[DMCA-Activists] William Gibson to Director's Guild

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from Pho list)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: pho: Future of Digital Music (Wm Gibson view)
   Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 11:59:44 +0100
   From: Wendy K <address@hidden>
     To: address@hidden


apologies if this has been previously posted from somewhere else.


> http://feed.proteinos.com/001359.html


The Future of Digital Music
By William Rowe on May 23, 2003 09:11 AM

A little insight into the future of digital music from a recent speech by
William Gibson at Director's Guild to America. Inspiring stuff.

"But I need to diverge here into another industry, one that's already and
even more fully feeling the historical impact of the digital: music. Prior
to the technology of audio recording, there was relatively little one could
do to make serious money with music.

Musicians could perform for money, and the printing press had given rise to
an industry in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a
matter of patronage. The medium of the commercial audio recording changed
that, and created industry predicated on an inherent technological monopoly
of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor
manufacture audio recordings. That monopoly has now ended.

Some futurists, looking at the individual musician's role in the realm of
the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of
the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and
non-profit) will eventually become a musician's only potential ticket to
relative fame and wealth.

The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of
market position, is seen to have been technologically determined.  And
technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction and
distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus are in
the hands of whoever might desire them.

We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals.
I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly
as an example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change.
It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying
business-model of popular musical stardom entirely.

If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and
few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a
complex interaction between several. You can see the difference if you
compare the music industry's initial outcry against "home taping" with the
situation today.

-- 

Wendy K, Netbod
http://www.ninjatune.net

-- 

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