Music in the Digital Age

Ideas about online music commerce and culture from New Music Strategies

Andrew Dubber

Music in the Digital Age

Ideas about online music commerce and culture from New Music Strategies
2011 Andrew Dubber

is is a Leanpub book whi is for sale at hp://leanpub.com. Leanpub helps you connect with readers and sell your ebook, while you're writing it and aer it's done.

Contents
1 2 is is a conversation Music Your music is commercial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Your music is media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e Digital Age e Five Ages of Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A shiing of ratios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An evolutionary process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e Internet explained Understanding the Internet . . . . e Online Medium . . . . . . . . As a Digital Native sees it . . . . . So - okay - but whats the internet? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 8 9 13 13 19 20 23 24 25 27 30 32 34

Music Online - and Online Music Transitional media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This is a conversation
Ive been trying to write this book for about four years. When I ran New Music Strategies as a blog about independent music business in the digital age, I released an ebook that had a degree of success for whi Im very grateful. Not that I made any money from it, as I gave it away for free, but I did make some money because of it, whi is a dierent thing, but equally appreciated. It also took me to some fantastic and interesting places around the world and allowed me to meet and work with some really talented and amazing people - several of whom are now the other members of the New Music Strategies team. New Music Strategies is now something quite dierent. What that something is, is something thats still up for grabs. We do things that we think are interesting about music in the digital age. ings that are about participation, about community, about music as a tool for social ange and about more music, by more people in more places. But thats a prey broad brief. Prey mu the only things were not interested in working on are Can you help make my 13 year-old niece a famous popstar? and Were seing up a website to make the music business more like the sto market. In both instances, were likely to not only say no, thats not what we do but also we wish you every failure in your endeavour - for reasons that I hope will become clear as you read this book. at said, this book does have helpful marketing strategy ideas in it that will help you bring your music to a wider audience if thats what you wish, and it will help you nd ways of using the internet that are manageable and productive for independent music business. 1

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Most likely, thats why youve downloaded it. But I hope some of the other things I have to say will be both interesting and useful as well. Or at least not boring. But allow me the indulgence of going ba over that earlier book and hopefully, in my long-winded and meandering manner, that will lead us to the point of this book. At the beginning of 2007, I wrote an e-book called e 20 ings You Must Know About Music Online. I hadnt planned to write that book - it just came out of a conversation. I was at a seminar alongside some notable local music industry types. Id been asked to say a few things about the internet for music business, and so I had prepared a few notes. e notes were on cards, and ea card had a topic wrien down on it. My idea was that I would say a few simple things about ea topic, and then move on to the next one. ere were about twentyve cards all up, and I had about an hour to talk. I made it through three of them. In the question and answer session aerwards, some people asked me to briey summarise the main point of the rest of the cards. At the time, I couldnt really do that. I didnt know how to condense those main issues into a single idea. To me, these were all separate issues that needed unpiing. Ea one was an important idea that needed discussion, explanation and clarication. So instead, I oered to write a blog post about ea one, then post it up on my website. Over drinks, someone suggested that it would be handy if they were all bundled up together into a single work, and I thought that was a good idea too. So I went away and turned those cards into a series of related blog posts. I narrowed the topics down to a nice round twenty (thereby geing rid of some repetition and overlap), and then I combined those blog posts into a book. By the time Id nished, it was the middle of 2007. I put the PDF up on my website for free. Its still there. Help yourself. Its still good and relevant, and it has some useful stu in there you may wish to implement. You dont have to give me your email address or jump through any hoops to get it. If youre so inclined, you can also give it away for free

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from your own website or email it to everyone youve ever met. Kno yourself out. Its a totally free e-book containing what was, at the time, a distillation of my thoughts about the online music environment. My best guess is that the 96-page `20 ings' e-book has now been shared, downloaded, given away and distributed in excess of 300,000 times. at number is conservative, and its possibly mu higher. But if Id asked for so mu as an email address, that number would probably have had several fewer zeroes on the end of it. If Id asked for money, Id have been luy to sell a single copy, and - if you ask me - rightly so. Apart from anything else, the whole thing was already available as individual blog posts on my website. But whats interesting to me is that since May 2007, every single one of the people who have invited me to all sorts of amazing places around the world, and who have found money for me to talk to their students, sta members, clients, friends and fellow musicians all have one thing in common: theyd read the book. I suspect theres a lesson in that, but you can make your own conclusions. e thing is the internet moves really quily, and that was over four years ago. When I wrote that `20 ings' e-book, and put it online, I was aware that Id probably have to constantly update it. I certainly wasnt expecting this many people to have it or know about it, but I was prey sure Id need to revisit it prey regularly. Aer all, new tenologies come along all the time. Unexpected and disruptive platforms mean that the main ways in whi we consume music may be dierent at any moment; massively increased download speeds and storage space alter our online practices beyond recognition; new services come along that make the old way in whi we did things - just last week, even - positively quaint. Hell, it even has references to MySpace in it. Who uses MySpace? So, since around November 2007, Ive been trying to work on a rewrite of e 20 ings You Must Know About Music Online. A second, revised and updated edition. Ive tried to get it done quily, by just tweaking and modifying bits and pieces here and there, and Ive also tried completely dierent approaes to the same material.

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One version turned the `things' into specic strategies - and attempted to give a step by step `how to' guide to independent music online. While su a thing might sound incredibly helpful at face value, I realised almost immediately that su a book would be prey mu useless, for reasons that will become apparent as you read this. But at any rate, ea time Ive come up with a new way of revising the book, Ive made it about halfway through, and ea time it hasnt felt quite right - and so I stopped. Of course, there are lots of simple lile things that could be anged. ere are, to my knowledge, four typographical errors in the original ebook. Two of them, naturally, occur in the section where I talk about how important it is to be careful about spelling and professional presentation. I did receive a few emails about that. Moreover, theres no need to be talking about the Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen in this context these days. eyve moved on and so have we. But these are the sorts of lile things that would need constant tweaking if I just anged and updated those bits. And so Ive been stu, and Ive le it. And any time the e-book has come up in conversation, Ive felt a weird mix of nostalgia, pride and embarrassment. I cant help but be reminded that its not what I want it to be anymore but nor did I know what I did want it to be. I havent been promoting it, particularly - and nor have I been bringing it up in conversation recently - but it seems to have a life of its own, and people keep passing it around and linking to it, whi is nice, of course. And while helpful volunteers have kindly been translating it into dierent languages, making free (and very professional) audiobooks out of it and circulating it to more and more people throughout the world - Ive been becoming increasingly uneasy about the books continued relevance. Its not wrong as su - its just not as current as it could be. And one week in June 2009, I found myself in Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. I was doing what I like to call an `Unconsultancy' - whi is simply me turning up and being as helpful (and aordable) as I can be to as many independent music people as possi-

