Dave Allen
Dave Allen. Director, Interactive Strategy

What happened to the Big Idea in music technology?

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Or: Did we ever need one..? A prelude to a panel discussion at SF MusicTech 9/12

Wolfman Jack John Peel
Wolfman Jack (left) and John Peel

I read this article recently: The Elusive Big Idea by Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California and the author of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

For me it was a fascinating reminder of how timid our contemporary thinking has become, at least as expressed in public, (are people keeping their big ideas to themselves?) and it makes me wonder what has caused this timidity. And how, as Gabler points out below, can the editors at the Atlantic not understand the difference between “ideas” and “observations.”

The July/August issue of the Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” Take a deep breath. The ideas include “The Players Own the Game” (No. 12), “Wall Street: Same as it Ever Was” (No. 6), “Nothing Stays Secret” (No. 2), and the very biggest idea of the year, “The Rise of the Middle Class — Just Not Ours,” which refers to growing economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Now exhale. It may strike you that none of these ideas seem particularly breathtaking. In fact, none of them are ideas. They are more on the order of observations. But one can’t really fault the Atlantic for mistaking commonplaces for intellectual vision. Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.

I love that last sentence. Yet here’s a question – is this lack of intellectual vision a peculiarly American problem? Gabler again:

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.

And I might add, clichés.

If you have time read that article now, it’s not too long. Here’s the link again. Then please come back here.

Ok, now I want to go on to discuss the Lack of Disruption in Music Technology which is the title of a panel I am leading at SFMusic Tech on September 12th. Let’s start out with a couple of questions – why is there a dearth of Big Ideas around music delivery systems, particularly in the path that leads from artists to fans? And what causes that dearth – is it a lack of intellectual vision or the lack of research by technology companies when it comes to understanding the history of the recorded music business?

I invited Corey Denis to the panel and she pointed out to me recently that she knows many people inside music tech companies who have never read Frederic Dannen’s Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business. This is what Billboard had to say about the book – “Hit Men is the shocking, highly controversial expose of the venality, greed, and corruption of many of the assorted kingpins and hustlers who rule over the music industry. A sobering, blunt, and unusually well-observed depiction of the sometimes sordid inner workings of the music business.”

Frederic Dannen may not exactly be the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of investigative journalism but it’s an eye-opening read. It’s too late for the existing services but if you’re thinking of launching a new music service perhaps you should give it a read..my gut tells me Steve Jobs probably read it before starting to negotiate with the labels over iTunes and music catalogs.

To tie this in to Gabler’s article it’s worth pointing out that I don’t believe the lack of Big Ideas in music technology thinking sits only at the feet of music tech folks; many, many artists have failed to come up with Big Ideas themselves regarding different ways to reach their fans through technology. Yes they may embrace Facebook, Twitter and the now floundering MySpace, but those are tactics not Big Ideas.

Modern rock music is blandly conservative, which in and of itself appears to me to reflect the timidity of modern youth and young adults (can we please stand up for something?) Musicians seem to prefer the bland and banal to the barricades. They act as if they’ve been neutered by American society (and yes, I know that’s a generalization.) My current favorite exception, for which I will no doubt get some flack, is – Tyler The Creator. He should not be tamed.

I wrote recently about the London riots, London Burning, pointing out the parallels of disaffected youth in London today to those of 1980. The punk rock movement came about partly because of the disillusionment with society and politics at that time – it was the soundtrack to the 1980′s societal upheaval – and yet here we are in 2011 with multiple wars, global recession, mass unemployment, and not a peep of dissent from artists and bands, never mind a full on punk rock revolution.

Clearly something has to happen: Kids won’t sit around and do nothing. They will do something – and doing and making still requires big thinking. How do we fuel the big thinking part?

Musicians could start with considering the issue of the ancillary use of music by corporations to their benefit at a cost to the musicians. Case in point – when my band Gang of Four made a video, the record company put the cost of that production in the band’s debit column to be paid back. And yet they gave the video away for free to MTV, a company owned by the conglomerate Viacom who honestly could afford to pay to license that content. But no, free! To add salt to the wound MTV doesn’t pay performance royalties to the artists either.

The modern version of that is the wholesale commoditizing of music catalogs by the labels who create licensing deals with the streaming music services. Those actions in turn further homogenize the streaming music service systems as the services only have access to the same catalogs – there is no differentiation. Artists get pennies, or less than a penny, when someone streams their song, and the listener gets advertising in the stream unless they pay to escape the ads.

