WHO LET THE BLOGS OUT?
Tuesday 13 December 2011 at 04:53 am
By Carly Blair. With insights from Mike Sniper (Captured Tracks), Amanda Brown (100% Silk), Derek Evers (Impose Magazine), and Justin Gage (Aquarium Drunkard) Illustrations by Geoff Kim
When it comes to music, mp3 blogs help us navigate the internet's unfathomable depths. But where everyone has an opinion, whose do you trust? There's no denying that the internet is a useful tool for finding new music. But if we have to consume information faster and more efficiently to avoid drowning in a sea of information, do we put ourselves at risk only skimming the surface of things? We ask online music experts for their take on the situation.
The internet didn't always exist. It's hard to imagine and easy to forget that sometimes. Since its advent in the late '80s, the internet has gone from a bizarre underworld frequented by only the hardcore-est of geeks to, quite simply, omnipresent, absorbing other technologies and becoming progressively more integrated into every aspect of our lives. With it comes a lot of promise – of access to an essentially infinite store of information; of the ability to connect with like-minded people all over the world; of the democratization of information. The challenge now is to figure out how to navigate the internet's unfathomable depths. When it comes to music, mp3 blogs increasingly serve as our guides.
Back in the day, downloading music was a fairly dodgy endeavor – you were nearly as likely to get a virus as what you were searching for, and anti-piracy propaganda and legal crackdowns by the Recording Industry Artists of America (RIAA) made it feel like you were a Robin Hood-style cyber bandit. Looking back, it's funny that the RIAA ever imagined they would succeed at stopping online file sharing. Fortunately (at least for us naughty little pirates), they didn't. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, as they say, and the record industry is gradually doing just that. Digital music sales are now a multi-billion dollar industry. Beyond that, many traditional ways of discovering new music, like listening to the radio, or watching MTV (ha!), or going to an actual record store and (gasp) BUYING SOMETHING YOU HAVEN'T HEARD, are giving way to finding things online.
There are of course also exceptions: passionate blogs with commitment to their own aesthetic, and hope-inducing tales of amazing bands rising to deserved fame on a sea of blog buzz, some without so much as a record label to promote them or any physical media whatsoever. We used to rely on gatekeepers with extensive knowledge and expertise, such as labels or radio DJs, to select the music we were exposed to. Now that information is freely available and everyone can share their opinion, these gatekeepers have less and less power. On the one hand, the reduced need to rely on a limited number of experts to get your music heard has been a boon for creativity. As Amanda Brown observes, “People are working harder now to get heard than ever before, because with the internet it all seems possible.” But in the absence of traditionally vetted expertise, whose opinion does one trust? “What you have is a community filled with amateurs, with everyday people, all with opinions and attitudes and ideas to share. Only for a fraction of society does that pose a problem; most see it as an extension of democracy, evolution. Some of us are still a bit traditional in our thinking about knowledge and culture - in that we want to receive it from valid, experienced, thoughtful sources,” says Brown. By virtue of caring enough to write about music, perhaps bloggers are discerning enough - “If lots of music nerds like you, you're probably pretty good,” Derek Evers notes - but Mike Sniper sees it otherwise. “I used to think (pre-approval by elitist music snobs) was a bad thing, but the more I think about it, maybe it's for the best, because the majority of bloggers aren't richly educated in music history and where things come from.” In any case, by completely opening the floodgates, we put ourselves at risk of drowning in an ocean of opinions.
While the proliferation of digital music and of information in general is partly a natural consequence of more and more people getting online, it's also partly an indication that the way we consume information is changing. Because there is so much to choose from, and we feel pressure or temptation to know as much of it as possible, we're taking in smaller chunks at a faster pace. This certainly facilitates discovering a larger QUANTITY of music. But as Justin Gage observes, “Here in the second decade of the 21st century there is an unparalleled opportunity to explore and listen to more music than any other time in history. Because of this we are also now faced with the challenge of quality over quantity -- meaning on what level are you able to engage with the 20,000 albums on your computer? In a lot of ways the connections people had with music are not as deep as they were, say, a decade ago.”
This touches on precisely what troubles me most. Music listening is becoming a cycle of “in one ear and out the other.” As we've traded purchasing music on cheaply manufactured media that fall apart for an online repository of files that will “last forever”, the music itself has ironically started to be treated like something cheap and temporary; our memories of songs end up like so much landfilled waste, buried under a pile of other stuff and slowly decaying. In our obsession with being as familiar with as many things as possible and consuming information efficiently, we sacrifice revisiting the familiar and beloved. What's even more disturbing to contemplate is that we may also lose our ability to appreciate complex music by only ever offering it cursory attention, thereby depriving ourselves of the opportunity to truly understand and appreciate it.
People fear change, as they say, and skepticism about the internet falls into a rich history of ultimately doomed resistance to technological innovation. Video indeed killed the radio star. Hell, even Socrates himself lamented the advent of writing (writing!) out of fear that it would make people “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and by facilitating the transmission of information, would fill them with “the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” It's difficult to predict all the benefits that will accompany new technology, but something is indeed always lost in the process.
I think I'm not the only one having a kind of existential crisis nowadays, feeling like the fuller life gets, the emptier it feels. When we used to have to struggle to fulfill our basic needs, simple pleasures were like a godsend. Now, when everything is so easy and so abundant, we become less and less satisfiable, not realizing how amazing the things we already have are. Milan Kundera once said, “To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.” I'm not saying you should throw your laptop out the window and disconnect completely, but I do think peace is worth finding, and that finding balance is a crucial part of that. Embrace the internet, but do so critically.
Maybe I’m just a whiny old fart, fighting a sisyphean battle against the boulder of changing times. You 21st century kids can go ahead and consume music however you want. But if you ever feel a sense of despair at the realization that no matter how many blogs you read and how much time you spend listening, you will never know all of the wonderful music there is to know in the world, you’re welcome to take a break with me and my dog up on that hill. As Brown advises, “You can't avoid the cycle, you just have to make sure you have better things to do than pay too close attention to it.” After all, having more cool shit to choose from than you could ever possibly find time for is actually awesome, we might as well relax and just enjoy it.
