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Where Music Will Be Coming From

March 17, 2002

By KEVIN KELLY

Technology is changing music. But then again, it always
has. The invention of the piano 300 years ago centered
Western music on the keyboard. Electricity's arrival in the
late 19th century enabled the duplication of performances
and, later, the amplification of instruments. With
digitization, the pace of upheaval has further accelerated.
Digital file-sharing technologies -- Napster and its
offspring -- are now undermining the established economics
of music. And everything we know about digital technologies
suggests that Napster is only the beginning.

There is no music made today that has not been shaped by
the fact of recording and duplication. In fact, the ability
to copy music has been deeply disruptive ever since the
invention of the gramophone. When John D. Smoot, an
engineer for the European company Odeon, carted primitive
recording equipment to the Indonesian archipelago in 1904
to record the gamelan orchestras, local musicians were
perplexed. Why copy a performance? The popular local tunes
that circulated in their villages had a half-life of a few
weeks. Why would anyone want to listen to a stale rendition
of an obsolete piece when it was so easy to get fresh
music?

As phonographs spread throughout the world, they had a
surprising effect: folk tunes, which had always been
malleable, changing with each performer and in each
performance, were transformed by the advent of recording
into fixed songs that could be endlessly and exactly
repeated. Music became shorter, more melodic and more
precise.

Early equipment could make recordings that contained no
more than four and a half minutes, so musicians truncated
old works to fit and created new music abbreviated to adapt
to the phonograph. Because the first sound recordings were
of unamplified music, recording emphasized the loud sounds
of singers and de-emphasized quiet instrumentals. The
musicologist Timothy Day notes that once pianists began
recording they tried, for the first time, to ''distinguish
carefully between every quaver and semiquaver -- eighth
note and sixteenth note -- throughout the piece.''
Musicians played the way technology listened. When the
legendary recordist Frederick Gaisberg arrived in Calcutta
in 1902, only two decades after the phonograph was
invented, he found that Indian musicians were already
learning to imitate recorded music and lamented that there
was ''no traditional music left to record.''

As the technologies of reproduction bloomed in the last
century, consumerism boomed. What consumers consumed --
whether in the form of a book, a CD or a can of Coke --
were exact copies. The ability to make copies in
mind-boggling quantities, ceaselessly and perfectly, was
the chief ingredient of mass culture. Music rapidly adapted
to the culture of the copy. Reproductions were made exact,
while copies were multiplied vigorously. Music lived in its
constant reproduction.

The grand upset that music is now experiencing -- the
transformation that Napster signaled -- is the shift from
analog copies to digital copies. The industrial age was
driven by analog copies; analog copies are perfect and
cheap. The information age is driven by digital copies;
digital copies are perfect, fluid and free.

Free is hard to ignore. It propels duplication at a scale
that would previously have been unbelievable. In only 10
months, 71million copies of the music-sharing software
Morpheus were downloaded. Of course, it's not just music
that is being copied freely. It is text, pictures, movies,
entire Web sites. In this new online world, anything that
can be copied will be copied, free.

But the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its
position in the economic equation is suddenly inverted.
When nighttime electrical lighting was new, it was the poor
who burned common candles. When electricity became easily
accessible and practically free, candles at dinner became a
sign of luxury.

In this new supersaturated online universe of infinite free
digital duplication, the axis of value has flipped. In the
industrial age, copies often were more valuable than the
original. (Who wanted the ''original'' prototype
refrigerator that the one in your kitchen was based on?)
Most people wanted a perfect working clone. The more common
the clone, the more desirable, since it would then come
with a brand name respected by others and a network of
service and repair outlets.

But now, in a brave new world of abundant and free copies,
the order has inverted. Copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap
(free, in fact) that the only things truly valuable are
those which cannot be copied.

What kinds of things can't be copied? Well, for instance:
trust, immediacy, personalization. There is no way to
download these qualities from existing copies or to install
them from a friend's CD. So while you can score a copy free
of charge, if you want something authenticated, or
immediately, or personalized, you'll have to pay.