Music streaming on the web is not a Big Idea, it’s simply a lack of intellectual vision and thinking. Worse, it has advanced the “passive listening” experience. It’s just terrestrial radio dumped on to the web in other words – including advertising. The big daddy of all of these services, because it had an IPO, is Pandora. Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, has this to say about its mobile advertising business model:

“The company also trumpeted the fact that half of its revenues now come from mobile advertising. But some analysts view that as a weakness, not a strength. He doubts that such campaigns will produce the necessary ROI those advertisers demand. The reason is, Greenfield writes, is that Pandora is a “passive listening service” and users generally aren’t inclined to be looking at their phones while these ads run. And when Pandora listeners have the site open on their PC, they’re apt to have other tabs open and therefore aren’t looking at their computer screen either.”

Pandora hopes to turn a “small profit by the end of 2012.”

The Big Idea that launched Pandora was that “FM Radio sucks!” Yet, the Music Genome Project notwithstanding, the company has simply recreated the FM radio experience online. So Pandora’s fonders didn’t come up with a Big Idea, they merely made an observation. Certainly FM Radio sucks because of annoying advertising and corporate playlists, but Pandora didn’t solve the real problem – the lack of a human DJ (think John Peel or Wolfman Jack) who created their own playlists. Back in the day, those DJ’s filtered music through their vast knowledge base and personal taste in music and kept the emotional-connection-to-music continuum intact. Music is personal, no algorithm on earth can match that and provide a singular service to each and everyone of us. Last Night a DJ Saved my Life..Indeep. (Video)

A question I like to ask before embarking on a digital project is – what problem does it solve? Most streaming service founders seem to think that the problem was that we needed more interaction when we access music collections, so they provided playlist ability for music fans. They also appear to believe that they were making the radio experience “better.” Unfortunately they missed the real problem of terrestrial radio; when FM radio became homogenized and the US radio stations formed into conglomerates such as Clear Channel, they neutered the DJ. When Wolfman Jack was programming his own rock shows in the USA, and across the Atlantic in London John Peel was exposing young people’s ears to music they’d never heard, they were just two examples of the extraordinary power DJ’s had on the music business. They were tastemakers, influencers and filters of music culture. When the conglomerates did away with the role of the DJ in favor of automated playlists they ruined everything. The DJ was the voice of the station and he or she was considered dangerous to the bottom line if they were to offend their advertisers – they had to play nice, or go.

The music streaming companies didn’t see the problem that needed solving – the lack of authentic DJ’s who programmed their own shows – because they thought “interactivity” was the answer. It’s the “Did you see the Gorilla?” problem.

The bottom line is that there is no differentiation at the end of the day between Mog, Rdio, Spotify, Rhapsody, and all the others too numerous to mention, if they all have the same music catologs – widgets and tactics don’t count. One company that has embarked upon research in an attempt to fully understand its user base (it’s been surveying them as it moves toward launching a new platform this fall,) and already understands the power of niche, is eMusic.com, a company that’s attempting to give its customers what they are actually asking for. That’s the opposite of “knowing what music fans want” by the way.

I’d like to take a stand and say there is nothing new in digital. Throughout history new technologies have had a habit of turning up to disrupt systems, business and society.

Think about music – from the earliest wax cylinder, through vinyl albums and cassettes, to 8 Track cartridges to CDs, there has been constant innovation. The problem is that the technologists devising these new forms of music delivery never ask artists or music fans how they would like to deliver or receive music. I discussed this in my essay The End of the Recording Album as the Organizing Principle.

I suspect there’s an assumption amongst music technology folks that they know best, or, it’s a “we can build it so we should” mentality. And, I would argue, the proliferation of streaming music services that allow us to “interact with music” are doing exactly the opposite. We get to interact with playlists or widgets, and share etc..the music is actually subservient to those “interactions” – it becomes a passive experience..

If musicians, record labels and music technology companies can’t get beyond the fact that innovation occurs regularly, ie digital is not an aberration it’s just part of the cosmic order of things, then we’ll never get to the Big Idea.

And now, to undermine my entire argument above, I’d like to ask: Do we even need a Big Idea in Music Technology?

Just last weekend the New York Times ran an article about a company called Qtrax. Yet another music tech startup. The company failed big a few years ago, but incredibly it’s back again. Once bitten, twice shy doesn’t seem to rub off on these guys.

From the article:

“Still, the false start and missteps raise credibility questions for prospective investors, says Michael H. Baniak, a partner at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff, based in Chicago.

And the issues don’t end with the over-the-top promises it made in 2008. The company has also been sued by at least four entities: Oracle, the software giant; Osher Capital, a private investment company; Millennium Information Technologies, a networking solutions company; and the Las Vegas Wall Street Group, an investment company based in Brooklyn. Some of the suits are related to technology licenses while others are associated with unpaid loans.”

All of the above is but one example of trust and authenticity issues, or what my good friend and fellow panelist at SF MusicTech, David Ewald, calls “trust erosion..”

As we know, record companies and music tech companies are often at odds, but not all the time. For instance record companies have been known to take a piece of ownership in some music startups as well as also charging them a premium for licensing their catalogs. Still, both sides are quick to litigate when they feel wronged. These type of schizophrenic relationships create a large churn rate for the startups, one that is almost constant – someone raises venture capital, someone else sues them, lawyers get paid, startup goes away – repeat.

