"Decommodifying Music": strategic ideas

from Bohème Magazine Online (http://www.boheme-magazine.net):

Decommodifying Music
By Danyl Strype
http://strypey.orcon.net.nz/indymusic.html

In today's society music, like milk, is farmed, processed and sold.
Rather than being a spontaneous transformation of the milk of everyday life into
sonic yoghurt by a free cultural process, the music industry treats musicians as
cash cows. Their product is pumped out of them by the machinery of the record
contract and pastuerized by the censorship of mass-produced pop culture and
compressed by the corporate marketing machine into hard cheese for everyone
except for the blue vein of the corporate elite.
Who benefits from this industrial treatment of music? Not the artists, who
must sell the rights to their work in order to gain access to the means of
distribution which the six major media corporations monopolize. Not the audiences
who must pay for over-inflated CDs and concert tickets and can access only
those forms of music which are considered marketable by the gatekeepers of popular
culture.
The only class which seems to benefit from the dominant form of musical
manufacture are the shareholders of the major labels and their
pseudo-independent subsidiaries. The commericalization of music, like so many other aspects of
modern society, is a tool for the concentration of wealth and the majority of
musicians are as exploited as any other industrial worker.
So what forms of resistance exist to this rampant commodification?
Firstly there is the immediatist response - to make music only for the pleasure of
the players and never perform it publicly or record it. Then there is the DIY
movement championed by punk bands like Crass, where bands are encouraged to
manage themselves, organise their own shows in whatever venue is available -
ideally all-age, non-commercial ones - make their own records and run 'distros' to
trade them with other bands. The DIY philosophy has been remarkably
successful within the various punk subgenres with warehouse venues, garage rehearsal
rooms, home studios and small scale labels and distros springing in and out of
existence all over the world. To some degree the same DIY ethos can be seen at
work within other musical subcultures such as the underground dance party
movement or the lo-fi and indie pop genres. But although DIY has kept an
independent musical muse alive it has yet to become a publicly-accepted alternative to
the corporate world and thousands of young music writers and performers are
still trapped into exploitation by the promise of fame, fortune and album sales.
As well as DIY there are also the independent labels often run by cult
celebrities. Examples include Alternative Tentacles run by Jello Biafra of Dead
Kennedys' fame and Epitaph run by Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion. The major
problem with the 'indies' being that they are still businesses, bound by the
structural injustices of the state-corporate system. Each indie could potentially
become a major of the future, be bought up by one of the majors or turn out
to be a sub-label created by a major to niche market more edgy musical
commodities to more skeptical alternative music consumers.
If the hands of the corporate ogre are to be removed from the neck of the
music world, there needs to be a way for all of the people involved in these
anti-corporate organisations to pool their resources and form a transnational
co-operation that I have dubbed Indymusic. I envision a global network of open
content websites that showcase independent music along the lines of the way
Indymedia currently provides alternative news.

Each site would include:

* Features on non-corporate bands, venues, labels etc.
* An open-publishing 'music-wire' down the right-hand side of the page
which artists could use to announce the release of a single, tour dates or any
other news about their musical activities
* A database of music encoded using .ogg (the open source Ogg Vorbis format
(http://www.vorbis.com/) with info on the artist and how to donate to them (a
la www.adoptaband.com) or buy their recordings. Artists could put the song
and their artist info in the database for music fans and even radio stations to
download for their playlists. Ideally that archive would also be linked to
some of the popular file-sharing networks, especially the open source Gnutella
network (http://www.gnutella.com/).

Another part of the concept is for each local Indymusic group to also be
affiliated to a community recording facility - an Independent Sound Centre -
where the music can be produced, converted to .ogg and audio CDs made, recycled
cardboard cases and slicks made, etc. This facility could also involve video
artists making music videos and burning them to DVD. The Independent Sound
Centres could fund themselves by burning and selling compilations and albums of
each other's local artists. The concept would be communicated in a 'copyleft'
open content license (http://www.creativecommons.org/) that would mirror the
way open source software licenses guarantee the freedom of anyone to distribute
the content free or for a fee negotiated with the buyer.
The Indymusic network could also help bands tour, providing accomodation
and help with finding venues, support bands etc. If the costs and stress of
touring can be reduced to the point that playing live becomes a viable and
enjoyable living for artists, they can stop stressing about shifting units and
celebrate the fact that fans anywhere in the world can download their music free
or buy it cheap from their local Indymusic centre.
How can you help? It depends on what skills and resources you can offer.
The first thing you can do is help to circulate and develop this proposal. If
you have access to computer equipment, especially internet servers and
bandwidth we are going to need that to run the indymusic sites. We will need
graphical designers and web language programmers to build and maintain the sites. We
will need sound-proof spaces or space in no-noise-control areas for the
Independent Sound Centres. We will need instruments, amps, microphones, mixers,
cables, computers and other equipment as well as the engineering and teaching time
of capable sound recordists for the recording, digitizing and CD-making
aspects of the ISCs. We will need people to help raise funds and promote the concept
to the community.
At the moment I'm looking for input from artists about the proposal and
to see how they would feel about using such a system. I would really appreciate
it if you could talk to any musos you know and pass my email address
strypey@... around for feedback. If the level of freedom in a supposedly
democratic society can be guaged by looking at the independence of its artists,
journalists and historians then we have a lot of work to do before we should
presume to call ourselves a free people.

Anti-Copyright July 2003 by Danyl Strype. May be reproduced freely for
non-profit purposes provided that the author is credited, with either his e-mail
address or website (http://strypey.orcon.net.nz/indymusic.html) link included.

--- º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º º°`°º ø,¸~->

Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist
(no, I don't wanna take over the world, just the sound spectrum...)
http://www.boheme-magazine.net

"... Music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the
other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the
essence." - Schopenhauer, _The World as Will and Representation_

"... the distillation of experience into pure sound, a state of music, is
timeless and absolute." -Anais Nin

"...improvisation is about change, about flux rather than stasis. ...
improvisation is about a constant change." - Steve Beresford

improvisation: "a process of liberation, a working around the assumptions
that define our civilization, and the results are open-ended." - John Berndt

NATURE LOVES MUSIC:
Scientist Phil Uttley "said the music of a black hole could be called
improv." In "comparison to a specific artist or style, he said the late Greek
composer Iannis Xenakis used flicker noise to randomly generate pieces called
stochastic music. 'You could use the variations in the X-ray output of black holes to
produce just this sort of music.'"
" [ ... ] 'Flicker Noise' - Nature's inaudible rhythms & patterns are "in
everything from heartbeats to climate change. Other astronomers have detected
flicker noise in X-ray outputs and in interplanetary magnetic fields."
"Scientists say music is ubiquitous in Nature (Earth itself) and shows up
in the arrangements of the planets, in seascapes, and even in our
brainwaves." --- SPACE.com

"Any sufficiently advanced music is indistinguishable from noise"
(after Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism that any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguisable from magic.)" - John Chalmers, in email
response
to the quote _The Difference between Music and Noise is all in your Head_