Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

Amy and I watched the returns on November 4th with a sense of awe, admiration and inspiration. More than anything, I watched it with a sense of the inevitability and purpose that was behind this campaign. I also watched with a distinct sense of awe not for watching a good politician get what he worked for, but instead watching the first time in my life a true modern Executive would be moving into the Executive Branch of the US government.

The more I read about Obama, and the more I read about his campaign and study exactly what transpired, the more admiration I feel for the way it was run and the way (I hope) he runs his presidency.

The lessons of the Obama campaign are applicable far beyond politics. I think the lessons of determination, deliberation and discipline that were behind his campaign would serve as good guides for most businesses, both large and small. However, given the industry that I’m in, I have been looking at his campaign as a useful model for the industry I’m in, and the career I have.

The record industry, in my estimation and experience, fluctuates between McCain/Clinton and Obama campaigns regularly. Alternatively panicked and deliberate, adrift and determined: you’re looking at an industry that once was a linear path of causality to one working in a world where complexity is the norm. A world where there exists the paradox of talking to a million people when only talking to one. And the inverse: talking to one person with the intention of talking to millions.

The central tenant to how to rebuild an empire, a country or a business is in an analogy of a boat tied by the bow to shore, slowly getting pulled in. Let the tide shift the angle, but always move forward with deliberate haste. The worst way to deal with change is through a reactionary treatment of its very agents, or the over simplification of the very causality for it.

We do not live in a simple world, one who’s boundaries between action, motive and reaction are distinct and linear. Instead, through proliferation of communication, technology and the lack of scale of rhetorical influence brought on by both, complexity is not a byproduct of a lack of deliberation, but instead of the prerequisite toward any deliberation.

The thing I saw as characterized by Obama’s campaign is exactly this: an understanding that the ramifications of one action extend far beyond necessary consequence, and those ramifications could inform, dictate and structure other actions as necessary. In the Music business, and indeed many other industries that are undergoing post-information economy change, this method of operation was missing for a long time. There has and was a very thorough understanding and examination of the repercussions of technological change, without understanding that the roots of every manifestation was from a common place.

Reactionary discourse breeds with it a sense of aimlessness and disjointed motivation. Without deliberation and an end-to-end understanding of the complexities of predicate situations, there is often 0% change of success along a given path. Ask John McCain. Or Hillary Clinton.

We are at an interesting point in history. We’re at a point where the externalization of all human product far exceeds our ability to process or use it. The point at which the analysis of data through means far exceeding cumulative human intellect is a necessary predicate toward understanding human conditions (ask Nate Silver). A point at which determinism and probabilism are mutually dependent but not mutually inclusive. The differences between the two colliding often in the form of credit ratings, SSSS tickets, secondary searches and advertising profiling.

It is in this type of world that a business rooted in the primal psychology of art, culture and comprehension has to remake itself. The reaction to music is not something that is determined through deterministic algorithmic analysis and thus predicated on the understanding of behavior in such an ontology. It is personal, defined as much by all senses as by the one that is necessary. The business of music however is dependent and reliant on an evolution in the value ascribed to consumption as the methods of consumption shift.

This electoral cycle brought with it a sea-change in the method by which the average American related the relevancy of politics to their own lives. Politics left the belt-way, and left the state dinners, donors and punditry that so often typified its own reality. Further, extending more from the Hollywood idealized war-rooms of the Clinton era, the Bourne influenced high gloss, technocratic conceit of Bush era politics, the 2008 campaign was rooted in the periphery, center and corners of the realities — both virtual and reified — that we inhabit daily.

This campaign infected — for there is no better word — every aspect and tool that I use to define my specific ontology. Facebook, Twitter, my phone, my computers, my music, my friends and my business. It wasn’t signs on a lawn, it was an app on my phone, a friend on Twitter, AI algorithms on memeorandum and discussions with both friends and clients (musicians).

To look at the campaign from the other side of November 4th is to understand that this was and will remain a deliberate action by Axelrod and the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign served not to be a product, or a singular entity, but a concept that was rooted in media however that media wanted to be consumed. It was a concept that infected and spread through all aspects of our own specific ontologies, until the candidate himself was no further away than our own loved ones.

This is what the world has become. This is what culture has become. We’re not a singular, linear tree-branch structure extending from power-elite to the consuming class. We are defined instead by a circuitous relationship with those that wish to define our relationship with the world, with culture and with art. A recombinant dialog with those that want to better our lives, or just provide us with something to listen to.

The cultural industries today have to adapt to this. The role of an artist, musician, performer or otherwise has as much of a part of our lives as it ever did. The complication is that we are not in a single-point endgame toward one goal (purchase) that enables other goals (relationships). Instead, the situation is reversed:

We have to define the relationship before we monetize it. And in the same way, once the relationship is monetized, it has to be maintained in order to solidify its value and ensure further investment.

