…. to have this conversation…
This is the talk that started the day at TEDxNashville 2014. The magazine cover Dan Hogan is pointing to tells the whole story.
Denial of Death. At some point, it does become pointless.
The Melodores open TEDx:
… at TPAC’s Polk Theater for TEDxNashville:
And who on earth am I to wonder such a thing?
But after reading David Carr (my new favorite NYTimes columnist) critque the shenanigans at last week’s Austin Clusterfuck (aka “SxSW), you do have to wonder…
You may have heard by now that pop-star performance artist Stefanie Germanotta – aka Lady Gaga – was this year’s marquee performer and keynote speaker, following in the steps of such luminous predecessors as Bruce Springsteen and David Grohl. Maybe you’ve heard that the whole thing was a big shill for Doritos. Or maybe you heard that who got in to the big show in was determined by a raffle held via Twitter.
I guess this is what we missed:
We missed quite a spectacle, from what I can see in video clips and news reports. Lady Gaga was smeared in barbecue sauce and mock-roasted like a pig and then, with the ink on the check from Doritos barely dry — and with millions destined for her charity — she bit the tortilla chip that fed her. “I won’t play by your” — insert street-cred adjective — “rules,” she said.
She then wagged a crooked finger at her fans who were shooting pictures on their phone and had tweeted their way in at her instruction: “When you leave this earth, no one is going to care what you tweeted. Don’t let the machine and don’t let technology take you from this earth.”
Note the use of the word ‘spectacle.’ A word that often comes to my mind when watching the Grammy Awards. Who can forget Pink and her Cirque de Soleil routine?
Apparently we are supposed to overlook this latest exercise in spectacle-borne hypocrisy because Ms. Gaga donated the Doritos money to her charity. Well, Gagme.
Carr continues:
At her keynote address on Friday, Lady Gaga thanked Doritos and said plainly, “Without sponsorships, without all these people supporting us, we won’t have any more festivals because record labels don’t have any” money.
And, given the nature of this particular performance, that would be a bad thing because….??
Still, she’s probably right about anybody caring what I tweeted.
I still find it equal parts surprising and gratifying when somebody wants to hang one of my photos on a wall somewhere. Especially when it’s in, like, you know… and actual art gallery.
The first photo I ever had displayed in a gallery was several years ago when Chromatics – Nashville’s pre-eminent photo-finishing lab – displayed one of theruined abbey photos I brought back from Ireland in 2006. How fitting that I should remember that on St. Patrick’s Day…
Right now, The Second Floor Gallery at Chromatics is hosting an exhibition of various media depictions of “Natural Reflections.” I have not one but photos TWO hanging in the exhibit, which is open until June 26.
This one is called “Let There Be Light” and features my photo-muse, Pru Clearwater dancing with the sunset.
And this one is just called, well… “Balls.”
(Click the thumbnails to ’embiggen.’)
The exhibition at Chromatics is open until June 26, if you’re in the neighborhood (Dury’s, Plaza Art Supply…) I hope you’ll stop by and check it out.
Notes from a productive Sunday:
A few minutes ago, I posted this to my Facebook:
So I’m going through some notes and I find one from Sal Cincotta that says ‘My clients are not looking for a photographer. They’re looking for an artist.” Mantra for the week? Check.
And then this showed up:
I think I’m detecting a trend here. If not a downright theme for the coming week…
I wrote a little something yesterday about streaming music and the transition that is now threatening to disrupt the music business again as much as the advent of paid downloads did a decade ago.
In the course of that post I made a reference to seeing the future “through a rear view mirror,” which is one of the fundamental lessons I picked up years ago in the writings of Marshal McLuhan.
While I was citing that notion, it dawned on me to Google the phrase “mcluhan rear view mirror” and was surprised to discover that the phrase has its very own web page, which quotes the pertinent passage from The Medium Is The Massage:
When faced with a totally new situation,we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.’1
In other words, we are trying to fathom a streaming media future with the metrics of a unit-purchase past. In other, other words, flogging the engine with a buggy whip. Git along, little motorcar…
Actually, if you have any interest in McLuhan’s observations, this whole site is worth spending some time with. It is based on a doctoral thesis by an Australian named Alice Rae and is extensively researched and documented. Hopefully Alice won’t mind if I cite the centerpiece of her ‘about’ page:
Was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) one of history’s greatest thinkers?
