"Recorded music is dead", so proclaimed Bill Drummond in an engaging talk on the Radio 3 Arts & Ideas podcast a week or so ago. His skillful oratory grabbed me initially with such a provocative statement, then dragged me along the path of his argument by first reminding me that before 1873 (I think it was), when the recording of sound was first invented, people's lives were far less immersed in music than during my lifetime, and even my father's. Of course - no radio, no records or CDs, no television, only buskers, concerts and Aunt Lucy's turn on the piano after dinner (for the better off) ... 'in our day, we used to make our own entertainment'. Following his argument, the democratisation of music culminates in our CD collections, and the goal of most musicians has been, within living memory, a recording contract. This has created a powerful recorded music industry, which is now seriously threatened by the anarchy of the internet. Musicians nowadays just need a MySpace account and anyone, anywhere in the world can hear their music - for free. This is not to mention myriad other ways to download music free. It is far from straight forward now for a musician to make a living from recordings - it's back to good old live performance. In essence, he was urging musicians to explore new ways of conceptualising music, and highlighting the 'incompleteness' of the convenience of recorded music.
Whilst it is most certainly true that this famous agent provocateur (naughty boy) made me think, had me going for a while - after five minutes I realised that he had painted a distorted picture. As a fellow 'child of the album', and addicted to the notion of a CD/record collection as a kind of window on my soul (and status symbol amongst my piers), I have a clear memory that despite this, live performance was always considered superior (maybe not musically, but certainly experiencially). Those aged rockers the Rolling Stones recently packed a stadium in Brazil with folk of all ages, who maybe bought a CD as an aide memoire, a souvenir of an event intrinsically more significant that the music itself. The festival scene seems to grow and grow, pubs use live performance to attract punters at least as much as they ever used to, and buskers still flock to the Tube. Whilst it is hard for us to imagine life without radio, hi-fi systems, walkmen, TV and music 'on-tap', the democratisation process in general has simply empowered the common man, adding more layers of consumptive choice. Artists of course respond to this, partly as shrewd 'marketing', but as because they themselves are 'common man'. Let's face it, recorded music made a lot more musicians considerably richer than they would otherwise have been, as well as bringing the great reward of spreading the music further.
Drummond's climactic point was that the delightful anarchy of the internet has fucked notions of 'the album' and CD collections, and the music industry executives are squirming in their ostentatious office chairs. Procateurs, amongst many others, like black and white - not grey. The internet, iTunes et al, are going to kill the CD, which in its turn had killed live performance, and the way is open for an entirely new concept of music. All very entertaining, but five minutes after he stopped speaking I realised that it's just more choice, and he just twisted the facts (like a good politician) to suit his purposes. However, he did throw up a new perspective for me, about our experience of events as opposed to life before, say, the mid-1800s. Actually, we should really go back to the invention of printing, and the birth of the common book, I suppose, but we are nowadays accustomed to the preservation, reproduction, replication, representation, or just plain copying of events. First, I suppose, books (printed matter in general) allowed us (and many others) to re-live events and experiences as an aide to our own memoire or through the minds of others at our own convenience. Painting was somewhat more exclusive until photography, then recorded music, then film ..... Someone far cleverer than I spotted long ago that all this technological progress seemed to respond to pre-existing human needs rather than create new ones. Diaries and storytelling go back far enough to demonstrate this, not to mention cave paintings. It hardly needs saying that the creation of monuments (to existence) was 'the stuff of kings' until relatively recently and, in this sense at least, we all live 'as Caesar' now. It is true that the internet has made our 'monuments' accessible globally, in a way unimaginable to our forefathers, but differentiation and promotion in the swelling ocean of the products of our imaginations or experiences have become, if anything, more daunting.

Jon Hatfull
Jan 2009