blackrimglasses

As you all might have seen, there has been none-stop blog coverage of Radiohead, NIN, Madonna, Prince, etc and their activities portending the death of record labels. I’m not going to specifically comment on whether I think labels are dead or not, but I do want to address the “_______ is dead, long live ________” mentality of the blogosphere and the press in general.

Progress breeds with it the necessity of windowing off the new in favor of the old, meaning that in order to contextualize what is beget by progress, once has to clearly define what the antithesis of this progress is. In reality of course, there is no clear windowing of any such progress, whether it be political, technological or human based. Only in retrospect can we define a “Year Zero,” and only in retrospect do clear lines become apparent.

This is annoying. Progress is not linear, its not defined by different epochs in situ, it is a gradient that moves from one to the other over a period of time. The complication of media and blog attention on different events is that singular situations are used as an extrapolation for the summary of the gradients. From this we get “record labels are dead,” “newspapers are dead,” “broadcast TV is dead,” etc.

Its understandable why these pronunciations are so common: its easier to grasp change when its isolated. The problem is, that each assumption is directed not at the underlying complexities of the situation, but only at the media that is the interface point to the populace. Record labels death, however valid of an assumption, is talking only specifically about the death of a label in relation to another band putting a barter based system online to sell a record. The Record, as it were, its about 1/10th of the underlying super-structure of a label. In the same way, death of newspapers is directed at the physical media, not taking into account the relative complexity of what machine underlies it.

Through windowing of history then, one can constantly assume various media forms are “dead” by virtue of an extrapolation of only the surface manifestation of said media. At any given point, books, TV, mobile media, magazines, the publishing industry, telecom business, etc are “dead” when looking at specifics, but the underlying complexity, in reality, serves only to shift the outward manifestation while retaining the core.

Telecom might be “dead” because of VOIP, but the telecom companies still own the pipes. Newspapers as physical media might be dead, but their underlying structure still provides the advertising base that allows for the risk of online advertising. In the same way, record labels are dead, but are they even record labels any more? The superstructure mutates, and with that the outward facing media might change, but underneath it all, the foundations which make up all representational media are not so much different than they were 100 years ago.