Tom Wolfe, who met McLuhan in 1965, praised him in the New York magazine as a thinker on par with ‘Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov’.
Critics remained unimpressed, calling McLuhan a ‘false prophet’ and ‘one-idea man’ and his work ‘pretentious nonsense’ or at the very least ‘slightly dotty’.
Since McLuhan’s death in 1980, the advent of the Internet and the vindication of McLuhan’s theories has led to something of a McLuhan renaissance.
He was declared ‘Patron Saint’ of Wired magazine in 1993.
Which maybe explains why I keep coming back to him.
From the Department of No Shit, Sherlock:
Crowded Field
Derek Thompson points to the elephant in a post at TheAtlantic.com.
Citing the increasing saturation of the streaming music market (where any more than one or two services qualifies as saturation), Thompson points to the elephant that has been in the room since… well, since the first Real Audio player made streaming music a reality in… what, 1996?:
…what isn’t there room for in music?
Buying it.
“Young people today don’t buy music anymore,” said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Wedge Partners. The numbers agree.
I suppose my objection here should be something along the lines of “whatchyou mean ‘young people’, Kimosabee?”
Or maybe I should take it as a compliment that somebody thinks 63 can qualify as ‘young’ – particularly since I just bought tickets for a movie tonight at the reduced fare for ‘seniors.’ But I digress…
I have been arguing for years that the ‘unit purchase’ model for music – whether it’s physical products like CDs (or, yes, even the revered, resurrected vinyl…) or virtual units delivered as purchased downloads – has been on the wings of the dodo for years, and that any assertions to the contrary are an exercise in viewing the future through the rear view mirror (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I sincerely implore you to click the link and find out).
And no, the fact that I’m engaged in a project that is about to release its third physical product at the same time that I’m predicting the demise physical products is not lost on me. I write these things because I think I’m observant, maybe even a tad prescient. I never said that made me invulnerable to also being a hypocrite. Such is the nature of living on a cusp. But there I go again, digressing…
As Thompson reports, the handwriting is on the wall, the die is cast, the nails are in the coffin. Pick your metaphor, but this is we see when we turn the car around and start steering through the windshield:
“…digital music sales fell last year for the first time ever, by 6 percent, as the music business inches closer to an access-over-ownership model. Overall streaming (which includes digital radio) is up 32 percent to 118 billion song streams in 2013. On-demand streaming (e.g. pick and click a song on Spotify) doubled last year.
Meanwhile, we have Tommy Silverman and others at the annual Austin TX Spring Break Clusterfuck known as “SXSW,” (that’s pronounced “ess-ex-ess-doubleyew) professing to possess the keys to a $100-billion kingdom with a more colorful metaphor of his own:
This enema that we’re going through is making us realize that our business is much bigger than what we thought it could be,” Silverman said. “We’re in the attention business now.”
And the nominees for the 2014 ‘Masters of the Obvious’ award are….
Silverman etal be right, the entirety of the recorded music business could certainly be much larger than the rapidly-shrinking single-digit-billion-dollar business it has recently been reduced to.
I’ve done this math for you before: A couple of years ago the NPD group estimated that the average music ‘consumer’ spends a paltry FORTY dollars per year on music purchases (that figure is surely even less now). That expenditure adds a bountiful 30 or 40 new tracks to their record collection every year. Now persuade those tight-fisted consumers that for only TEN DOLLARS (per month…) they can have the entire history of recorded music – past-present-and-future – at their disposal, and you can effectively triple or even quadruple your aggregate industry top-line.
Of course, that’s assuming they have any money left after paying for their cell phone, cable teevee, broadband internet and Clover brewed coffees at Starbucks (which I am drinking as I write & post this…)
It may not add up to the $100-billion that Silverman is hallucinating, but it could be considerably more than whatever the current figures are.
