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Arranging the Deck Chairs on the SS Art & Commerce

posted by c money burns

The oft-referenced dictionary.com defines neophilia as the trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. This being a site dedicated primarily to underground electronic music, it’s safe to say that most readers and contributors share this trait when it comes to discovering new music. Exactly how we go about finding such still seems to be a complete mystery to the kinds of people who run the ‘industry’ side of music, though.

Figuring out how to market music to an internet-savvy public increasingly wary of being sold anything and jaded to the point of outright dismissal of anything the industry recommends is perhaps the most burning question the old guard of music commerce faces. While some of these dispossessed tastemakers are marveling at the money-making opportunities of social network-based music sites (such as pandora.com, last.fm and a slew of genre-specific music blogs often collected by aggregators and meta-sites like elbo.ws), others see the music discovery angle of these sites as nothing more than a byproduct of their users’ primary focus.

This dichotomy was never more apparent than at the Leadership Digital Music Summit in Nashville on Tuesday, where excited venture capitalist Paul Santinelli said without a trace of irony that “the next big thing is going to be music discovery,” while Marc Cohen, CEO of speech recognition software maker Lyrix, Inc. and owner of the all-too-predictably named blog Ad-Supported Music Central countered:

The first is that people don’t seek to discover new music - it just happens. They don’t listen to the radio, watch TV or talk to friends for the purpose of discovering new music. This is a byproduct of the intended object of the interaction. The Internet music discovery sites, even with their social networking skins, assume the primary object of interaction to be music discovery. This misunderstanding of consumer behavior will be fatal. The second conclusion I draw is that historically the number one source for music discovery - terrestrial radio - is a type of ad-supported music. The extent to which music discovery becomes a successful Internet business is wholly dependent on the success of streaming ad-supported music, as it is the on-line equivalent of terrestrial radio.

while offering this laughably biased chart as evidence of such:

(Note: this is from a poll taken by Arbitron and Edison Media Research, who make their money on radio advertising, and is taken from a sample of 2,000 Canadians, not exactly representative of the entire music-listening public [no offense meant to the Canadian WPB contingent])

The central idea that both of these views seem to be overlooking is that, with the advent of online social networking, peer-to-peer networks and music blogs created by aficionados (instead of profit-driven opportunists), the ‘industry’ part of the music industry may already be a propped-up corpse. That they think the apparently outmoded and absurd idea of anyone aside from the artist making money at all from the brokering of their art still seems viable is maybe the most telling notion of where the industry is headed. The most honest perspective on this whole scenario could quite possibly be this, courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider :

…The music industry’s future is clear: A modest, niche business supported by a handful of passionate consumers, and ignored by most others. And no PR agency will be able to fix that.

It’s truly an exciting time to be a fan of music, as the reins of popular taste are being taken from the moneymakers and takers (that would be fourteen-year old girls and rich, old white men) and placed back into the hands of the true tastemakers (that would be us). These next couple of years may see music become more than just the background lifestyle accoutrement it has been relegated to, as the art we “in the know” know it to be.

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