Meanwhile as David says, “why would the average music fan have any reason to trust any of these folks, especially when they offer free players that are merely vehicles to serve some ads in between the music that fans are trying to find.” As he also says, we’ve all endured our music collections quickly becoming relics over and over – vinyl, tapes, CDs, mp3s, cloud services, next?

He correctly laments “There’s nothing or no one left to trust…except the artists we’re all trying to listen to.”

It’s a digital minefield out there for music startups. Check out the ongoing heated dispute between Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame and Grooveshark. Fripp is simply attempting to protect his rights in the work of King Crimson. He says he has never given permission to anyone that allows them to sell or license his music, or be made available for downloading or streaming. Seems pretty straightforward to me but you really ought to click on this link and see what Grooveshark’s lawyers are getting in to.. Fripp wants transparency in his communications with them, Grooveshark’s lawyers are pushing hard to stop that. They are acting just like recording company lawyers to me.

Another great friend and thinker who’ll also be on my panel is Roy Christopher. He has this to say: “More and more, I’m doubting how much I really care about the Big Idea, at least where music is concerned. For a lifelong music fan like me (my foremost point-of-view on all of this is that of a fan), music is better now than it has ever been. The Big Idea, when it happens, is likely to harm the situation (for the fans). I hope they (the music and tech companies) never get control of it again.”

Maybe everyone has been looking in the wrong direction? The labels, the music tech companies, the musicians and their fans. The advent of the MP3 file changed the course of music delivery and retailing and with it created disruption at all levels of the recorded music industry.

What’s interesting to me is that there became an almost common cause to “save the record industry” as if the record industry had always had musician’s rights at heart. That was never the case. When you signed to a label it was the equivalent of having a mortgage on your home, except when you paid back the “mortgage” to the label you never got to own the “home.”

Today it’s slightly more complicated because we have to add in the venture capitalists who are out to make a buck or two.. If I were to insert a Venn diagram here it would consist of two large circles – one side for the record labels, the other for the VC’s. In the middle would be the music tech startups. The VC’s and the record labels can hardly contain their smirks.. and of course, the musicians and music fans are not in on the joke.

I’ll end with a question for music lovers: Would you rather save the recording industry, the VC’s, the music technology startup companies or the musicians that provide the means for both those entities to actually exist? I trust that we all know the right answer.

If you are attending SF MusicTech drop by the panel and ask us some questions. Other than Roy, David and Corey mentioned above, two other panelists are Jesse Von Doom of CashMusic and Alexander Ljung of Soundcloud

Some reading that could be considered research for this article:

Time Warner to Subsidize Subscriber TV Device
Revamped MySpace will have iTunes, Spotify and Vevo in its Crosshairs (Yeah, I’d really like to go up against iTunes..sheesh!)
The Elusive Big Idea
Let Readers Share E-books and They’ll Really Take Off
Pandora Revenues Jump, Chance of Breaking Even in 2012
From Scroll to Screen: The Reading Device, a Short History
Confessions of an Ex-Moralist

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Comments

10 Responses to “What happened to the Big Idea in music technology?”

  1. Jared Hoffman
    September 9th, 2011 @ 1:04 pm

    For better and for worse, technology can’t save or kill the music industry.

    The music industry is in a state of extreme stress, because we are still trying to adapt new technology, new tools, to an old way of thinking, to an old model. At the end of the day, Spotify, Rhapsody, et.al. are just a more efficient pipelines than bricks+mortar (albeit pipelines so broad that they have substantially diminished the economic value of their content.) Primarily, they serve the same old masters in the same way.. the labels, the publishers, the consumers.

    Until we fundamentally rewrite the rules and transform the existing, historic structures that broker this relationship between artist + audience, little will change.

    Maybe we are looking at this on too small a scale. The structural issue extends beyond recorded music, to the organization of, the balance of power, throughout the entire music ecosystem.

    Look at the number of relationships/structures that exist (through out the industry) only because they represent boundaries required by the technology of the times. For example, in the world of concerts and touring – Why do we still have Ticketmaster and all the insanity surrounding ticketing and inside fees, rebates, givebacks. At the dawn of time, it made sense, tickets were local to the box office of the venue. Then came ticketing services, with multiple outlets, and finally the transition to online… but the structure in place between promoter/venue/artist never adapted. Why don’t we rewrite this now so that… the artist is selling their tickets, tour-wide nationally, directly?

    But that is big, big, hairy structural change on so many levels. Lot’s of burned fingers, and an entrenched mesh of interests and players. There’s a whole new generation of ticketing tech companies coming up who are deploying new tools, new pricing, but, as with Spotify, MOG, etc, they are serving the old game.