This is one of the lessons from the Obama campaign. It’s not enough to engender support. Not enough to engender devotion: in order to translate that devotion into an investment (in whatever form), one has to translate interest into a relationship and maintain that relationship in way that puts maintenance over transaction.

The thing that technology has changed in the last 10 years or so is that the relationship maintained is by and through the filter of mediated communication, and informed by the abundance of discourse that could inform comprehension.

In this type of world, forging a relationship with a consumer, investor or supporter can’t be done through traditional means of cacophony based marketing or effusive but distant engagement. It can not be erratic, disjointed or without message. It has to be done with the same tenants that I feel embodied the Obama campaign:

• Deliberation
• Adaptability
• Measured approaches to the unexpected
• Determination

I’m sure there are more lessons to be learned from the past two years, but these stuck out the most for me in terms of their applicability toward the industry I’m in. Lets take them point by point in terms of applicability toward music:

Deliberation - Technology will change, and often the changes that they cause will not be expected, condoned, appreciated or liked. Technology is like the worst form of liquid: able to permeate even the most impermeable barriers. Unlike water, which can be stopped even on its striving for level, technology always strives to level out existing systems, but with little regard for barriers which strive to encumber its path. It is the prototypical leveler, even if taking thousands of years.

However, this act of leveling is not always seen as a positive. Indeed, technology from steam dynamos to the Internet have an effect that is equally disruptive as it is enabling. The key to working with technology isn’t how its adopted, but the reaction to its introduction.

Deliberation is something that is often missing when technology is introduced that threatens established hegemonies, especially in media businesses. Mechanical reproduction, the phonograph, radio, television, cinema, the cassette tape, compact discs, DAT, MiniDisc, Mp3 formats, digital audio recording and playback, personal video recorders: all caused seismic shifts in industries which reacted not with deliberation and contemplation, but erratic shots in the dark until something stuck, and then lurched to the next thing.

Innovation will happen. It has to happen. What needs to happen in response to it is a deliberation about the innovation informed not by panic and distrust, but informed comprehension of what this innovation means both in the localized and historical context. The best response to new technology, and especially disruptive innovations in technology is not to immediately use it or shut it down, but to deliberate on what it means within the context it now exists in.

Adaptability - Being able to go-with-the-flow is something that industries under a significant amount of change have never been able to do in a good manner. There is either too little reaction, too much reaction, too much or too little deliberation, but never a measured and controlled approach to dealing and adapting to changes.

The problem I’ve seen with music in recent years is similar to the problem I saw in the newspaper industry in the mid nineties. There was an inherent trust back then for new media that replicated the hegemony of the old media. Systems like AOL and Compuserve that were organized and stratified upon capitalism rather than the inherent anarchy on the web. Newspapers trusted structure, trusted partnerships that were dependent on exclusivity and access.

When myself, Val Cohen and Leah Gentry put up the first website for the Orange Country Register, we did so as an experiment in non-linearity, decentered journalism and augmentation of an existing product. The first site was RWorld, and only consisted of the online version of the coverage of the Pulizter winning story of the UCI Fertility Fraud. It was an experiment, not the least indicated by the relative links for every image and link. It was not mean to to grow necessarily, but the power of what we created soon drove us to want to grow, with the goal of having the newspaper, in its entirety online.

Here is where newspapers didn’t learn to adapt. Those used to linearity, hegemony and control had a hard time giving up a piece of that toward universal access without the possibility, necessarily, of monetary gain. Since then, with the Register the 5th newspaper online, newspapers have held on to the sanctity of their own identity while ignoring the increasing irrelevance of it in a rapidly decentering world. This escalating to the point where ex-newspaper executives are killing the gray-papers, to the point where the rush on newspapers was only as a reified reminder the next day of what they read on the Huffington Post the night before.

The key to an industry weathering a sea change is to admit that they are falible, and to learn from the lessons of others that are driving the sea change forward, while not loosing sight of exactly what it is they produce and do.

Record companies exist for the reason of nurturing talent, creating a market for that talent, and then sustaining the talent through the length of their career. We are active investors in the power and belief that music can fundementally change people’s lives. In the end we’re all fans, and understand that things don’t happen by accident, and it takes both guidance, support and a love for what we do to make others react to music in the same ways we do. That is the fundemental reality for what I go to work doing every day. I listen to music on the way in, listen to it at work, listen to it at home. I live and breath it.

Through the last three years in the industry, everything else about my job has evolved and changed, from the top to the bottom. The company I go to work at now is not the same WBR as it was three years back when I joined. Its not the same company it was 6 months ago, or a week ago. Its a daily reinvention, and thus a daily adaptation. The key to weathering through this, for it will never end, is to take the notion of what it is you always do, and apply that to what you must do today. The worst mistake one could make in a world of a constant delta is to loose the core of what makes your business tick with every adaptation to keep it ticking.

