Simon Reynolds, one of Pop Culture's most articulate critics and theorists.
Simon, how has the internet changed the music business?
It 's just been cataclysmic I guess in mostly negative ways, but you know, this one has positive aspects as well. I mean it.
Well let's start with the negatives.
Well, obviously, it's been really bad for record labels. It's been pretty bad for artists. I mean some artists have made it work but not a lot.
Not everyone would agree with that. Why has it been bad for artists?
Well it's much less likely that you be able make a living doing it. A lot of, certainly the reduction in record sales has made... You know, it's always like a lottery, like most musicians never make any money, most of them leave their deals in debt, emotional debt because the erecord companies don't come and repossess your belongings.
But it's like a your in the red, and if your record happens to sell a lot later the money you'd be earning would be going to pay off this debt that you built up through recording cost, in touring classrooms kinda stuff, but it was always, there was always the possibility that, you know, a tiny fraction of the musicians just really hit the big time and that's made forever.
And that's gone down, you know that chance, that prospect has reduced a lot I think. There are other ways of making money.
Why, is it because of piracy? Is it because of the collapse of the industry?
Because a generation's come along who don't think they should pay for music, you know. What's your reading on that, you're obviously someone who spends an awful lot of time with artists, and with audiences. You're someone who I assume mostly pays for music. Why so many people not interested or willing to pay for their music anymore?
It's just, it 's irresistible isn't it, I think? And in fact, you know, I have downloaded records in a naughty way, and it's say something about the fact that it's so easy to do. I have actually downloaded records I already own, 'cause it's more convienient than trying to find the CD, and I'll actually, you know, rather then go waste 20 minutes going through my boxes for a CD I'll just download it.
It's just all out there. Mostly, you know, for me, mostly of the interest is things that are out of print and esotaric, you know, that you never dreamed of ever hearing. I think the thing that I find though is that kind of left, you know, left when people often have this thing of like, rubbing, because your reflexively anti-capitalist, often rock critics are.
They often, they think they should rejoice that the record companies are suffering, and it's great, the corporations are suffering after having prospered off the back of musicians for so long. But I think the de-commodification of music has actually not been very good for fans, either. I think there's something about paying for music that makes it it's more intense; you've got to listen harder to music.
If you pay for it you're going to pay attention to the record you bought and get your money's worth. Whereas I think people who download a lot, I've just seen from my own habits, you listen distractedly, you might never get around to playing it, you might listen to half of it then stop and get distracted by checking your emails or something else, downloading more music.
So I think there is something about the loss of the buying music relationship that has dis-intensified.
In your excellent book Retromania you talk about something called "the crisis of over documentation." There's this Yeah.
abundance. We've arrived in the promised land, but it's a rather dark place.
It is like the promised land; it's sort of the world you always dreamed of if you're a music fan.
Cornucopia of absolute abundance.
Or even a fan of any art form, you know, film or design or whatever. It's all up there, all the information, all the most obscure images, movies, that you'd never hope to see normally. You can access it all. But it's too much to process. It's too much to feel, really. I find, like, I find that I'm trying to keep up with so music or listen to so much music from the past that it doesn't quite...it's hard to emotionally react to it.
You're just processing it, ticking off boxes. "Oh, I must check out, you know, this genre from the late 70's," or whatever and it becomes a different relationship. I think also having so much knowledge about music takes away some of the mystery as well. Like some of the...
Well, you're calling in your book for a return to boredom. You said that we are super saturated now with information, with data, with music, and we need to go back to a world way where we're not easily bored.
Well, I don't know if I actually...it's like a manifesto or a call for boredom. But it was more like a musing where I had this funny thing where I suddenly started remembering what it was like practically a teenager, grow up in a small town in England and being starved for stimulation. And the results of that you tended to deal with it by daydreaming and fantasy or mischief, you know, like vandalism and, and pranks and things like that, or just making your own entertainment.
And there's a different kind of boredom now that I think comes from having so many choices and so many options that you, you find yourself just, you know, I mean, one thing is mindlessly flicking though TV on the, with your remote, just through the hundreds of thousands of channels, or drifting restlessly across the internet.
Never quite fully, starting to read things and then getting bored .
