Great posts, Jack and Ramona... illuminating beautifully both sides of the curtain that separates the artist from the lover of his/her art...
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JackSpratts:
one of the most amazing things about napster for me was the discovery process whereby i would set out in search of some artist or song to fill a collection gap and wind up with the best tune i'd heard in months from a band i didn't know existed until that very hour and then finding out that they'd been around for years and had six albums! a case in point was komeda. i first stumbled across them browsing someones' file one day and soon i was playing this previously unheard of gem at one of my shows. this became a regular occurrence and almost overshadowed my original reason for using napster which was to find (known) obscurities, out of print rarities, and develop an unparalleled rock, pop & jazz collection that i naively thought in the beginning of the process last year would be complete at 50,000 titles. when i hit 10,000 and realized i HADN'T EVEN STARTED i evolved a new awe and appreciation for the sheer volume of tunes the planet pours forth regularly. and therein lies the problem that has brought us to this point.
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I share very similar experiences to those of Jack's. It has been a fascinating adventure to find the 'tunes of the planet' and realize what a vast expanse of great music there is to be found! New interesting artists and albums keep appearing onto my HD from week to week - there seems to be no end to good music on this planet. What a blessing and inspiration! What a great gift from my online friends and community fellows!
To me all artists are on the same line - or rather behind the same opaque veil of potentiality. I find it irrelevant whether somebody is signed or unsigned - the only thing that counts to me is his/her music. The same applies to my fellow peers who recommend these artists to me. I accept virtually every suggestion from my best contacts and get rarely disappointed with what I hear. At the very least that stuff is interesting; often it is rewarding enough for me to share it further through my own library.
This intelligent, unforced and wonderfully equalizing mechanism of exposure is already out there but it is doing its work very slowly and almost invisibly. It takes time for two persons to find a shared moment on IM and even then, recommendations are given and received only when the tone and the timing of the communication is right for it. Without external commercial promotion it may take months or years for a fresh artist to make a community-wide impact through this mechanism, even if his/her music is really good. Is this too bad? Not really, if you compare it to the time and effort that is needed for an artist to develop his/her skills and to become popular outside cyberspace. Does it have to be this slow and inefficient? No. It is just that the more advanced ideas of social interaction have not yet crystallized into p2p software. Once that happens the exposure mechanism based on trusted personal contacts will both speed up and scale up greatly
Napster developed the idea of social intelligence up to the level of hotlists, IM and browsing. WinMX and audioGnome continue to support this level on their own p2p networks but haven't so far come out with any further ideas. Morpheus hasn't got any social intelligence at all and may not get much anytime soon. We are still living early days of p2p and our tools are still primitive. The more intelligent they get, the better the situation will be both for the artist and for the potential lover of his/her art.
Quote:
Ramona_A_Stone:
As an artist, it seems a sad reality check that Napster, as well as all its clones, are fueled by consumers of music that a narrow scope of industry has imparted an artificial sense of 'legitimacy' to over the last half century, while the 'undiscovered' continue to languish in a prefabricated void of obscurity. This void however, is engineered as much by the consumer as by the industry, That the music industry is a kind of filter seems to only to ping the consciousness of artists. While you fight for a 'digital luxury zone,' artists seem to be starving, not for financial gain or even for your attention, but for minimum hope of accessibility.
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The music industry is indeed a filter, and also an amplifier, for what is allowed to resonate in the collective musical mind of its 'consumers'. The mass movement of these 'consumers' - the funny little beings with a pair of ears and a wallet - over to the digital luxury zone does not yet damp down the mighty milk-and-honey-dripping vibration of Britney Spears's boobs. But it
leaves room for all the other vibrations to co-exist with it and to be
equally perceived by anybody within the zone. The industrially generated power fields of suggestive manipulation lose their grip as soon as they enter the thick and intelligently interwoven substrata of p2p relations. Using its 'external' means the music industry can surely generate an
interest in and even a
presence of an artist in a p2p network but once the art is available inside the luxury zone it is on its own. It either finds its true lovers or not; its vibration either starts to live a life of its own or dies away as soon as the external promotion is over.
There are several ways how the p2p substrata can be made much more perceptive and swifter, enabling it to amplify that which is most passionately and devotedly
loved instead of that which is most aggressively and effectively
sold. Developing the social intelligence of p2p software into this direction is an area where we cannot rely too much on our commercial bedfellows. They have their own agendas and we have our own. They want to maintain at least some vital control and power lines into the collective mind of their communities, cashing the outside world for the privilege of using them. We, on the other hand, want to have the fullest possible control over our own p2p environment and its perceptive space.
- tg