In the domain of the plentifully free, music will do the
only thing it can do: charge for things that can't be
copied easily. A friend of a friend may eventually pass on
to you the concert recording of a band you like, but if you
pay, the band itself will e-mail it to you seconds after
the performance. Sure, you can find a copy of that hit
dance track, but if you want the mix approved by the
legendary D.J., then you'll want to pay for it. Anyone can
grab a free copy of Beethoven's Ninth, but if you want it
customized for the audio parameters of your room or car,
you'll pay for it. You may have downloaded that
Cuban-Chinese rock band from the Morpheus site without
paying, but the only way to get all that cool
meta-information about each track, which lets you search
for chords and lyrics, is to establish a relationship with
the band by paying.

The quality least plentiful in a world of rampant free
copies is attention. Each year more than 30,000 new music
titles are released (or rereleased) into a very cluttered
head space of new movies, new TV shows, new books, new
games, new Web sites. No matter what your musical appetite,
there are not enough hours in a lifetime to listen to but a
tiny fraction of the global supply. People will pay simply
to have someone edit the music and recommend and present
selected material to them in an easy and fun manner. That
is why producers, labels and the related ecology of
reviewers, catalogers and guides will continue to make a
living: they counter our natural lack of attention for the
10 million albums we can expect to see in another 50 years.
In the end, an awful lot of music will be sold in the
territory of the free because it will be easier to buy
music you really like than to find it for free.

Free is overrated as a destiny. It is only the second phase
of the three stages of copydom. The first phase --
perfection -- is experienced in both analog and digital.
Perfect duplication made the modern world and modern music.

The second stage is freeness. Costless duplication made
Napster possible and a music revolution thinkable.

Yet it is in the third level of digital copy-ness that the
real revolution lies. This third power is liquidity, and it
will take music beyond Napster.

Digital copies are not only perfect and free, they are also
fluid. Once music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can
be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked. You can
filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it,
mess with it. And you can do this to music that you write,
or music that you listen to, or music that you borrow.

At first glance it seems audiences were drawn to online
music because of the power of the free, but in reality the
rush to online music came from digitized sound's
ever-expanding power of liquidity. Once music could swirl
around one's life unencumbered, the millions of people who
downloaded peer-to-peer file-sharing software suddenly and
simultaneously imagined a thousand ways to conjure with
music's liquidity. It wasn't only that it was free; it was
all the things you could do with it.

Once music is digitized, new behaviors emerge. With liquid
music you have the power to reorder the sequence of tunes
on an album, or among albums. To surgically morph a sound
until it is suitable for a new use. To precisely extract
from someone else's music a sample of notes to use oneself.
To X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and
then alter it. To substitute new lyrics. To rearrange a
piece so that its parts yield a different voice. To
re-engineer a piece so that it sounds better on a car
woofer. To meld and marry music together into hybrid
breeds. To shorten a piece, or to draw it out so that it
takes twice as long to play.

With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb,
once again.

If this third power of the digital copy were to play out in
full, the world would be full of people messing around with
sound and music much as they dabble in taking snapshots and
shaping Web pages. The typical skepticism toward a scenario
of ubiquitous creation and recreation of music is that it
is always easier to read than to write, to listen than to
play, to see than to make. That is true. Yet 10 years ago,
anyone claiming that ordinary people would flock to
expensive computers to take time from watching TV in order
to create three billion or more Web pages -- well, that
person would have been laughed out of the room as
idealistic, utopian. People just aren't that creative or
willing to take time to create, went the argument. Yet,
against all odds, three billion Web pages exist. The growth
of the Web is probably the largest creative spell that
civilization has witnessed. Music could experience a
similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur
spirit.

Part of the reason people have been inspired to create
text, graphics and action in the digital realm has been the
arrival of new tools. Fans of music are already shuffling
playlists, remixing tracks, sampling sounds, laying music
with automatic drums and other instruments. They are
already making music in the way that a camera makes an
image -- by starting with what is there and adding a unique
view to it. Just as the introduction of the Brownie camera
changed photography from an expert's art to a ubiquitous
public expression, with the right tools in hand it is not a
very long hop from now to a time when everyone makes music
in a small, amateur way.

Much of the friction about Napster is cast as a question
about the future of music. But no matter what happens, the
world of the future will have lots of music, listened to by
lots of people. The question is not about the future of
music but about the future of musicians. The role of the
professional musician is in flux. But again, it has always
been so.

