ground. Some people are instrumentalists and that is all they want to be. They make records, polish them, sell them. They do not like to talk about what they do, share the process by which they do it, or explore where it is that they are heading. From the internet they seek only a means to advertise where they play, what they are selling and a way to let prospective employers know how to contact them. In these cases, MySpace is fine, forget everything I said.

Select others have sufficient fame that they share more than records and dates even if not through their own channels. Interviews are published on journalistic web sites. For them the need to embrace the new order is not as urgent, but still beneficial.

For the rest of us, the internet presents the opportunity to be artists in the way that we, as musicians, have always understood it, not the way record labels and the business model have shaped us. Coltrane's music, Bird's music, Miles's music, were always about the process. The artifact was secondary. It was a glimpse, a snapshot. To Columbia records, Kind of Blue was Miles' crowning achievement, Bitches Brew another milestone. To Impulse, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his defining achievement, Crescent another burst of creativity. To those of us who know better, these were gems along a bigger path. We love the records, but we care about the path. Who, in possession of a bootlegged Bird record prizes it less than its official counterpart? We cherish the raw. The development of the idea. The snapshots along the way are great, but the path captivates us.

Our moment has arrived. The internet is the new media. Radio was great for selling records. Television was great for selling records. The internet is great for sharing everything. The process can now be exposed. Imagine having access to John Coltrane's mind when he was practicing ten hours per day. Imagine knowing exactly what he was practicing, what he was reaching for.

For some, this proposition might seem scary. Not having to explain what it is that we do makes it easy not to have anything to explain. How can one pass off mindless harmonic super-impositions in the absence of a deeper concept as intellectual art if expected to explain what it is that they are doing.

Still, any resistance to the new media is futile. The old media is disappearing. The live concert is not going anywhere, but the mass audience is in the cloud. The CD is done. It will probably not be sufficient in this world to share nothing besides a business card with several attached mp3s. An artist must also be a thinker, a writer.

Great art is always of its time. Bach, Dostoevsky, Picasso, Miles. I believe that in this time, the creative process must be laid bare. How else can we reflect the times in which we live? Jazz, without the trite attempts to commercialize, has been perfectly suited to benefit from this paradigm shift for at least sixty years. Instead, the territory is ceded to Indie rock musicians who have managed to be more savvy and demonstrate themselves more literate in spite of the intellectualism associated with jazz. Art music will become the dominion of ideas again. The highest art in this age will be characterized not by the illusion of perfection or the air of intellectualism but by boldness of concept and an almost confrontational honesty.