    Technology can’t save or kill music. Only people can, ideas can.

    Technology can provide the tools.

    So, let’s talk about saving music first, and then figure out how we can use technology to help.

  2. steve harvey
    September 9th, 2011 @ 1:25 pm

    I thoroughly enjoy your writing, Dave. Let’s hope you put some of it into book form one day.

    I’d like to read more of your thoughts on Big Ideas. What was the last Big Idea, to your mind? Thinking of the last few, have they come from any one area: labels, tech companies, musicians, fans?

    You mention MTV. That, to my mind, was a Big Idea at the time. Napster, too, for that matter. Neither lived up to its potential, for diverse reasons.

    I haven’t experienced Bjork’s new iPad album/apps, but that – and there have been others, I believe – seems to portend something significant, if not Big.

    I believe you’ve discussed the problem of filters in the digital music world. I grew up listening to Peel at a time when there were numerous other shows worth listening to on Radio 1. I regularly read more than one of the music weeklies from cover to cover. Now, there are just too many places to go for music recommendations. My music consumption these days tends to be driven by Google, diving down one rabbit hole after another, each sparking a new avenue of exploration. “Music is personal,” as you noted; something that elegantly supports that music consumption paradigm would be a Big Idea for me.

    On the flip side, as an artist, you have a similar problem: how best to be heard above the thousands of others.

    I have followed Mr. Fripp’s diary for years. It’s such a pity that the constant work of dealing with legal matters has effectively taken him away from music.

  3. Suzanne Lainson
    September 9th, 2011 @ 3:48 pm

    I don’t think the Big Idea is going to be found in music delivery systems. I think it is going to be found (and is happening) in music creation systems. Right now most music people are still thinking in terms of one group of people making music and another group of people consuming it. But as the music creation tools become smarter, easier to use, cheaper, and more widely available, they allow that many more people to create their own music. Imagine each individual being his/her own music creator, promoter, and producer, and not only not needing record labels, but also not needing musicians, other than as fellow collaborators. Everyone becomes a music maker. Music becomes ubiquitous. It’s everywhere and everyone does it.

  4. Jeremy
    September 9th, 2011 @ 3:49 pm

    “When the conglomerates did away with the role of the DJ in favor of automated playlists they ruined everything.”

    I had not thought of this as a turning point (just never looked at it as a moment that you could point to), but there is so much truth to this. Today’s generation of music “fans” will never understand the power that the DJ held in defense of their listeners. There are a few remnants left on a handful of public radio stations (notably Nic Harcourt before his departure at KCRW), but there are certainly no tastemakers in commercial radio anymore that I know of. A real shame.

    Thanks for such a detailed, well-reasoned piece. Really enjoyed it.

  5. Luke Lefler
    September 11th, 2011 @ 2:50 am

    It is always with great interest that I read your essays, Dave – they are consistently insightful and thought-provoking, and generally they reach for an over-arching truth within which to wrap the discourse. You invite and promote civil discussion and debate.

    Here you again speak directly to what is on the minds of many for whose lives music is an organizing concern. Your thoughts stake out a foothold in the void you’ve identified, and extend a hand to help us inside. In this essay you explore the obverse of your thesis-question and wind up climbing back out and away from it to some extent, allowing the discussion to breathe and our thoughts to expand.

    Your cast of characters includes many of my personal idols: the beleaguered gentleman Robert Fripp, the epitomitical DJ of my youth Wolfman Jack, and John Peel – the epitomitical DJ, period. (Having not the discipline to become a working musician like Fripp, I became a DJ in noncommercial radio in the 80s.)

    Although non-commercial radio lacks the market share of its commercial siblings, in the USA it is the only place where terrestrial radio programmers can enjoy a Peel-like autonomy. It actually requires considerable effort for me to not use the past tense in talking about terrestrial, but you are keen to regard the historically crucial relationship of radio DJ and consumer.

    Technology has resulted in many more DJs (the .fm sites turntable and blip, for example), as well as many ex-DJs and producers (and regular J. Does) who have become recording artists and hobbyists. Of course “DJ The Guy In Accounting” might have great taste but I doubt he holds a candle to DJ Peel. As a consumer I am going to entrust my time and money to my best sources and my own serendipitous investigations. Anyone who can’t or won’t do that for himself is really on his own, at the mercy of promotion and placement.

    After hearing about it for a while I recently checked out Spotify during the initial US roll-out and within a week I opted for the Unlimited plan (but not the one including mobile, because I’m not one of those headset people). Contrary to your statement, Dave, for me this sefvice is The Biggest Idea in a long time in music tech.

    For the moment I’ll leave aside the question of price and compensation, because 1) we know that price is always subject to change, and 2) I don’t know enough about the compensation of musicians except that it’s reputedly dismal. As a heavy, long-term music consumer I have invested a lot of money and energy in all corners of the industry, from corporate to indie, labels large and small, mom and pops and chain stores alike. I have gone wherever I had to go (and usually spent whatever I was charged) to obtain the music experience I sought. Today I spend $4.99 a month on Spotify and I contemplate parting ways with the bulk of my physical music collection.