The Nicholas Carr, Gerondin, yeah, thing.
As you ride on the air, I think so. Are you in Lanier'st cab when he argues that seems to blame the internet for the disappearance of original music? I think it's had something, you know I think that's at least a partially correct intuition or observation by him, and I thought his book was really interesting.
I think having all this stuff available to young bands, it makes it so tempting to sort of work by revisiting the start and then tinkering with it a bit. I think like in the old days like bands tended to start with a few primary influences and it was a different sort of model of creativity. You struggled with you influences and you overcame them and then you, if you look at what the Rolling Stones did like they struggled with, they were super inspired by Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf and Robert Johnson.
They kind of had to research for the records. It's hard to find them. They start up quite imitative, and then they basically they would go off their own original track.
So what you're saying then is that the remix culture might be a cultural cul de sac.
Yeah, I don't think it's like a particularly mash-ups seem to me a very sterile genre like, you know, they-- and also a mash-up is not something that you'd really want to listen to more than a few times because it's like a joke, isn't it, really? It's like a wisecrack. You have the juxtaposition of unlikely things, you know, like Salt ; Pepper like, you know, a rap artist combined with the Stooges like a punk hard rock.
It's a funny combination. It's incongruous. But you wouldn't--you probably want to go off and listen to Salt ; Pepper on their own and the Stooges on their own. Mash-ups don't have a very long shelf life, I don't think. And they're not adding anything. They're not adding--they're not a contribution to the future of music, I don't think.
Well you're not allowed to be on TechCrunch and be too miserable.
Right.
So, lets end on a cheerful note. You said that the internet has had some positive impacts on music. Are you encouraged by Spotify and these new models that seem to be more viable business models for enabling audiences to access music and realizing some revenue at least for the industry.
Yeah, I mean I think anything that sort of, you know, I think a lot of people probably would like, you know, they like the idea of the artists making a living, I think.
Well who doesn't? Who want's starting artists?
Yeah, because you don't want people to suffer for their art necessarily. But I think, you know, there are definitely positive aspects to having all this knowledge. The interesting thing is you get the rise of basically the rise of filtration systems on you. You have such an abundance of knowledge and data and cultural stuff.
So that requires things like Spotify or aggregation sites; like one I visit a lot is The Daily Swarm. It picks music related stories, and its very useful because, you know, the whole concept of the name we've just realized is the swarm of data, but were gonna navigate Paul's view so that role is very important.
Do you think that's where the business opportunities in the future of music lie, with curators? You talk in some detail Yeah.
about curation in your book. Do you still think that we're on the verge of reinventing a new kind of curated media on line?
I don't know about that, but I do think that more and more people, you know most people don't have time to sift through everything, there's too much to sort of to go through, so, in terms of like, what I do, that role of being a filter seems to be one viable future for the critic and suggested there's some kind of, you know, future for that the profession.
I think just generally, anything that sort of makes it manageable, anything that sort of directs people to the good stuff, is going to be original.
So nothing really has changed. We're still really at the beginning of this thing. We're still trying to figure out how to make this data valuable, for the consumer.
Yeah.
And we still still haven't figured it out.
No, it's just a, there is a sort of a, there's a problem of overabundance and of plenty can be . . .
So, the good news then is for the entrepreneur out there who loves music, who wants to set up an online music business, there are still opportunities.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, basically the things are, all these systems are basically variants of what radio used to do, in a way. Radio was, this famous rock writer Greer Marcus called it like a good weird machine.
It's a machine that introduces you, it's like radio gives you what you already like, but every so often it lets you have, shows you something you don't know that you like. That's the secret, to get people to encounter things that they're not already looking for and surprise them every so often.
So anything that kind of can take on the role that radio used to have, deliver it, new things to people for they're gonna like. It's gonna prosper.
On that serendipitous note, Simon, I want to thank you so much for appearing on TechCrunch TV.
Well thank you, I enjoyed it.
So is Simon Reynolds correct? Has the Internet really had such detrimental impact on artists and fans alike? And if so, then how can we return to a time when musicians like the Beatles, Stevie Wonder or Talking Heads, rather than Steve Jobs or the iPhone, captured the zeitgeist of our age?
