Is there a fundamental difference between song and music?

I've been thinking lately about, well, just music in general and I've had some ideas. I've been part of this community for almost two years now and I've been watching it grow. I've become aware of the strange world of music business, and the compelling side is not the music itself but the people who make it, sell it, and buy it. And I now believe that there are two very different flavors of music, that which is comodity and that which is art.

Lets start with the many names that are given to the makers of music. They might be called singers, performers, acts, the kind of people who make music live before an audience. They might be called song writers, composers, musicians, the kind of people who invent music. They might be called divas, pop stars, vocalists, the kind of people whose music is part of thier image. These names are but costumes that people wear to get attention. It all boils down to two things, there are those who create music as an artform and those who advertize music as merchandice. Both kinds are given their place in this society.

As it turns out the music merchants are more succesfull than the music artists. It's not that people do not care for asthetics, but they shy away from art because it is rare. When pure thought and raw emotion become sounds, it doesn't matter how the music comes or where from, only that it is shared. But merchants have a monopoly on distribution, their distribution media are innovative and accessible but they are proprietary. Music that the merchants don't want to sell does not have access to the more successful distribution channels and must be spread by other means.

The music that the merchants do sell is created for efficiency rather than artistry. The music business produces songs in bulk to maximize their exposure. Songs are written and recorded over a period of days, and albums are put together in a few weeks. Songs are short so more than a dozen of them can be played on air per hour. They emphasize vocals over instrumentation and lyrics over melody. This ensures that the fewest number of people can create the greatest ammount of music that is the most marketable. How efficient it is. Combine that with a distribution monopoly and a labor force of over a million musicians and you can bengin to understand why it's called the music industry.

This industry does produce good music but it is not the only sorce of it. That is why I'd like to make the distinction betwen song and music. Songs are like chapters in a book, they may stand alone as short stories but they cannot be fully enjoyed unless they're played with other songs. When songs are put together in a certain order they can communicate whole storylines, that is real music. The music industry is the largest source of songs while independant artists are the best source of music.

The music industry itself ignores this distinction because this kind of thinking is bad for business. Maybe philosophy and business just don't mix, but what ever the reason the music industry does not have the time or the money to produce real art, it can only afford to resell it as abridged synopses. Creating music as an artform requires a fluency in the language of music that few people have posessed throughout history. Today's popular music is founded on a few basic priciples that are centuries old and have developed in the minds of the greatest composers. A favorite quote by George Christoph Licthenberg sates, "Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede-not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen." We live in a time when people are very illerate about music music, and most musicians are to Mozart and Bach as most second grade students are to Einstein and Newton. The music industry does not have the resources to educate its musicians.

So for now we have to settle for song and hope that music will develope on its own and find a viable distribution model on its own. Popular music isn't all bad but there is lots of room for improvment and lots of chance that it will get worse. Song writers and singers are powerless to create real music that the merchants will sell because their audience is as ignorant as they themselves are. Once in a while they will create something that is both original and entertaining but that's mostly due to statistical probability because there are so many singers and songwriters in the industry. But given that fact it is still unlikely that the industry will be able to create entier albums that are more than just a collection of songs.

It's also true that good songs and music by different authors may be strung together to produce a synergistic compilation, just as a movie can be greater than the sum of it's scenes. The recording industry has never figured this out, and releases only 'greatest hit' style compilations. Mood music tends to fall short of this ideal as well, by virtue of aiming to elicit only relaxation, or 'tranquility', not that there's anything wrong with that.

The great classical composers understood this synergy well, and most major works have several distinct sections, each with it's own rhythm and tempo and theme. These tended to be related to and supportive of each other, but were so well developed that they were capable of standing alone. The principal failing of modern culture is the reduction to absurdity of the attention span, via the 'short song/fast cut/no time to absorb' style designed to show us products before we can switch channels. Ironically, time has become so precious that it is being cut into pieces so small that they are worthless. Extreme moments spliced together whirling by in a meaningless blur.

I believe that it was greed that caused the record companies to be opposed to Napster, but not just a financial type of greed. It was greed also along the lines of them wanting to control the music industry. Napster was a threat to them because it exposed people to new types of music, and the record companies were more uncertain about a marketplace which would contain more alternative types of music. They preferred a stable musical climate in which their sales and growth were relatively predictable. Now, with millions of people exposed to new types of music, they would no longer be able to exploit the market in a predictable way. And they could no longer take it easy, and throw out their trash onto the radio stations with each generation's version of "the backstreet boys", playing over and again, and expect their sales to remain steady.

I think we're all agreed that the "Record Industry" is the enemy here. It seems that they took over about the time vinyl phonographs became popular. Before audio recordings you had to buy sheet music and perform the music yourself or go see a live band or orchestra. Copyright now applies to original recordings as opposed to sheet music and lyrics alone. I think if things continue the way they have then bands will have to ask their record companies for permission to play their own songs at concerts. It's obvious that greed has corrupted a business that has gone far beyond the scope of media distribution.

The point I want to focus on is how musicians have created art in this environment despite their limitations. Ah-pook is absolutely right about classical composers, I had exactly the same thought in the back of my mind as I wrote the words above. Before records the only kinds of widely available and widely popular music was classical music and folk music. Other genres existed like early jazz, but not everyone had access to them. Without the convience of original recordings musicians had to create art that other people could perform and enjoy with their own instruments and voices. Not everyone had a piano or guitar, not everyone could make it to the opera house. So like today, the music that was the most popular was the music that was the most accesible, and people only bothered to play the best music.

Records made music more accessible because people didn't have to go out of their way to experience it, they no longer had to go to the music because it came to them. Convience always comes at a price and in some way quality is always affected. Phonographs were noisy, low fidelity, and easy to break (they still are), and all in all could not compete with a live performance. But over the past century phonographs overtook live performance in populrity for two main reasons. First the quality or the records improved. Horns were replaced with vacuum tube driven loud speakers, and vacuum tubes were replaced with transistors, stereo was introduced, and turn tables became automatic, and then there were 8-tracks and cassette tapes and CD's; records matched live performances in audio quality. Secondly the quality of the music itself declined. As I wrote before only the most efficient songs were ever recorded and distributed, and people would rather not travel some place else to listen to mediocre music.

Even so I think that real music has been created and mass prodced. I think the Moody Blues were the first band to make a record that had a story line, before that records were just collections of songs. A few songs from their first album stood alone as singles but they fit in their place on the record too. They continued making music records when everyone else was making song records, eventually people saw what a good idea it was and tried it themselves. Appearently it didn't work because most records today are song records, any themes or story lines are vague because they are not developed until after the individual songs have been written and recorded. Music records do exist but they're hard to find.

I think that Napster is a natural outcome in this kind of situation. It and its progeny are song swaping services rather than music swaping services. Most people don't download entire albums, they download top 40 singles. It's more convient to get this kind of music because the industry has saturated the market with it, and the short songs are easy and fast to download.

I compare music to chess. There are the long, thought out games that are deeply layered and intellectual, and the 10 minute games that are fast and rely on instinct and intuition. Some top 40 songs are really good by themselves, they're fast and powerful and anyone can appreciate them. Other songs take their time and each note leads the music in exactly the right direction. Both kinds of music have their artistic merit but unfortunatly only one kind is commercially viable. I can pull out the chess board and play any kind of game I want, I'd like to have that same kind of discression when I choose what music to listen to.