Measured approaches to the unexpected - As a part of adaptability comes the reaction to changes that aren’t anticipated. The Web caught newspapers by surprise, much as how packet networking and the growth of broadband in college campuses caught the music industry by surprise. With newspapers, it was the sudden loss of rhetorical hegemony as well as the lack of a clear path toward monetization that threw them for a loop.

I remember when I was 18 or so and went to my first Newspaper conference in Boston, called “New Directions for News.” Dave Winer was a speaker there actually, and there was a lot of discussion going along all the publishers, editors, ombuds and new media types of about the protection of content, the protection of the sanctity of what a newspaper was (in the symbolic sense) and the strength of editorial outperforming any other person’s attempt to debase it. This in reaction to a concept that has come and gone many times, embodied by a product called Third Voice.

Third Voice was a tool (I believe a browser plugin) that let others annotate a website in a communal fashion. Basically overlaying someone else’s site and content with your own. I remember my reaction to this that it was defacement, like graffiti on the Mona Lisa (I was insufferable at 18). This discussion though extended into discussion about the content of websites when Dave Winer was talking about XML-RPC and early concepts of syndication. At this point it should be known, I ran Murmurs.com and readily syndicated (or stole) content from other people’s sites, with only attribution and a link back in return. There was a lot of hemming and hawing going on about how the paper was sacred, the content even more so, before I stood up and admitted, naming names, content I stole for my own site (a blog basically) from all the newspapers present. That caused problems.

Point being this: the reaction of the newspaper business to the loss of readership, increasing costs of paper and production, the loss of classified real estate, a softening advertising market and a fragmented younger readership was to make it harder and harder to consume the content online. Requiring registration, subscription, not putting full content up, watermarking and degrading images, you name it. Not a measured approach.

In the music business, every day is something unexpected that has the potential to radically effect what we do. We make a product that in the base level is consumed by listening to representations of data. On that basic level, anything that provides the means of creating aural representation of stored data, in any form, has the potential to be a disruptive technology or system. That could be embedded chips in greeting cards, stuffed animals with audio and flash drive storage, the latest phone, website, widget, home theater system or conceptual art piece. When you make a product that is the monetization of sound in musical form, you expect the unexpected.

The difference though is in how you approach it. Reactionary or measured? Measured approaches always involve less effort with more reward. Reactionary approaches devolves into lost elections and a lot of collateral damage. Nothing progresses without reasons behind its progression. When things happen that aren’t expected, and move things forward in interesting ways, they are usually rooted in things we already understand, if only we take the time to investigate how. That only happens through reasonable reaction, and that reasonable reaction serves to further push things forward in ways that become expected and deterministic.

Determination - And lastly, it is not easy to do anything I so often talk about on this blog. It never will be. This is a world that is bigger at the same time its smaller, in which collective influence is both global and hyper-local. We are fragmented now by interest and temperament as much as we were by socio-economic indicators. Making things work — whether music, media, technology or politics — is much more difficult today, paradoxically considering how easy communication through all media is now for the average person. It is through this ease though that we find ourselves so often shouting to nothing, or having the recombination of our shouting amongst others serve to pacify our need to be heard without ever having our rhetoric comprehended. It’s very easy now to shout into a crowded room and be silent, and conversely whisper in the ether and be heard unwillingly and unknowingly.

Working within a world like this is difficult, and making a business in a world like this sometimes seemingly impossible. But it can be done. Outside of the infinite that presents itself at every single point of entry into the collective, there still exists basic human needs and wants for a singular experience, whether visual, musical, emotional or otherwise. The needs for contact, culture and validation are not any different than they were a hundred years ago. The fundamental difference is the inversion of the importance of the aesthetic with the pragmatic, the more the pragmatic becomes dependent on the aesthetic. We are an entirely aesthetically driven society, given the ambiguity of function in terms of different forms. As we move into an industrialized landscape more dependent on encapsulation and polymorphism of function rather than significant formal differentiation, the ability to be pragmatic in driving our basic lives is subservient to the decisions we are able to make that make our lives more pleasant. We can drive any form of car to get us from A to B, but we choose the one that appeases the senses rather than the pragmatic.

In this type of world — centered on the aesthete vs. pragmatist – it takes a willful determination and focus to the core of what we do, and belief that it still matters underneath all the hyperbole and dissonance of progress. In the end: we still listen, we still see, we still feel and we still have emotional reactions to these senses. There will always be a need to provide things to fill them, its just a matter of inventing, progressing and focusing on finding what those new things can be.