    Spotify is the only delivery system by which I would have heard the new album by Thurston Moore as of today. Even if Spotify did not exist, I probably wouldn’t have bought this album, it’s likely that I wouldn’t have been able to obtain a copy from the County Library by now, I may not have read about it, and I may not have even known about it. I heard a track from it on The Leaf Label’s office playlist on Spotify. I trusted Leaf (as I tend to) without even the least of the usual risks. Now I am fortunate to be able to listen to the Thurston Moore album at any time, wherever I have Spotify open, on any of the PCs I use.

    Another, perhaps better, example is the latest Kanye/Jay Z album. It’s certain I would not have been exposed to this album in my usual course, at least not in its entirety. But the issue of cost, convenience and availability was removed, and all that remained was my decision whether or not to listen. And why not? If I didn’t care to listen further I could stop at any time without remorse, without the sense of not being unable to give it another try when I was in a different mood (I didn’t need to; I enjoyed it all the way through the first time).

    There is no “homogeneity” in music streaming services as far as I am concerned; there is my legitimate choice in music streaming services and its millions of tracks. The market may not be able to support multiple homogenous streaming music services anyway. So after years of spending thousands of dollars patronizing the recording industry I am throwing in my modest lot with Spotify. If Spotify doesn’t prevail, I will cross that bridge, but meanwhile I have lots of back catalogs and new releases to keep me as pleased as a hog in slop. If this new paradigm is born of “a lack of intellectual vision and thinking,” so be it. Other than a few user experience tweaks, all it needs in order to be perfect is the rest of the stuff I’d like to hear – the usual holdouts represented by Apple Records, Peter Gabriel and our dear Mr. Fripp. It’s missing Tot Taylor’s albums but I have already searched far and wide to find my copies. And let us not forget everything that is out of circulation and may never make it to streaming. Incidentally, “Solid Gold” would be a welcome addition to Spotify; yet again, I have the vinyl and CD already, so its absence is only situational for me. Meanwhile, I have The Smiths’ and The Kinks’ and thousands of others’ catalogs to explore. I may never have known just how much I dig Aram Ilyich Khachaturian, although Spotify has only a handful of his recorded works. I don’t need to go to a different store, a different format or even a different website to hook up with the vast majority of music I want to hear or have yet to explore.

    Pandora made no sense to me as a consumer. In my considered opinion it is the opposite experience from what you describe. I found myself constantly addressing the user interface, mostly to tell the “genome” how much I didn’t like what it chose for me. In so doing I saw plenty of the Glenlivet bottle that was the subject of its advertising at the time. I don’t have to care who Spotify thinks is a related artist, but I enjoy that feature. In fact I enjoy the related artists feature as much if not more than I enjoy finding music on one of my friends’ playlists.

    Spotify does not push me around and make me uselessly feed an un-intuitive, ill-coded “Project.” If I wanted to tandem “Year of the Cat” and “Fake Plastic Trees” on repeat all day it would not protest. By the same token I don’t feel it has diminished the music or made it subservient to my “interaction.” On the contrary it has magnified my enthusiasm for music. Moreover, for me it has made music more egalitarian and less esoteric. It took quite a big idea indeed for this fringe-dweller to applaud the obliteration of the last boundaries in music, after all of the remixing, reissuing, rehabilitations, reunions and ironic cross-overs of the last decades.

    If I had to lament, I would curse the meager interactive platforms I must use when I have occasion to “share” something from my listening experience. But that is more of a reflection on my social media network and my ability to inform it, rather than on the impact-neutral content. Nothing forces me to interact with Spotify beyond setting up the stream, whether via a playlist or a simple query. Rather, it is a new journey every session.

    Dave, I appreciate the emphasis you place on that which has the potential to distance us from direct appreciation of art. That is the very reason I gravitate to Spotify – it poses the fewest obstacles to my direct listening experience. Maybe that is all wrong. Maybe I am supposed to still be fighting with cellophane and handling media by the edges and fussing with die-cut cardboard in plastic liners. There was a day that I totally relished that complete experience but I can live without it today because there is a sufficient substitute. I could spend a day in one nook of Spotify in the same way I could spend a day in one room of the National Gallery of Art.