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ble in a short space of time - as opposed to a traditional consultancy, whi is a more intensive, single-client aair. Its an interesting approa, because it makes the sort of thing I do mu more readily available to a mu wider group of musicians and music businesses that could really do with a few pointers to get them `unstu' and move them forward on their path - but arent the kind of people who can generally hire consultants. Anyway, over lun, I was talking to one su person - who asked the question: What would be dierent about the 20 ings book if you were to write it now? And thats a very dierent question to the one Id been asking myself, whi was: How should I update the ebook? So I gave it some serious thought. And I came up with what I think is the best answer I could: ere wouldnt be 20 ings. eres really only ONE. at is to say: ere is just ONE thing you must know about Music (and, come to think of it, everything else) in the Digital Age - and all else follows from that. And if you really understand that principle and apply it to what you do as an independent musician, or an entrepreneurial music business, then everything will follow from that. Every decision you make about the online environment, every digital marketing strategy you come up with, and everything you say, make and do on the internet will be guided by this single, simple idea. It is the one thing that updates, encapsulates and contextualises everything Ive wrien online at New Music Strategies - and its the one single realisation about the online environment that I believe solves `internet strategy'. Best of all its something that can be summed up extremely simply - but its extraordinarily ri, nuanced and complex. is is a conversation. Its human beings, communicating with ea other. ats it. e whole message in a nutshell: is is a conversation. And by this, I mean the whole thing - the music, the medium,

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the marketing, the tenology, the relationship with fans, the branding, the community music workshops, the recordings, the live concerts, the social media prole pages, the improvisations, the downloads, the tshirts, the BitTorrents, the ringtones, the status updates, the copyright laws, the CDs, the vinyl, the day to day work of being a musician, the inspired musical expression. Its human beings doing what people do: Communicating. Expressing. Sharing. Relating. Culture is simply whatever people say, make and do. Music is Culture. Music in the Digital Age is the creation and propagation of culture within a particular media context. A contemporary media environment. I think its important to understand what that means, why its dierent and why thats important before you can start implementing strategies - whether its to make a sustainable career as a virtuoso nose bagpipist, to help kids to play Baa Baa Bla Sheep on the piano, to start an online service that lets people listen to their favourite music whenever and wherever they want to, or to inspire political ange through song. We need to think about what music is. We need to think about what it means to be in the Digital Age. We need to put those things together and explore the implications of that. Because the simple fact is that it IS the digital age. If youre just strumming a nylon string guitar in your bedroom, you are making music in the digital age, even if your computer isnt swited on. I believe thats signicant, and warrants investigation.

Music
In order to talk about Music in the Digital Age, its probably helpful to actually start from the beginning and consider what those two concepts mean (`Music' and `the Digital Age'), both separately, and when put together. I have no intention of trying to `dene' music other than to say that I think I know what it is when I encounter it. Youre probably the same yourself. I could say something about it having melody, harmony and rhythm, but actually, a lot of my favourite music has none of those things. I could say `intentional sound', but then that would deny the musicality of ance acoustic events. I could go into a bit of a ri about perception and the rather interesting truth that the human mind `creates' sound aer the fact of its reception by the ears as simply moving columns of air. You dont `hear' music as mu as your brain actually constructs it from the input from your auditory sense. And yeah, that means if a tree falls in a forest, it makes vibrations in the air, but unless theres an ear and a brain in the vicinity - no sound. Hell, even a series of dots on a piece of paper can be called `music'. Christopher Small (1998) suggests we drop the idea of `music' as a noun, and rather discuss the notion of `musiing' - a verb. Musics not a thing we can hold in our hands, or own. We can own a piece of paper, or a plastic disc, but those things arent music - and nor is, ultimately, what comes out of the speakers or emanates from the piano when the dots on the page are played by a pianist. Music is an activity that people do - and oen its something that people do together. Its a social and cultural activity, more than it is a commodity. And he kind of has a point. Far more music is made for social and cultural reasons than for reasons of commodication. We sing `Happy Birth7

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day' to ea other. We sing songs to our ildren to help them learn. We engage in music for celebrations, religious ceremonies and rituals. Denitions of music are problematic at best, and need to factor in aesthetic, social, artistic, communicative, anthropological, philosophical and physical understandings of the phenomenon. Precise denitions of music are not the point when were trying to deal with the rst principles that are important to us here. But we do need to know what it is were talking about when we discuss this stu.

Your music is commercial

For the sake of simplicity, and because its the bit youre no doubt most interested in, Im going to be entirely culturally reductive here and simply talk about whats confusingly known as Popular Music. e term Popular Music does not mean `music that is popular' or even `pop music', but instead refers to those types of music that are created, performed or produced in relation to the kinds of cultural exange that is, in essence, commercial. I know, I know - the term `commercial' has all sorts of negative connotations. Im not talking about the `commercialisation' of independent, folk or other musical forms, but about the simple fact that prey mu all music we listen to is inextricably linked with commerce. As Simon Frith (1988) points out, without Music Business, no music. e industrialization of music cannot be understood as something whi happens to music, since it describes a process in whi music itself is made - a process, that is, whi fuses (and confuses) capital, tenical and musical arguments. Of course, youre thinking `but what about people who just learn an instrument for fun, and only play for their friends?' - to whi the answer is that the music that they play - its form, structure and derivations - all stems from a kind of music that was designed to be played and performed in a commercial seing. I include classical music and jazz in this context. Most folk music too (I say most, because many folk musics are purely cultural and communicative expressions that

