On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 09:24 -1000, david wrote:
> Vince Werber wrote:
>
> > On a lark I surfed over to Matt Drudge's web site (www.drudgereport.com) to
> > see if there was anything new on the ASCAP lawsuits and lo and behold...
> > There is a story about Sir Elton wanting to shut down the web because he
> > thinks the web music people are in some way causing a problem with music...
>
> Sir Elton is just mouthing the fundamental RIAA issue with the web.
good grief, did you even read/listen to what he had to say? it has
absolutely nothing to do with the net as a distribution/retail/exchange
medium.
Well, what he said has nothing to do with that, but why he said it... Well if it was someone who wasn't senile I would suspect they had ulterior motives, but with him who knows.
his comments were primarily about the impact that music technology and
the internet have on the social aspects of art production and
consumption. he really didn't say much at all about money, power or
control.
and i think that he is right, at least in part. however, scapegoating
technology for magnifying an existing feature of human life doesn't make
much sense to me. it was always the case that social, gregarious people
got together with other such people in person, and less social people
did not and hungered for other ways to interact with people. the
internet makes various kinds of social interaction and collaboration
that were unthinkable 30 years ago, and for the most part, this seems
like its probably a good thing, even though more people are making music
alone.
I think there is music that gets produced and sold now that could never have made profit in the 80's. One other result of increased communication, including the internet, is that people with similar non-mainstream interests can find each other. Now certain musicians can have an audience that never could have found their audience without the help of large corporations before, and large corporations had no reason to help them. I think of Beck as being this way. I'm not sure how much role the internet had per se in his obtaining contracts, but the general increase in communication technology definitely helped. Primus comes to mind as well: they could only turn a profit by appealing to 1 out of 10 people in a million groups.
Also, in some ways, creativity works better with individuals. Once you start collaborating on your vision, it can get diluted. It always amazes me when people can pull off some huge project involving dozens of people that retains some really quirky creativity. "Being John Malkovich" comes to mind, and Southpark. How do some visionaries keep the producers from reigning them in? I don't think that art produced by isolated individuals is generally worse than that made by people who are "out there". The isolated individuals are just more likely to snap and gun down everyone in their workplace or school. But maybe in some ways we all benefit from that too.
Apparently Elton's comments didn't just disappear as I predicted. Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about it last night. I hate, though, how someone can say something like "I'd like it if they shut down the internet just for 5 years," and others then say "Elton John wants to eliminate the internet."
lol people
-Chuckk
--
http://www.badmuthahubbard.com
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