    It is hard to not sympathize with Fripp or any other working musician who has held up his end of the deal by wrting, practicing, rehearsing, recording and touring. After following his carreer for some years, his argumentativeness isn’t surprising to me in the least. I heartily commend him for calling out the scoundrels as he always has. However I fail to understand this general attitude of his (and yours as well, Dave) toward this model of licensing for streaming. In this day and age, what else is supposed to become of the early-to-mid-period King Crimson catalog? What anticipated renaissance will return it to its once rarefied state? I have a gorgeous original vinyl as well as a first edition EG Digital Remaster compact disc of “In the Wake of Poseidon.” Why should I not be able to enjoy it on Spotify alongside all of the obscure early 70s records that I didn’t embrace so strongly? I could rip my CD and queue it up within the Spotify player, but (correct me if I’m wrong) Fripp obtains no royalties from that. I assume that today one can obtain “Poseidon” legitimately only on the standard physical formats. While he is entitled to maintain and defend his stance, I can’t imagine this scenario is earning Fripp more pennies than if he were to submit to the wholesale streaming licensing model. The work certainly isn’t out there doing its magic as much as it coud be. His legend may be intact but I fail to see why his valuable contributions should be sequestered through this period of streaming consumption.

    Maybe he is smarter than the rest, and there is something I’m missing. I will gladly be persuaded to ditch the whole thing if it’s proved that I’m helping to defeat musicians, who I would of naturally choose to protect before the recording industry, the VC’s, or the music technology startup companies.

    Previously, Dave, you have opined that musicians ought to be brilliant or get out of the way, and that we have arrived at end of the recording album as the organizing principle. I for one still believe in the recording album as a fine organizing principle, and I probably always will. I also feel that everyone who wants to should make an album, also that, as always, I can decide for myself whether I will listen to it, how much of it I will listent to, in what order, with what else, at the same time as another one if I want to, and how often.

    I submit that, instead of the demise of the album, instead of the great drought of big ideas, we are at the demise of those who pick winners and losers. I believe we are at the end of esotericism as regards music. We are certainly at the end of anything that resembles what the recording industry used to look like, as long as one does not watch the awards shows.

    Perhaps that is the reason the kids aren’t doing anything now, not that we can see anyway. More than ever there is an whole dimension lost between the flat screen and the street. Riots and revolt are on the rise. Maybe the US is not leading the way today but when it catches up it will be the focal point, and music will serve the role it always has in times of unrest.

    In your criticism of miscasting observations as ideas you have also made a series of observations. Likewise my preceding comments are also observations. Observations are in fact what trigger ideas big and small. I dare say that observations alone constitute certain seminal, barricade-charging works – works which we collectively bemoan a current lack of, but which nonetheless inform the ideas we still manage to cultivate.

    Perhaps the kids are also observing. I’d like to think that they are.

  6. Dave Allen
    September 11th, 2011 @ 10:45 am

    Luke, thank you for such a well-reasoned response. As always, this is a forum for debate although I can be guilty of pushing an agenda too often. So, where to begin? I’ll try and address your points one by one.

    First you note that I am making observations, which is true, but that doesn’t run counter to my point that we are lacking Big Ideas in the music technology arena. I’m not attempting to have a Big Idea but I will come close toward the end of these responses.

    Spotify – I’m puzzled about your idea that Spotify is a Big Idea. If as you say “Pandora made no sense to me as a consumer” and Spotify only has access to the same music catalogs as Pandora, what makes Spotify the Big Idea? Perhaps you mean that it is functionally different? That alone doesn’t set it aside as major leap forward in music tech. It is still a streaming service and one you pay for to avoid advertising, and that business model, advertising, is the one that drives me nuts. It doesn’t appear to create the revenues that these companies need to survive so I’m amazed that companies keep using it. Although of course they are really doing it to appease their investors. All that said, I’m glad you’re enjoying Spotify as it’s not my intention to pick on any one company.

    Robert Fripp and also my own music catalog – you make a good point about how music could linger, lost and forgotten, if it weren’t to be found in a streaming music service. That’s not the issue that Fripp and myself are concerned about. I do note that you can get great vinyl reissues directly through Fripp’s site. The issue is that our catalogs are provided by record labels without asking permission for their use in those services. Fripp makes it clear that he never authorized those transactions and is dead set against them. I take the position that Gang of Four songs should not be available, but only because of the fact that we never authorized nor were we consulted about making them available. Fripp and me are not being luddites here – we simply want to control the rights to access ourselves, so that we can negotiate with Pandora, Spotify, iTunes et al and perhaps get a better deal to boot. By the way, you mention ripping your Fripp CD to add to Spotify’s player and think that Fripp doesn’t get royalties – he does from the sale of the CD and as you own it you can add it to your iTunes or Spotify player at will. If you think we are getting fair royalties from the streaming services please let set that straight: we don’t, we get pennies..

    You also mentioned homogeneity, what I meant there is in the catalogs not how one chooses to stream or play them.

    Finally, how about this as a Big Idea? Musicians work in tandem as a collective, without getting angry and defensive, to persuade the labels to come back to the negotiating table and work out a fair and decent deal for how our songs are sold and/or packaged to these online music companies. We have always been left out of the conversation and the ultimate results are far from satisfactory for both the music fan and the musicians. I’m tired of lining venture capitalist’s pockets..