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exist to perform social functions independent of a performer/audience relationship where value is being exanged). eres this widely held idea that music is this pure and natural expression that happens creatively and artistically among human beings, and then commerce comes along and corrupts it all. I say thats obvious nonsense. Music and Commerce arent individual concepts or entities that exist `over there', separate from People. Music and Commerce are both ings at People Do. Sure, some music is ruined by aempts to reshape it for greater commercial acceptance, but in fact the more fundamental truth is without commerce, no music. If there were not concerts, records, marketing, patronage, equipment sellers, promoters, retailers, managers, professional teaers, venues, publishers and music press, there would prey mu be no music as we know it. At its simplest level, whos going to form a band if we have no cultural reference for what a band is and what its for? Barring those musics that exist purely for tribal and community social function - and even these are dwindling as `World Music' is captured and commodied for a willing commercial marketplace - music and commerce are inextricably linked. So why, if these things are simply part of the same phenomenon, do we have this ongoing tension between the art of music and the commerce of music? Because clearly, there is a tension. e simplest way to explain it away is that people are a problem. Musicians are selsh and precious. Record companies are greedy and corrupt. Audiences are thieves. Promoters are crooks. Publishers are parasites. Retailers are unimaginative. e Music Press either regurgitates PR bollos or has completely disappeared up its own arse. We oen rely on these simplications and stereotypes to make sense of the fact that being in music (and, therefore, in the music business) is hard. Harder than it probably should be.

Your music is media

Instead of considering musicians as gied and talented artistes (or selfobsessed primadonnas), and the music business people they have to

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contend with leees (or tragically inept but lovable enthusiasts), I prefer to consider music and its business as Media forms. Let me explain. We think we understand media. We are completely immersed in it and it inscribes our daily lives. We have a fair idea of how newspapers and magazines work. We get that television operates in a certain way, and that radio is kind of similar. Film we have a prey good sense of too. ese things are clearly media. But we struggle to think of popular music, as Ive described it above, as being part of that same media family. But in fact, all popular music is mediated. And in fact, I`d go a step further - Id say that all popular music is a process of mediation of what Small calls Musiing'. Whether we have a CD, a DVD, a download, a stadium concert tiet, a magazine article, or front row seats at a small venue - there is a process of mediation at work. Heres one way to think about it: Consider a TV Show. Lets take the Sopranos as a case in point. If we think about it, we can see prey clearly how a programme like that comes to be. Someone comes up with it. Someone writes it. Some people act in it, and other people direct it. Someone edits it and someone else distributes it. Somebody promotes it to the correct audience. It gets broadcast, and some people consume it by way of an electronic appliance in their home. is is, of course, a complete oversimplication, but in a nutshell, thats the ain of events. Even more simply put, Id break that down into some main stages: theres a Composition step, a Performance step, a Production step, a Distribution step, a Promotional step and a Consumption step. Map a Coldplay album onto that same ain, and you can begin to see why I think of popular music as media. But you see, the thing with media is that ea of those steps is aware of, and takes into consideration the needs and parameters of ea of the other steps in the ain. e writer of the Sopranos is no more going to write a 25-minute third act than the director is going to shoot on 70mm IMAX lm, or than a publicist is going to target it at pre-teens. e whole Sopranos phenomenon, as a TV show, is made up of the sum of its parts, it ts into generally un-

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derstood categories and fullls certain tenical and structural criteria so that it works as a media artefact. is may be a controversial thing to say, but if you have ideas to engage in your bit of the music media ain that resolutely ignores all of the other bits, then youre going to encounter tensions. ese tensions might come when a recording artist wants to make a ve-album song cycle as a rst release, or when a publicist wants to get a political punk band to pose for a Smash Hits! magazine foldout. In other words, misunderstanding the cultural and commercial parameters of any of the other parts of the ain causes the problems. inking of music as the art (or the `product' to be exploited), and commerce as the necessary evil (or the whole point of the exercise) automatically starts things o on the wrong foot. But when you think of Popular Music Media as a single phenomenon, you can start to arrange the parts in a holistic and intelligent way, in whi all of the parts are compatible, and can both understand and deal with all the other pieces of that same thing. Perhaps most importantly, media tends to factor its audience into the design, all along the ain. Of course, there are television programmes that are made simply to amuse or allenge the writers of the show, and a group of people who happen to think along those same lines may discover and appreciate them, and form its small audience. ere are television programmes that are completely constructed to appeal to as many lowest common denominator viewers they can nd. And there are television programmes that respect and allenge an intelligent audience, but completely understand the parameters of the media business and consumer relationship they form part of. I think there are helpful parallels that illuminate the condition of popular music in there. Chances are, what you personally happen to do in all this falls somewhere in the Composition, Performance, Production, Distribution, Promotional and Consumption parts of the media equation. You may even take care of a few or even all of those bits yourself. Personally, Im down here at the end of the ain, listening to, collecting and loving the music. But although you have to think about us, you also have to think about the whole media ecology youre

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part of. So, when I talk about Music Online, thats what I mean by the Music bit.

The Digital Age

We are living in what I would call the h media age (and just to underline how important I think that is, lets capitalise it: `e Fih Media Age'). In order to understand what I mean by e Fih Media Age - and why thats signicant to someone who just wants to make a living playing music and is reading this book for clues - let me take you through the ve ages so you can step ba for a minute and see whats really going on. For this, I take a leaf out of the work of Herbert Marshall McLuhan. In his books in particular, e Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) McLuhan talks about dierent periods of history as they relate to the primary media forms that aracterise them. He speaks about these as if they are evolutionary phases: for instance, he talks about the age of the printing press as being a specic period of humankinds development Typographic Man. McLuhan died in 1980. He didnt, as some people suggest, predict the Internet. However, one of the things he did do was to provide a useful framework for thinking about ways in whi our media environment anges the way that we think and also has a profound impact upon the ways in whi we communicate and express ourselves.

The Five Ages of Media

e central premise of this is that media are environments. at is, we dont consume media - we inhabit them. at sounds a lile needlessly obtuse, but its really quite simple: throughout history, we have lived 13

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in a world saturated by one media form or another, and that anges over time. And by `media form' I mean `the main way in whi we take in our information'. Our brains get information about the world through our senses. Our senses are connected to whatever the main media happen to be at the time. And when those media ange, we ange. And like a frog slowly boiling, we generally dont realise its happening to us while its happening. We have been through ve main ages of media, ea with its own unique aracteristics. As we move from one age to another, the media environment alters, and the organism of our brain has to adapt to its new environment. It evolves. Not metaphorically - it actually anges. Our wiring is dierent in response to the dierent tenological context we nd ourselves in. is isnt complex, but it is important - in particular when it comes to everything I have to say about music and the internet but also in general. It aects culture, society, law, politics, art, commerce and our own fragile psyologies. Ill take you through it.