But whatever the figures might be, we will never realize the full potential of any future business model until we stop trying to drag the old models long with us. I don’t care if your fancy new “human-powered” streaming music service is called “beats,” It does no good to beat an internal combustion engine with a buggy whip.
But there’s another message in all of this that I think has been overlooked, and that’s all this emphasis on recorded music. That’s the biggest buggy whip that we’re dragging along with us, the biggest thing that looms in that rear view mirror.
As long as we’re focused on how to preserve or grow the recorded music business, we’re going to miss the point of what Silverman inartfully calls “this emema” that the industry is going through.
What we cannot see so long as we’re driving backwards into the future, surveying the landscape in front of us through the rear view mirror (really, try to get that image in your head…), is that the ‘future of music’ is much less about the recorded music than it is about the way that music lived before it became any kind of product – back when music simply did not exist unless there was somebody in the room playing it for you, which person was often yourself and your friends.
The future of music is not any kind of product, physical or virtual, delivered by truck, download, or stream. It’s much more… organic, and ‘aural’ than that. But until we’re a little further removed from the product era, it’s going to be hard for most people to appreciate that prospect.
The idea was never more succinctly put than during a conversation I had with Scott Huler, one of the presenters at last year’s TEDx Nashville.
“I tell my kids,” Scott said, “that music is not something you buy. It’s something you make.”
I don’t care how many billions Tommy Silverman thinks the ‘music industry’ can be, those children are the future.
It’s no coincidence that a better picture renders better stories.
The future according to HDTV?
Ever since I got my first HDTV – would you believe it’s been more than 10 years? – I’ve been wondering what effect the higher resolution picture would have on the medium itself. Because, let’s face it, more than a thousand lines of resolution is really a completely different experience from the NTSC standard, the 525-line picture that defined the television picture for its first fifty years.
So if HDTV is effectively a new medium, and the medium is the message, then… what new message is this new medium be delivering?
I think David Carr answered the question in the New York Times over this past weekend:
The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet and threatening to consume my waking life in the process. I am not alone. Even as alternatives proliferate and people cut the cord, they are continuing to spend ever more time in front of the TV without a trace of embarrassment.
In case you don’t get the reference, “the vast wasteland” harkens back to a speech that then-FCC commissioner Newton Minnow delivered to the National Association of Broadcasters way back in 1961:
That speech pretty much set the tone for how television was regarded for several decades. It was always “the vast wasteland,” “the boob tube,” or “the idiot box.” Nobody of any intellectual standing ever admitted to actually watching TeeVee.
In the past several years though, as Carr articulates, the television universe has become much more vast – but much less of a wasteland. Oh, sure, we’ve still got the Kardashians (who?) Nancy Grace and Court TV, American Idol, Survivor and all of their “reality” brethren (because nothing says ‘reality’ more than having being followed around by a camera crew…). The lowest common denominator will always have a place in American culture, just like trailer parks and tent revivals.
But we’ve also got Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Justified, and more recently the just concluded first season of HBO’s anthology True Detective.
These shows and several others have expanded the narrative capacity of the medium – arguably (I would argue…) because the refined visual capacity of the higher resolution screen has forced writers, producers, actors and directors them to raise their own game.
In other words, television shows are better today because the medium itself is better.
But it’s not just the screen (and the theatrical, surround-sound audio) that is changing the game. It’s the mode of delivery as well.
I’ve had a DVR (TiVo) for longer than I’ve had HDTV, and that device probably changed my viewing habits even more than HDTV did. Before TiVo, I’d always time-shifted the series I wanted to watch with a VCR, but TiVo changed the whole experience, making it much easier to record, store, and play back entire seasons of multiple shows. And fast-forward through the commercials…
Now, add to TiVo: Netflix, AppleTV, Hulu, HBO GO and an array of other services that are delivered mostly through the Internet; then add YouTube and Apple Airplay or Google Chromecast that give you the ability to flip just about any ‘content’ from any networked device onto you high-def flat panel display – and it’s a wonder we ever get off the sofa.