    Thanks for the conversation, I hope you’ll respond.

  7. Luke Lefler
    September 11th, 2011 @ 7:01 pm

    Dave, you have my support in achieving your desired proximity to a Big Idea, and I wish you the best.

    In my role as a consumer I tire of lining the pockets of corporations such as Comcast for the use of the internet and to enjoy satellite TV transmissions via cable, whereas a generation ago this relationship did not exist – what we received was primarily funded by advertising, a model neither of us are fond of. Today, however, my Xfinity package is the best value for the services I want to have, but it is indeed a flawed model that rewards the distribution system more richly than it does the content creators.

    In my haste I probably lost sight of your intended purpose in seeking the Big Idea. I now see that the Big Idea ought to be about a model that includes musicians favorably in the deal. Legal shenanigans notwithstanding, no one can argue against your desire to control access to your work. Yes, you and Fripp have earned your places at that table by not only being forward-thinking musicians and non-luddites in re music tech, but also because you insist, to my greatest admiration, to be fairly compensated for your work. It’s only that my cynical (or at least skeptical) mind wonders whether they are holding your chairs at that table, and how you persuade your musician colleagues to join your utopian collective. Historically in these situations, the solution has not been to persuade the oppressive system without getting angry and defensive, rather it has been to strike, to boycott, to protest, to shut down, and to revolt.

    You noted the shift that occurred with FM radio in the 70s. Truly this was a huge deal, especially for those of us in our teen years smack in the middle of forming our musical tastes. With some distance, I’m able to observe that this shift happened not only because station owners armed with stats and demographics discovered how to zombify their listenership, but also because there were plenty of artists willing to contribute slick and hollow garbage to the cause (I’m thinking The Cars, Foreigner, and many once-progressive artists who migrated to the AOR sound in the mid-70s).

    I do not begrudge any artist for having chosen to mine that lode, or for being subsumed into it. That system made superstars out of many artists such as Pink Floyd and Bob Seger who had toiled in the shadows for years. So it seemed not to be a question of where is the money, but rather who is the audience? What percentage of “Don’t Fear The Reaper” was Blue Oyster Cult finding more fans and what percentage of it was more music fans finding Blue Oyster Cult?

    Also, notably, Fripp disbanded King Crimson in 1974 and released nothing under his or Crimson’s name for the rest of the 70s. Fripp’s sabbatical led to more ground-breaking work upon his return, but it did not change the relations of production in the music industry. My observation here is that, no matter what the industry, for every linchpin who abdicates his role, whether that choice is based on principle or spiritual calling, those who remain will endeavor fill the vacuum.

    The dreary mid-70s trend through AOR and Disco preceded the Punk and Post-punk eras comprising the late 70s to the mid-80s. Few would dispute that the latter was one of the most fertile and exciting periods in modern music. Once MTV became the center of pop commerce (and honestly I do not recall seeing Gang of Four, or many of my favorites for that matter, in even modest rotation on MTV), the attendant cycle resolved rather quickly as compared with the culture wars of the 70s: soon a new mainstream was defined by what worked on MTV, and so began another rush to the middle of the road. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” dropped and the line crept to the side again, for a while, until the industry found its artistic stasis, whilst milking its new physical cash cow, the compact disc.

    It is downright eerie that adapting to Spotify today feels like what adapting to CDs felt like to me 25 years ago. Going CD certainly felt good at the time (although much more expensive). It seemed quite the end-all really, to own and re-own the music on those plastic circles, although we knew all along that the recording industry was getting away with the same shameful switch using different bait. Today I observe that the difference between collecting individual CDs (or vinyl, or digital downloads therof) and enjoying Spotify is like the difference between a la carte and buffet. And, to extend the analogy, the difference between Spotify and Pandora is like the difference between buffet and prix fixe. It may only be that as a consumer I have hit my buffet years.

    Roy Christopher’s observation, “The Big Idea, when it happens, is likely to harm the situation (for the fans),” resonates with me. I also think Michael Gira nailed it with is observation following the London riots (http://thequietus.com/articles/06752-michael-gira-pias-statement) that the burning of the Sony/PIAS warehouse is “a sort of living metaphor for what those of us who have dedicated our lives to making music now face.”

    Perhaps I am not enough of a visionary (or I am too old to care), but I don’t see how I as a consumer could resist a service such as Spotify for recorded music. Yes, I understand that the catalogs are the roughly the same whether one chooses Spotify, iTunes, Rhapsody, et al. My point is that upon choosing one of these services (and one is all I would want), the homogeneity issue does not exist, only the differences remain.