1) The Oral Age

Human beings are hardwired for narrative. Always have been. As soon as we gured out how to make words, weve been telling ea other stories - and some of our most compelling and enduring myths come to us from the Oral age. e medium was spee. It was the campre storytale. e oratory of Homer. e story was present before us, and we could interrogate it as it played out. And in the oral age, the main way in whi music happened was communally. As part of celebration or mourning, gathering or ritual. In this context, musics an extension of spee. In many oral societies, there are actually no musicians, because music is just something everyone does. Its not a profession. Now, thats not universally true for all cultures, of course, and over time, there are some oral cultures that turn music-making into some-

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thing else. ey are the troubadours and buskers. ey show up and they entertain with songs and stories from their travels - and they are rewarded for their cra. e oral age prey mu starts at the dawn of human civilisation, and unless you want to make the case for a gestural age before it (grunting and pointing to communicate), it marks the rst media age. e rst period through whi human beings had a means by whi they tended to communicate, and take in information and form an understanding of the world in whi they lived. e Oral Age lasted, to make it a crudely round gure, about 10,000 years.

2) The Scribal Age

And then we invent writing. Writings great. We can now take those stories, and we can preserve them. No longer do they have to be passed down from generation to generation by painstaking repetition and rote learning. Now they can be captured in a permanent form and recalled at will - brought ba to life from the page. Writing was more complicated than mere spee though. For a start, it required the skill of literacy, and that wasnt evenly distributed for the most part. Besides, there were very few texts. In order for a copy of a text to be made, what would ordinarily happen is that some scribes and monks from my monastery would come and visit your monastery in a dierent part of the world. It would take them months to travel there, they would copy a book by hand aracter by aracter, line by line - and then theyd make the journey ba to my monastery where it would sit in my library, where only my monks were allowed to read it. And only the important ones at that. Sadly, when texts are so precious and rare, sometimes great calamities can befall them. Like the re that wiped out the Alexandrian Library, taking hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable scrolls containing a large unk of all recorded human knowledge with it. But writing allowed for stories to be captured, studied and repeated faithfully in one telling to the next. e guy with the literacy could

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stand up the front and read in sermons to a congregation of illiterate and accepting aendees. Aer all, you cant question a text. It says what it says. And there were, of course, musicians who not only possessed this skill of literacy, but were able to compose and create works by making marks on paper. And so the profession of composer emerges - and before long a man named Ba is making copies of his works, handing them out to his assembled team of musicians, and they would perform for the entertainment and dancing of the guests at the party of Mr Bas ri patron. Roughly speaking again, the Scribal Age lasted around 1,500 years - depending on whi continent you happen to live.

3) The Print Age

So, along comes this Gutenberg guy and makes a maine that uses the concept of movable type (hundreds of years aer the Chinese rst think of it, as it happens) and before long, hes mass producing books. is turns out to be the biggest revolution in human history since the development of writing. Because not only can spee be captured in text on a page, its now almost a trivial exercise to make and distribute multiple copies of that knowledge. Now everyone can have their own Bible. Everyone can come to have a personal relationship with their saviour - or print and distribute leaets suggesting that perhaps they dont need one or that the saving that needs doing is one of political reform, or an intellectual and cultural enlightenment project. At any rate - the message is now in everyones hands. Literacy spreads like wildre. Before long, people are nailing their edicts to ur doors, or siing in private taking in information at their own pace - the words going into their brains like beads on a string. Our brains ange radically. We develop an unprecedented sense of the individual. We discover sequential logic and cross-referencing. And with meanical reproduction, we invent the industrial age. Music, as a business, of course, ourishes - and before long there is a real industry. e industry is called music publishing - and the

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main way in whi money is made from music is through the creation, distribution and retail of dots on pages. People can go into a shop, buy a famous song, take it home, and play it badly on the piano in the parlour. e Print Age lasted a good 500 years. Youll notice that number keeps geing smaller.

4) The Electric Age

en suddenly - Bam! Marconi, Edison, Franklin, Faraday, Volta, Tesla, Morse and Bell ange the world again with their magnets and sparks and whatnot. Not only can culture be mass produced, it can now be captured as audio or images - and mass broadcast. Its one thing to read a book that someone else is also reading and be able to have a conversation about it. Its something quite dierent again to simultaneously witness man seing foot on the moon along with millions of other people all across the globe. e radical shi in media environment that the Electric Age brings about is what exercises McLuhan the most. e eect of that media shi on our minds is something that he is now perhaps best known for: e Global Village - whi is not, as you might think, some sort of caring, sharing `hands across the water' thing (villages can be quite problematic and claustrophobic collections of people). At any rate, the Electric Age completely transforms our media environment again. e main way in whi our brains take in information about the world in whi we live and how we can make sense of it is fundamentally altered. And for music - with electricity, of course, comes recording. Now you can not only have a famous song in your living room on a piece of paper - you can have an idealised performance of that song, by an international artist and unlike the piano in your parlour, it will sound the same every single time you play it. Of course, this was a massive allenge to the music industry that came before it. e sheet music publishers WERE the music industry

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- and these recording companies threatened their livelihoods. Besides, how were local musicians going to make any money in concert halls if a single artist in another country could record one performance of a song and sell it all over the world? And the answer is - prey mu everyone had to adapt. e old sheet music industry fought the recorded music industry tooth and nail. Hell, the recorded music industry even fought radio. Who was going to buy records if people could hear them for nothing on the wireless? But just as the previous models of music business had survived in some marginalised form from one age to the next, its still possible to buy sheet music today - and its still possible to make money making and selling it. Its just not the main way that happens anymore. e Electric Age is aracterised by TV shows, radio airplay, records, tapes, CDs, retail stores with display shelves, top 40 arts, superstars, the dream of being signed to a major label and the album and single as the main ways in whi music is produced and consumed. e Electric Age lasted for about 100 years. Its over. We think its still the main thing, but its not. Were in a new age now.

5) The Digital Age

Were in the Digital Age now. is is an epoal ange, just as the other ages represented fundamental dierences in our media environment and - more importantly - who we were as human beings. We cant see how dierent it is yet, because of what McLuhan called the `Rear View Mirror' eect. We always look at our media environment in reverse - and certainly in the early days. We see where weve come from - and not where were going, or even where we are. e content of any new medium is its predecessor. We might think were wating TV online, listening to internet radio or reading newspapers on the web. ats not what were doing. Were on the internet and thats dierent. More on this soon.

