No offense to the op here, who I appreciate. ^^v
I find this hand-wringing, pseudo-intellectualism about culture about as annoying as the way old professors whine about The Book. We need to resist adopting elitism in our cultural critiques and we need to begin addressing the need for strong anti-capitalism as well.
The commodification of culture in music happened decades ago when it was fully corporatized. Who cares about the commodity as object.
Culture isn’t in things. We are culture. The idea that it is out there for us to possess or repossess is some capitalist trick of light to get us to debate about the best way to produce and purchase commodities for owners.
Ted Gioia at The Smart Set writes on streaming versus the sense of musical ownership. Back in our day, you bought your record and you loved that forty-minute object and its detailed packaging. In 2017, downloading is a sideshow compared to streaming.
Yeh, that object. Isn’t it interesting how these hipsters never address how music and records are actually produced? I’ll tell you what I lament. Having to hang out with yet another person who believes they got something special in their hands because they were able to afford it or find it before anybody else. Fucking competition to own the special thing.
Past pop kids always treated their records as a bit disposable. But even they were fans — radio listenership went way up in the ’80s when they stopped surveying just music fans and started surveying the general public. Modern pop is now literally targeted at people who aren’t really into music.
Preservation of culture is, of course, about to become a massive arse. There’s already people releasing records primarily on Spotify. Are you going to just rip the uncompressed audio from the MP3 or Ogg that Spotify actually send? Of course, when marketing demands the supply of full uncompressed streams, or even “hi-res”, that’ll be worth saving the decoded stream. But a huge amount is just going to be lost — there is no “cloud”, there’s just someone else’s computer. Did anyone catch the pre-lawsuit version of that great track? No? Oh well.
Notice how the ability to happily consume well is being conflated with the same old half-ass worry about The Preservation of Culture. By the way, the preservation of culture has always been a massively sexist and racist arse when it comes to rock and roll, soul, rhythm and blues, and pop. Never mind jazz, where we have what I’m sure is a long queue of whitesplaining films and retrospectives to endure post The Damien Chazelle Experience. Consumers will save the day. But this complaint is just a little more nuanced than the five nerds at the bar yelling at each other about which audio format is the only format worth listening to.
Now, the issue of people bothering to own a copy of music might seem like an issue but only insofar as we’re willing to talk about access to libraries. Literature has always suffered this setback because not everybody can afford books. The mass market in genre fiction is a very consumable narrow representation of the possibilities for the novel and let’s not discuss the fate of poetry. Nevertheless, the novel and poetry remain innovative presences.
The solution to these problems is not “to get out there and buy things” as the author at the link notes, but I just can’t with this kind of criticism:
As music becomes completely commodified, we should expect the general public to care even less. Gioia exhorts the reader to get out there and buy things, but I find even I’m listening to the latest lovingly curated Factory Benelux reissues on Spotify ‘cos it’s there, and casually playing songs off YouTube even when I have the ripped CD right at hand on the home server. Streaming as the answer to the Midas plague. Welcome to the bronze age.
There’s gotta be some way to turn what the kids are streaming into subculture, even in the midst of the Great Cultural Fragmentation. Nagging non-buyers to buy is not going to be it. What will be? Keeping in mind that we’re competing with the whole Internet.
Look, what’s being implied here is the more people that have access to something, the less it’s worth. It’s a capitalist critique of music culture that is posing as consumer criticism. gtfo
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