Music & The Internet Part 2. Running Out Of The Past?

Looking back at the broad sweep of twentieth century music, its hard not to notice how fresh and powerful it often was. Think about the dissonance and strange rhythms of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the jazz prodigies who rewrote the rule book, the artistic and cultural impact of the bands of the 1960s. Think about Brian Eno's ambient experiments, Public Enemy's use of samplers, post-punk, Kraftwerk's machine music, Juan Atkin's dystopian hymns to Detroit, Aphex Twin’s other-worldly electronics, the glitch aesthetics of Autechre, Oval and the Mille Plateaux label, the dub techno minimalism of Basic Channel, the rise of the DJ and club culture through disco, house, rave and techno. The twentieth century is full of examples of music that had a powerful artistic and cultural impact that went way beyond the surface level. It seemed reasonable to assume therefore that, catalysed by the digital technologies of the early twenty-first century, the trend wouldn't just continue but actually speed up. Jaron Lanier was surprised at the lack of musical progress in the noughties; “I entered the internet era with extremely high expectations. I eagerly anticipated a chance to experience shock and intensity and new sensations, to be thrust into lush aesthetic wildernesses, and to wake up every morning to a world richer in every detail because my mind had been energised by unforeseeable art” . It came as a surprise to Lanier however, that, at the tail of end of the noughties, this hadn't come to pass. For a while he put this down to a temporary lull, the calm before the storm, but after a while it felt more like a slump. Lanier’s growing suspicion was that the internet, far from facilitating musical evolution, was leading to an unprecedented picking over of pre-internet culture. In his view, “the reinvention of life through music was in retreat”. Culture was now “fixated on the world as it was before the web was born”.

Music & The Internet Part 1. More is Less?

There are two fundamental ways in which the internet has changed music. The first is that, by being freed from the limitations of physicality and old media, the vast majority of all recorded music is available to everyone instantly. The second is that the explosion of choice has created fragmentation; the decreasing relevance of the album, the splintering of music into sub-genres and the rise of the narrow cast, personalized, niche musical experience. The platitudes of the web-evangelists tell us this is overwhelmingly a good thing; the more choice people have and the freer they are to chose, the more everyone benefits. People will become more cultured and the culture will in turn become more sophisticated thus evolving more rapidly. Its a virtuous cycle, an exponential cycle of progress. Of course, nobody would argue that in order to have a healthy music culture (or any culture for that matter), diversity and freedom of choice is important. However, what happens when choice starts to feel limitless?