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A shifting of ratios
You could ll another book - even a whole shelf (or e-book reader) full of them - with all thats dierent about the media environment in the digital age. It so profoundly and radically impacts upon everything we do that its once again anging our brains. e way in whi we take in information and how we make sense of the world around us is increasingy digital, rather than broadcast or print. Its quite literally reshaping us and rewiring our brains. From mobile phones to laptops, sat navs to digital cameras, YouTube to Skype, iPods to USB keys - what we surround ourselves with - the media environment were immersed in - has fundamentally anged. And while the record industry, the lm industry and the publishing industry remind us that we are consumers and they are the content providers - we have the opportunity to remember that it wasnt always this way, and it neednt be a aracteristic of the Digital Age. In fact, it probably cant be. Like sheet music when recordings came along - recordings are now becoming marginalised. CD sales are not declining because of piracy, but because CDs are the last hurrah of the electric age. But dont forget: you can still walk into a shop and buy sheet music - its just not the main way in whi music is produced and consumed anymore. is is a shiing of ratios, not a `death of' anything. Not even CDs. I saw data last week that showed that the record industry now represents the economic value of just less than a third of the music industry overall. And thats the countable and counted music industry, whi is far from the full picture. But we have a oice. Despite the fact that it seems Im saying that tenology makes us what we are - in fact, if we understand the process, we can oose the adaptations that we make, rather than simply have them happen to us. is is not an entirely deterministic process. ats a mu longer discussion. e point Im trying to make here is that digital is dierent. Its as revolutionary and game-anging as writing, print, or the discovery of electricity.

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e internet is not a marketing platform for bands and nor is it merely a marketplace for content. Its the current media environment. e way to make meaningful musical content in the 21st century is not simply to make records and then point the internet at them - any more than you would put on a play in a theatre, point cameras at it, and call it a TV show. Of course, people still want recordings of music. People still want broadcasting. People still want sheet music. Its just not the main way in whi music is produced and consumed anymore - and increasingly so. Make an album, by all means - but do consider the fact that youre deciding to operate in an increasingly shallow end of the pool, economically - and even culturally - speaking. Weve been in the digital age for about 20 years. Our media ages are geing shorter. Historys speeding up. So whatever it is youre going to do to adapt to the Digital Age - do it now. Ive said it before, but its worth repeating - the shi to the online environment is not a shi in format. is is not like the ange between vinyl and CD. Its more like the shi from printed sheet music to recordings and broadcasting. is is a complete transformation of the media environment, and of the ways in whi people behave, adapt and operate in that media environment. And this new media environment is not set up in a broadcast, mass production paradigm. is is not a one-to-many medium, like radio, television, newspapers and so-called `traditional' music distribution.

An evolutionary process
Our brains are evolving again. As our new environment envelops us, we become involved in the biggest conversation our world has ever known. ats dierent and it radically anges who we are, and what we say, make and do. ere are only two types of content of any value online: conversation, and the things about whi the conversation takes place. Stop making Electric Age media - start doing Digital Age stu. Stop making records, start having conversations.

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Im convinced that were living in a Digital Age, in the same way we were living in an Electric Age, and before that, in a Print Age. We were once in a Scribal Age, and before that - an Oral Age. I believe that this dominant form of communication absolutely shapes the way in whi we understand the world around us. I know that we are not uniformly living in this Digital Age, and that there are economic and social barriers to it. Im also aware that the benets of that age are not evenly distributed. However, digital tenology - both online and o - are increasingly the dominant modes of communication. Dominant modes of communication shape the ways in whi we think. In a literate society, we read books. We learn to apprehend the world in a linear, logical and sequential fashion. rough the printed alphabetic language, we take in information one word at a time, like beads on a string - rather than in the surrounding all-at-once fashion that oral cultures are immersed in. e way in whi we get information, culture and media completely transforms the way in whi we experience the world. Media are, as McLuhan put it, extensions of the senses. e fact that online (digital) media are dierent from electric (analogue) media doesnt just ange those media artefacts - it anges us. Because we only experience the world through the information that comes in through our senses, the input to those senses - visual, sonic, etc. - completely inscribe our world. Changing the nature of those inputs anges the nature of our experience, and thereby our selves. And its for that reason that the tenological shi encountered by the music industry is signicant. Changes to our media environment dont just ange the economic, legal, social and consumption aspects of our lives. ey ange us. But as McLuhan pointed out, we have diculty seeing our current environment for what it is. In fact, we seem to always act as if were living in the previous media environment (seeing the world through a `rear-view mirror') - and this causes problems. By acting as if we should conform to the rules of the electric, broadcast, mass-production,

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analogue media world - even in the face of radical tenological and environmental transformation - we fool ourselves into thinking the world should be other than it so plainly is. And this causes tension, lawsuits and confusion. To me, the digital world is the online world. It has aracteristics that Ill explore in more depth as we go along. Some of these processes are clear and obvious, some are obscured and unexpected. But all of them shape the new media environment, and allenge our ability to adapt and evolve. By understanding these shis and accepting them for what they are, we are oered new opportunities to specialise and thrive, rather than pretend that the world continues to be, or should act as if it still is the way it was in the previous media environment. So, when I say `Online', I mean connected, digital, discrete, abstractly mathematical (rather than concretely physical) and environmentally transformative. Where `music' is media, `online music' suggests a profound shi in terms of what music is, how it is composed, performed, produced, distributed, promoted and consumed. I realise that this seems all very theoretical and abstract, but by following this mu of the argument, you can begin to see how and where very practical and pragmatic new strategies can be developed and deployed to take advantage of the aracteristics of this new environment. And thats what were working towards here.

