Derivatives, Creativity, Barriers and Revenue

Tech Crunch Europe mentioned MXP4 raising $4M on their blog. MXP4 is working on widgets that allow you to play with digital content that sound like they could be pretty cool to me.

Reuse of content has a long and complicated history. Songs have been reused since before recorded history, this was one of the main ways history and culture was transmitted and preserved in pre-literate societies, after all. Styles have been imitated for just as long, I'm sure. When you hear someone who is good you naturally learn from the experience, and your own style is affected.The process of exposing yourself to different artists and imitating them, learning their songs, and expanding your repertoire, is a normal element of being a working musician. Imitation and practicing other's styles is a pretty standard way to gain expertise in most artistic pursuits.

I have an on-going discussion with a friend about how a DJ compares to a musician: are they both artists? Which is more creative? He's a DJ and I sing and fake it on the guitar, so you can guess which sides we argue.

A live DJ is a performing artist and needs technical skills fairly equivalent to those of a musician to do the job well: beat matching, chord progression considerations when switching from one selection to the next, tempo and tone adjustments, some presentation skills and charisma are important, technical details like equalization settings and sound effects, interplay with lights, video, and possibly other special effects all come into play. It's somewhat similar to a conductor and a master of ceremonies on some levels, except that the DJ conducts a symphony of machines and often doesn't talk much or at all, letting the music, beats, and sound effects speak for them.The tools and technology to do all of this keep getting cheaper, simpler, and more powerful.

There's a whole additional level to being a successful DJ beyond the technical - knowing what selections will appeal, keeping up with what's popular and what's passe, knowing how to program selections within a sequence to satisfy the audience and the venue, knowing how to get enough buzz going to make the show hot and draw lots of repeat business. Excelling as a DJ requires both art and science. New technologies make this real time creativity possible, allowing the productive and artistic efforts of thousands of people to be used, sliced and diced in a different manner every night, to generate the on-going club scenes in thousands of different towns and cities around the world. The final output of all of those musicians is directly accessible and easily manipulated thanks to the modern digital creation, manipulation and distribution methods. The output of DJs is usually ephemeral, but it is also one of the more popular performance styles world wide across a pretty huge variety of cultures - after all , the approach is infinitely variable and adjustable, so each culture's music becomes the source material that DJs in that culture make their creations from.

Sampling allows a whole new approach to building music - you aren't imitating somebody else's style with your own skills on your instrument, you're lifting the style directly and applying it to your on composition using the latest digital tools.There was plenty of controversy in the early days on this subject. Original artists could and did sue on occasion, and it took a decade for the practice to become (mostly) mainstream and accepted use. Some performers now provide wide access to their content explicitly for reuse in samples, and more and more frequently now we are getting remixes and mashups. With technology allowing unlimited reproduction of a performance that are increasingly virtual in the first place and the tools to manipulate and play with performances getting ever simpler and cheaper, the issues just get more complex and more interesting.

MXP4 is pushing widgets and a format for exposing re-mixable music. I assume this allows for more tracks and an "engineer at a mixing console" experience - an array of (virtual) knobs to tweak the individual instrumental and vocal components, setting their gain and location in the stereo mix, deciding which ones to run through effects, adding on compressors and limiters and so on. The actual operations being performed are fairly simple arithmetic so modern CPUs will provide a reasonable level of performance.

The whole music production pipeline is exploding. Instead of a tightly knit team of performers and engineers working in a short tight pipeline, a diverse set of musicians records their own efforts and swaps them around to others, effects are applied and toyed with, tracks are mixed together and remixed and compared and mixes are mixed with interesting viral results. CDs full of beats, simple MIDI input and output devices and cheap high quality computer recording tools allow millions to create original source material and mixes of original source material and mixes of mixes ad infinitum, a spreading weaving of thousands and then millions of creative impulses, intermingling and branching off in who knows what different directions.

Bands like The Postal Service already create albums without the different musicians ever being in the same city, swapping files around and collectively generating massively successful music in a whole new way. These tools have already proven their commercial value in the band setting, and I have no doubt that crowd sourced and crowd produced music that is commercially successful is just around the corner - if it's not already here, I could easily have missed it.

It is clear to me that we are living in an uncertain time, with new tools and technologies allowing new ways to create that are less expensive and much more accessible, but without an underlying understanding of what kind of an industry (if any) is involved in the production, distribution and sales of the results, and with existing time tested models (especially the big record label model) collapsing quickly. What will replace the record companies, or do they still have enough to offer musicians, writers, and bands in the modern low cost/low barrier to entry music creation business? How will creative genius be rewarded? It seems to me we are quite uncertain how it will all work out, but I'm optimistic enough to figure that it will get worked out, anyway.