    Regarding Fripp’s royalties on my King Crimson CD: I hope those royalties were well spent, because that CD was purchased 25 years ago. I am currently pretty well-stocked with Fripp on vinyl. As long as no one is being newly exposed to the music, I doubt there will be many folks joining that market soon. There are also plenty of ways to obtain illegitimate copies of Fripp’s music even without an internet connection. I’m not endorsing this of course, I am merely observing the realities.

    I am truly sorry that any musician receives only pennies for his or her catalog from music streaming services. I fully accept the principle that Fripp and Gira and Gang of Four should be allowed to collectively or individually propose terms and agree to the value of their catalogs. Fripp has every right to his stance upon that principle, and meanwhile I ardently hope that he is shifting enough of those vinyls via his site. I hope that any artist who prefers to retain that level of control finds it within his or her means. But such a stance is not going to topple the house of streaming. Rather it only perpetuates the myth of esotericism in music, with its concomitant notions of “radioland” and the canonization of DJs and the consecration of record stores.

    Society no longer has the likes of Peel and Wolfman and Dick Clark to showcase what it might like to have on the home jukebox. In their steads, the idea of small labels as the quintessential purveyors of music taste has long informed my own thinking.

    While radio still seems to have a role in society, the people who currently hold the places once occupied by those DJ/gatekeepers of the past are Pitchfork, The Quietus, Pamplemoose, Tiny Mix Tapes, Forced Exposure, Boomkat, etc. and the feeders on Twitter and Facebook. These on-line music oracles dovetail seamlessly with our streaming experiences.

    With the advent of wider bandwidth and more RAM, we are more inclined to stream, and less inclined to demand our own copies of mp3s, even if they are free, and even if we number among those headset people. When we are doing our reconnaissance at these tastemakers’ sites we are either streaming from them piecemeal or we jump to our streaming service of choice to see if the object of our attention is in its catalog. Thanks to the aforementioned homogeneity, the likelihood is high that if it’s streaming elsewhere, then it’s available via your music streaming service, or via the indispensable SoundCloud.

    On the other hand, King Crimson won’t be on any blogs or streaming services. You might find one or two illegal uploads somewhere but, as a matter of principle, the legendary King Crimson back catalog remains shrouded from the masses other than via those vinyl reissues. I understand this business decision as little as I understand why the superb Type label, whose every new vinyl I used to collect, transformed into a net label that now streams its entire catalog at no charge, removing much of my incentive to purchase the vinyl. I am not complaining about having unlimited streaming access to the Type catalog – perhaps my past patronage has helped make this possible. Long may it endure.

    I uphold Spotify as a Big Idea on account of how I relate to it; not as an objective truth, not as wishful thinking, obviously not as the best deal for artists, but rather as an idea that fundamentally changes me. My real behavior with respect to receiving licensed music has been permanently altered – you could have explained it to me and I still wouldn’t have believed it without seeing for myself how it works.

    Bob Lefsetz has written a lot about Spotify, and particularly in this entry he illustrates some basic contrasts with the other services: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/07/15/spotify-3/. He also refutes much of the criticism in his succinct, sometimes heavy-handed style. But the message is all there, and in a nutshell it is about being the right execution of the idea.

    I know this subject is near and dear to you. However, I know that I can’t shoulder a lot of guilt with respect to the state of the music industry. My friends and I all believe we have carried its water as much as we ever could have. Whatever Big Idea makes sense for the artists certainly has my support, although I am convinced that the music will go on no matter what.

  8. SF MusicTech Summit 2011: Discovery is Disruptive | Roy Christopher
    September 14th, 2011 @ 12:14 pm

    [...] As Dave says, “There’s nothing new in digital!” In his pre-talk post, “What happened to the Big Idea in music technology?” he points out that …when FM radio became homogenized and the US radio stations formed [...]

  9. Roy Christopher
    September 14th, 2011 @ 3:15 pm

    Excellent stuff here, Dave and Luke. Music will certainly go on no matter what. No one needs to save it. It can take care of itself.

    My post-talk thoughts:
    http://roychristopher.com/sf-musictech-summit-2011-discovery-is-disruptive

    Thanks again,

    -royc.

  10. Clyde Smith
    November 5th, 2011 @ 12:14 pm

    Getting to this late but, yeah, big ideas seem few and far between. However, there are some interesting ideas floating around that aren’t just variations on streaming.

    The most interesting ideas I’ve seen lately involve getting around licensing restrictions in creative ways. Of course, we’re now inundated with various sites and services that stream music via YouTube or SoundCloud. But I’m really thinking about Legitmix which allows people who could never afford the samples to make mixes that include virtually any recorded music.

    The Legitmix file doesn’t play the samples, it draws them from one’s own music collection. It opens up opportunities for certain forms of creativity while shutting down certain revenue streams.

    So it facilitates a process that has some difficult implications for the industry while relying on fair use in an interesting manner.

    Is facilitating fair use a big idea? Maybe so.
    The implications are certainly big.

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