The Internet explained

Apologies if this section seems a bit rudimentary. Even today, not everyone is immediately at home online, so I think its useful to just start with a few basics and work from there. You may not need to read this section. But if its helpful, here you go. Welcome to the Internet. Its a network of computers, allowing people all over the world to communicate, share text, audio and images as digital les and connect in ways that had previously been impossible. Youll no doubt be familiar with web pages and email, whi form the majority of internet use, and you may have heard of peer-to-peer lesharing tenologies like BitTorrent and Limewire, whi account for a signicant proportion of the data trac on the internet. en there are other applications like instant messaging soware su as Live Messenger or Adium, voice-over-internet programmes like Skype, and internet-capable media players like iTunes, that allow you to not just play music, but also purase it over the internet. ite oen when people start talking about Internet tenologies, the rst thing they want to do is have a conversation about morality. is is not that conversation. Lets not have that right now. For the purposes of this section, we are not interested in whether people who download music are pirates or thieves and nor are we particularly interested (at least for the moment) in whether major corporations lo down culture, impoverish the public domain or use their immense lobbying power to sway public policy in their favour with regard to digital media tenologies and copyright. Instead, this is a conversation about tenology and while a conversation about tenology will have an ethical dimension to it, for 23

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the moment what we are interested in is the tenology itself. We can come ba to that later. I point this out now, because so oen the morality conversation gets in the way of our understanding of the tenological environment. It does this, because we have entrened positions and strong emotional aaments to those positions. So lets put those aside for the moment and just look at what the Internet is, and what it does. e internet anges things, because of its massive connectivity and the fact that everything on it is digital. Digital is dierent. Digital media have dierent aracteristics to analogue media.

Understanding the Internet

First of all, you have to forget the idea that its a new format like records, cassees and CDs were. is is a transition to entirely new system that is as dierent from the world of CDs and records as that world was from the one in whi sheet music was the main thing. Digital media is made out of ones and zeros. Its all data. Whether its a recipe for soup, an email to your mother, a home movie, a Hollywood blobuster, a new hit record or your bands demo - to the internet and to the computers that deal with it, it looks something like this: 1101100011 0100110111 0001101001 1111011011 0010111101 1011011011 0000101100 0111011001 0111011000 1001100101 1101100011 0100110100 1000010110 1111011011 0010111111 0011001111 0000101100 0111011011 0011011011 0001101001 1111011011 1001011110 1101101101 1000010110 0011101100 1001110110 0010011001 0101101100 0110100110 1001000010 1101111011 0110010111 1110011001 1110000101 1000111011 0110011011 0110001101 0011111011 0110010111 1011011011 0110000101 1000111011 0010011101 1000100110 0101011011 0001101001 1010010000 1011011110 1101100101 1111100110 0111100001 0110001110 1101100110 1101101001 1001010101 1001011100 1101001000 0101101111 0111001100 1100110011 0011110000 1010110011 0011110011 0110110100 1101110001 1010010111 0011010010 0001011011 0110110011 0011011001 1000100111 0110011001 1001111000

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and so on. is is important for a number of reasons. First, it means that your music is just mathematics, and so by doing clever mathematical stu, you can ange, edit, remix and process it. Or any other kind of media, for that maer. is is all that programmes like Logic, ProTools, Photoshop, Final Cut, and Word are doing when they manipulate media les its all just (just?) mathematics with a user-friendly front end. So anyone can ange any piece of media. Including your recording of your music. Second, it means that your music - and any other media - is endlessly replicable. If I was making an analogue recording of your music, it would be a degraded copy of the original. If Im copying the ones and zeroes, then the recording is not a copy - its another original. ey are identical in every respect. ird, it means that copying is the easiest thing in the world to do. In fact, you cant avoid it. Just by reading my website, you make a copy on several computers in dierent places all over the world. eres a copy on your own hard drive - and all you were doing was looking. So - its a world of communication, connectedness and copying. ats just the way that it is.

The Online Medium

e other thing to know about the internet is that its a medium. But its a medium that includes and swallows other media. Radio, television, print and all other media - including music media - become nothing more than `content' on the new online medium. ey cease to be things in themselves and become just part of the whole online experience. e analogy I oen nd myself using is that its like what happens to theatre directors when you point television cameras at their work and put it on TV. ey either continue to make theatre productions and plays and hope that it comes across okay on the new platform - or they can adapt to the new medium and start making television programmes.

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One is not beer nor worse than the other. But the hypothetical theatre director who adapts to the new medium and starts working on its own terms is far more likely to have ongoing success, while the one who resolutely refuses to ange is more likely to experience diculties and will complain bierly that television is stealing the audience and making it very dicult to survive in the world of drama these days. Does that mean I think that you should stop making `music' and start `making internet'? Actually, yes it does. ats exactly what it means. ats not to say I think you should stop being a musician or a music industry entrepreneur. Just that the medium of music, as it has existed for around sixty years, is not the `natural condition' of music business. ese things are articial constructs that can and do ange over time. is one just happens to be a biggie. So the skills you have in making the art that you make will still come into play, just as the adapted theatre director who understands television still makes dramatic productions using those deep understandings of narrative, aracter, pace and dramatic tension but equally, theres a distinctive break in the way in whi they operate. To thrive in the online environment, you need to make a decisive break with the old way of doing things and instead aempt to `go native' in the new online environment. I dont care whether youre a solo singer-songwriter or a major record label. is applies. But just as our theatre director doesnt need to know how television transmission works nor even how to operate a camera you dont have to worry about `not being tenical'. You just have to worry about what the parameters and conditions of the new medium are, and what expectations your audience has in this new world. Its not about learning new skills. Its about understanding a dierent world. Some of us are o to a ying start and others are standing at the brink of it looking at a confusing and slightly scary landscape. Dont be put o its not the wild west and its not riddled with pirates and gangsters, no maer what you might read in the press. Its ne, its exciting, its completely within your grasp and its where your best ance of making a living from music lies. And best

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of all, you can put it together in any way that suits you, your audience and your music. Ive made the observation in the past that the internet can be thought of as being like electricity, and all of the dierent things that can plug into it are like appliances. Web browsers, email soware, instant messengers, media players and so on. Ive also made the observation that quite a lot of the time, when we use the one of these things - say, the web - to do online music, the eect is a bit like trying to dry your hair with a toaster. Itll do the job, but it feels like theres probably a beer way to approa this. So now that weve got that idea lodged in your head, lets talk about the actual aracteristics of the internet. Whi means that we also need to talk about the aracteristics of digital media generally. And to do that, let me tell you about the next generation of my own family.