The rules for making a living making music have been remade
over and over, from the first drumbeat. Until the 20th
century, musicians in Western societies were generally held
in contempt, their status approximating that of a vagabond.
Even the most successful musicians were mistrusted.

Recording technology redeemed the professional musician.
The machinery of recording and duplication steadily
elevated the role of musicians during this century until
many of them now have reached celebrity status and riches.
This was a status only a handful of musicians could have
dreamed of a few hundred years ago. Mozart never had it so
good.

The arrival of perfect, free and liquid copies of music
means that new economic models of making music will be
forced upon musicians. Will the model of the future be to
give away copies in order to sell out a performance? Or to
rapidly issue new work from the studio faster than it can
spread online? Or to release music in such wonderful
packaging that it is cheaper to buy it than to copy it? The
probable answer: all of the above and more.

If there is any lesson that should be taken from the online
world, it is that options multiply. I am willing to bet
that within the next 10 years a young band will come along
that will be primarily and generously supported by a
commercial sponsor. The band will write and play whatever
music it feels like, but it will grant first option to the
sponsor to use the sponsor's materials in commercials. The
sponsor gets cool, hip music, and the band gets its stuff
heard by millions, and anything the company doesn't use is
the company's to pass out, free of charge.

Creating music is hard work. Creating music that is widely
appreciated and constantly in demand is harder still. It
may seem ludicrous to suggest to a working musician that in
this new online world, music is becoming a commodity that
is traded, cocreated and coproduced by a networked
audience. How can an unskilled population create something
that will be appreciated by many?

The partial answer is that most of us won't. It will still
be a rare person who can write and play music that everyone
swoons over. Those hit musicians will have their own
economics. But most music, like most photography, needn't
appeal to everyone. Most photographs taken in the world are
taken by amateurs, and the images are of interest only to
themselves or their families. Music does not have to be
widely popular to be desired.

The future of music is unknown. But whatever it is, it will
be swayed, as usual, by technology. Carver Mead, a
computer-chip pioneer, advises us to ''listen to the
technology'' to see where it is headed. If we listen to the
technology of music, we might hear these possibilities:

• Songs are cheap; what's expensive are the indexable,
searchable, official lyrics.

• On auction sites, music lovers buy and sell active
playlists, which arrange hundreds of songs in creative
sequences. The lists are templates that reorder songs on
your own disc.

• You subscribe to a private record label whose agents
troll the bars, filtering out the garbage, and send you the
best underground music based on your own preferences.

• The most popular band in the world produces only very
good ''jingles,'' just as some of the best directors today
produce only very good commercials.

• The catalog of all musical titles makes more money than
any of the record companies.

• A generator box breeds background music tailored to your
personal tastes; the music is supplied by third-party
companies that buy the original songs from the artists.

• Because you like to remix dance tunes, you buy the
versions of songs that are remix-ready in all 24 tracks.

• You'll pay your favorite band to stream you its concert
as it is playing it, even though you could wait and copy it
at no cost later.

• The varieties of musical styles explode. They increase
faster than we can name them, so a musical Dewey Decimal
System is applied to each work to aid in categorizing it.

• For a small fee, the producers of your favorite musician
will tweak her performance to exquisitely match the
acoustics of your living room.

• So many amateur remixed versions of a hit tune are
circulating on the Net that it's worth $5 to you to buy an
authenticated official version.

• For bands that tour, giving away their music becomes a
form of cheap advertising. The more free copies that are
passed around, the more tickets they sell.

• Musicians with the highest status are those who have a
24-hour Net channel devoted to streaming only their music.

• Royalty-free stock music (like stock photography),
available for any use, takes off with the invention of a
great music search engine, which makes it possible to find
music ''similar to this music'' in mood, tempo and sound.

• The best-selling item for most musicians is the ''whole
package deal,'' which contains video clips, liner notes,
segregated musical tracks, reviews, ads and artwork -- all
stored on a well-designed artifact in limited editions.

• Despite the fact that with some effort you can freely
download the song you think you want in a format you think
will work for your system, most people choose to go to a
reliable retailer online and use the retailer's wonderful
search tools and expert testimonials to purchase what they
want because it is simply easier and a better experience
all around.

In the end, the future of music is simple: more choices. As
the possibilities of music expand, so do our own.

Kevin Kelly is the author, most recently, of ''New Rules
for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected
World.''

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