As a Digital Native sees it

When my son was about 9 years old (ba in 2001), he asked me the kind of question most parents both dread, and are entirely accustomed to: Dad how long is `now'? Its a good question. Philosophically, we can make all sorts of distinctions between contemporaneous events, the experience of instantaneity and the idea of the zero-sized point along a line that stretes from the past into the future. But he was nine and he wanted a measure. Essentially, he was asking for the sample rate of human experience. I dont think I could have even formulated that question at his age. And Im not saying that as the proud father of a budding philosopher I mean, I dont think my brain was wired up to ever wonder about that, and I think its generational. is was the moment I realised that because of the prevailing media environment, he has grown up thinking digitally, rather than in analogue format. Whats the dierence? Analogue media are continuous. ink of the groove on a record or the joined-up ow of a waveform. Digital

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media, on the other hand, are discrete. ink of the individual samples that follow ea other in rapid succession on a CD. To an analogue 9 year-old (me, 1976), you start at the top of a slide and you continue on down in one smooth motion until youre at the boom. To the digital ild (Jake, 2001), you start at the top of a slide, then moment by moment, youre a lile bit further down, then a lile bit further, and so on in rapid succession until you rea the boom. Of course, the net result is the same. Travel diagonally downwards still happens. An analogue slide, like an analogue record, sounds like a digital slide (or a CD). But its interesting that the way of thinking and understanding the world is transformed. Its signicant that the digital native in our family is now a young adult. e way in whi Jake thinks about a lot of things is based upon the way in whi he receives most of his information about the world. Hes also prey mu a key target consumer for the vast majority of the record industry. So heres the world as he experiences it: Digital media, being made of universally shared components (ie: 1s and 0s) are easily broken into their parts, mixed together with other digital things and rebuilt into something else. All texts are hypertexts. Understanding media texts happens as a result of connecting them to other things. Wating a lm also involves a visit to IMDB or a fan site, and trying to map the movie into a conceptual network of lms by a particular director, starring a particular actor, or of a particular genre (zombie lms, mostly). Everything is universal and platform-independent. If something works on one device and doesnt work on another, it is broken and useless. A Word document has to work and display identically on every type of computer it comes into contact with. A music le needs to play on every conceivable platform. All the world is screen mediated - except for portable listening. Sitting still and just listening to something without either moving around or looking at something is decidedly unusual. And these days, hes a music producer and sound engineer. is stu is important to him. Music generally accompanies other activities: making things in

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Photoshop, playing games, learning all there possibly is to know about the Marvel universe (hes in tou with his inner geek) and reading his RSS feeds. Where the music comes from is next to irrelevant. Pandora was good for a while, but thats gone now - and hardly missed at all. iTunes is the player of oice, but VLC Media player works for those media les that dont t into the iTunes world. Buying music on CD is not an alien concept, but its not the default mode of acquisition either. Finding a song quily that he doesnt already own - for a qui, one-listen x - the default sear is on YouTube, not a music site or even Google. e idea of a song without visual accompaniment is almost something of an anaronism. e Soundcloud waveform is not simply decorative - its part of the music. Now, I tell you this stu not because these things are essential components of the digital world, but as an ethnographic observation of a digital native. Im sure that what he does on the computer is neither typical, nor particularly unusual. is is a world of complexity - and nding out what his friends do online will ange his behaviours for a time to see whether this new thing ts with how he wants to experience the world, and new online habits are quily pied up and discarded. But certain things are constant regardless of this ameleon behaviour. Digital media are exible and adaptable. ey can be reworked into new media forms, and can be dissected to say and do things that were never originally intended for. is is a creative act, rather than vandalism. Media products are therefore texts in themselves, part of a wider body of works, and raw material for things that havent been invented yet. Unlike analogue media (say, broadcast FM radio for instance), digital media can be time shied, cut up into smaller bits, joined to other things, and transferred from device to device. ey are broadly independent of geography, ronology, and traditional one-to-many structures of authority and power. Even when su power relationships can be identied as coming into play (eg: major record labels, Holly-

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wood studios), circumventing the full eect of that relationship is the norm, rather than the exception. What was once the arcane dominion of haers and the holders of specialist tenical knowledge is now the lingua franca of the digital native.

So - okay - but whats the internet?

Tenically speaking, the internet is a network of networks. Its groups of computers connected with other groups of computers in an array that allows them all to communicate using a shared protocol. Whi is a bit like saying that radio is a system of transmiers and receivers that communicate using electromagnetic waves. True, but not useful. Like the medium of television that turned the medium of theatre into content, the internet turns all other media into content. Everything. Books, lms, spoken lectures, radio, television, comics - even the medium we call music - get `demoted' to content. at doesnt take away from musics art, its grandeur and its importance but it profoundly anges our relationship to it. You may have spoed one or two alterations to that relationship over the past decade yourself. And the reason that relationship has necessarily altered is not because people are thieves or because the tangible artefact is lost when you have a download-only piece of music, but because by being immersed in a digital environment, we are anged. ats the bit we miss. We keep looking at the fact that music online seems to be a dierent kele of sh to music oine. Other people notice that newspapers seem to not work the way they used to. Or that our relationship to text and images on a page is dierent. Or our consumption and interaction around radio programmes has altered. Everything looks new, perhaps exciting, certainly dierent, sometimes just plain wrong. And yes, were noticing the tenological shis in our media environment. But we overlook the more signicant fact that the more we are immersed in the digital world, the more we are altered by it, socially, culturally and psyologically.

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Sometimes when we see things dierently, we have to consider the possibility that the way in whi we see is what has anged. In a new environment, the successful organisms adapt and thrive. Adaptation doesnt mean doing dierent things, it means being dierent. So what is the internet? Its an environment within whi we are immersed. Its not just a distribution methodology for recorded music or a bigger antenna for a radio station. Its not a delivery platform for newspapers or a secondary carrier for television shows. Far more than what we consume, produce and experience - it affects how we consume, produce and experience. It anges us as human beings. We become, as a friend of mine has it, Digital Animals. So to answer the question surely youre not saying that we should compose for the internet? I have to say thats prey mu exactly what Im suggesting. e physical aracteristics and limits of the record, and the dictates of music radio profoundly altered our understanding of what a song is. ree minute pop songs are not that length nor in that structural form because of some natural in-built aracteristic of music. Its what sounds right to us because it was wrien for the electric age, where those were the dictates of the medium. And as radical as some people like to think they are, compositional forms are largely shaped by the cultures to whi they belong. Weve got a new culture, and new dictates of its dominant medium. ats all Im saying. But Im not here to tell you how to make music. My job, as I imagine it, is to try and put into words the ways in whi this kind of understanding can be helpful to someone who wants to start or continue to make a living from music given that both the environment and the people in it are now dierent, and still anging. And my rst tip? Stop pretending that theyre not.

Music Online - and Online Music

So weve covered what I mean by `Music', as well as what I mean by `Online'. ats what they mean separately. What do they mean when you say them together? Youll remember that when I say `music', I am not only talking about recordings of music. Im talking about the whole medium of popular music and all of the stages of its production, distribution, promotion and consumption. Likewise, youll recall that when I say Online, Im not just talking about web pages. Im talking about the whole ecology of the online environment. e electricity into whi we can plug so many internet appliances. So having come up with something of a working denition of what I mean when I say `online' and what I mean when I say `music' it will hopefully be instructive to look at the two of them as a single idea: Music Online or, to put a slightly dierent avour to it, Online Music. Because the order in whi you say those words gives a subtle shi to what it can mean, what you can do with that meaning conceptually, and therefore what you do as a result. `Music Online' is music that has been put into an online environment. Its music, rst and foremost, and now it happens to be online. `Online Music' is music that is aracterised by its online-ness. What sort of music is it? Its Online Music. Im interested in both. Now, of course, this is an articial distinction, and you can call these things what you like. Music on the Internet, Internet Music, Digital Music these all have particular connotations, but essentially 32

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theyre interangeable names that will suit most ordinary purposes. Its only people like me who think the semantics are even remotely important and who like to clarify the language in order to make these distinctions. But if youll bear with me just this once, being pedantic in this way does lead to a broader way of thinking about what we do when we connect music up to the online environment and what that might be leading us towards. To most readers, what I call `Music Online' will seem to be the thing to be concerned with. Its the stu of our everyday activities. We currently engage in the music world, doing whatever it is we do in order to create, promote, disseminate, enjoy and (hopefully) make money through music. And we live in a world in whi the internet is an important component of our media environment. So this is about taking what you do as a musician or independent music business, and puing it on the internet with the intention of enhancing, expanding or otherwise contributing to the rea and exposure of the music. Puing music online is usually taken as a step to expand audiences, rea new markets, promote a recording or live performance, or make a sale. e music activity (from whiever part of the media production, distribution or consumption process it comes) exists independently of the internet, but the internet is deployed as a tool and a strategy in order to aieve whatever purpose the music had, more eectively, eciently or perhaps protably. Take Music, add Online and hope for the best. In other words, Music Online is Music, put online. You have a band so you set up a Facebook page (it used to be MySpace, remember?). Youve made a record, so you make sure its available on iTunes (or beer still, Bandcamp). Youve got a concert coming up, so you use SongKi to make sure all of your fans know about it. Online Music (for la of a beer term - and this is a problem Ill come to shortly), on the other hand, is a dierent order of things. is is music activity aracterised by its online-ness. I think this is the area that most people in the music industries overlook as a possibility, and

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its a conceptual leap that you tend to miss if you dont think to put those two words together in that order. Remembering again (and Im going to keep reminding you) that when I say Music, Im talking about all of the dierent stages from the production through to the consumption of musical texts, Online Music happens when the internet is part of the design process of key elements in that ain. Normally, this will happen when music industries people partner with tenologists to design the `appliance' that will aieve the goal they have in mind (ie: to stop drying their hair with a toaster, and instead invent the hairdryer). is is a far less common approa at present, and there are only a handful examples of it around. Youll be familiar with Last.fm. Perhaps youll have heard of Topspin. You might know Soundcloud. ese, and some other organisations and services you may happen to think of are music enterprises `built out of internet'. You may nd some of them useful as part of your puing-music-online strategy. But if you were to take a more radical, deliberate and forwardthinking approa to the new digital environment, you might instead wish to emulate their process. Rather than do something, and then squeeze it onto the internet, you could actually take that dicult translation process out of the equation, and simply build the thing you do as a native element of the online world. is, to me, is the key to New Music Strategies.

Transitional media
Music Online, therefore, is essentially a transitional phase. Its a way of adapting to a new environment. Where Online Music is about being native to that environment and creating music business `organisms' with what you might like to think of as digital DNA, Music Online is about selecting organisms from the oine world, and transplanting them into the new environment, giving them new roles to fulll, and making adaptations so that they can survive and thrive.

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But even Online Music is not quite right to describe this new, native media category. It still smas of something in transition, rather than something new. Of course music wont be replaced or lost within the online environment. It is, rather, `made anew'. But if we were really being fussy with our semantics, wed probably be looking for a whole new word at this point. In fact, this stu is still so new, that most commentators see the process of adaptation as the endgame of digital evolution. What we dont see is that its part of the process towards being something else entirely. ink of this idea of Online Music as like being at the `horseless carriage' / `wireless telegraphy' phase of this medium. We understand what it is in terms of an old form (of course: its a carriage / its telegraphy / its music), but were also aware that it has some new, exciting perhaps troubling distinctive dierences that we need to come to terms with (its horseless / its wireless / its online). And like the phrases `horseless carriage' and `wireless telegraphy', `online music' is a term that hides from us the new and dominant form that is emerging. When we marvel at the horslessness of the carriage and the wirelessness of the telegraphy, we oen miss the fact that we should actually be designing and learning to operate cars and radios. I once asserted that theres no su thing as internet radio - by whi I meant that once you put it on the internet, you might as well not call it radio anymore. None of the aracteristics that we imagine to be `essential' to the medium of radio necessarily remain intact. It isnt transmied via radio waves for a start - but also the infrastructure is dierent, the political economy is dierent, the professional practices are dierent, the devices that we use to listen are dierent, its not necessarily time-bound, linear or local - even the nature of the programmes are oen dierent, and the necessity for radio output to be part of a radio station is gone. When we listen to internet radio - or wat TV online, or read a newspaper on the web - were not listening to the radio, wating television or reading a newspaper. Were on the internet, and the fact that thats dierent is important. Like I said before - the content of any new medium is its prede-

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cessor. Were not aending plays through our television set, were wating TV. ats not the Guardian newspaper you just emailed me a link to. We put our earlier media into our new media forms. And then forget that we did. McLuhan thinks (and I tend to agree with him) that were so busy looking at the content, that we overlook the medium. And its the medium that is the message. Its the medium that is the whole point. ats what has the eects, and provides the context for the anges. And for us to adapt to this new environment, its important for us to not only be aware of that fact, but to properly understand the aracteristics and aordances of that new medium. ose arent records were listening to. And for our purposes here, thats what maers. is is why were talking about this stu. For music makers, for music businesses, for music fans - and for music this is whats important.