Compare this splendid liquidity of options with the few fixed choices available to me just decades ago. No wonder the fans stampeded to the “free” despite the music industry’s threat to arrest them.
Where might this go? In the U.S. at this time, 27 percent of music sales are from the streaming mode, and this mode is equal to the sales of CDs. Spotify pays 70 percent of its subscriber revenue to the artists’ labels. Despite this initial success, Spotify’s music catalog could be bigger because there are still major holdouts, artists like Taylor Swift, who are fighting against streaming. But as the head of the largest music label in the world admitted, the streaming takeover “is inevitable.” With flowing streams, music goes from being a noun to a verb once again.
Liquidity brings a new ease in creation. Fungible forms of music encourage amateurs to create their own song and upload it. To invent new formats. New tools, available for free, distributed online, allow music fans to remix tracks, sample sounds, study lyrics, lay down beats with synthetic instruments. Nonprofessionals start making music the same way writers craft a book—by rearranging found elements (words for writers, chords for musicians) into their own point of view.
The superconductivity of digital bits serves as a lubricant to unleash music’s untapped options. Music is flowing at digital frequencies into vast new territories. Predigital, music occupied a few niches. Music came on vinyl; it was played on the radio, was heard at concerts, and in a couple hundred films made each year. Postdigital, music is seeping into the rest of our lives, attempting to occupy our entire waking life. Stuffed into the cloud, music rains on us through our earbuds while we exercise, while we are vacationing in Rome, while we wait in line at the DMV. The niches for music have exploded. A renaissance of thousands of documentaries per year demands a soundtrack for each one them. Feature films consume vast quantities of original scores, including thousands of pop songs. Even YouTube creators understand the emotional uplift gained by a soundtrack for their short spots; while most YouTubers recycle prior art without pay, a growing minority see the value in creating custom music. Then there’s the hundreds of hours of music required for each big video game. Tens of thousands of commercials need memorable jingles. The latest fashionable media is a podcast, a sort of audible documentary. At least 27 new podcasts launch every day. No decent podcast is without a theme song and, more often, musical scoring for its long-form content. Our entire life is getting a musical soundtrack. All these venues are growth markets, expanding as rapidly as the flows of bits.
Social media were once the domain of texts. The next generation of social media is conducting video and sound. Apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, Vine, Meerkat, Periscope, and many others enable you to share video and audio—in real time—with your network of friends and friends of friends. The tools for quickly making a tune, altering a song, or algorithmically generating music that you share in real time are not far away. Custom music—that is, music that users generate—will become the norm, and indeed it will become the bulk of all music created each year. As music streams, it expands.
As we’ve learned from the steady democratization of other arts, soon you’ll be able to make music without being a musician. One hundred years ago, the only people technically capable of taking a photograph were a few dedicated experimenters. It was an incredibly elaborate and fussy process. It took great technical skill and greater patience before you could coax a picture worth looking at. An expert photographer might take a dozen photos per year. Today anyone with a phone—which is everyone—can instantly take a photo that is a hundred times better in most dimensions than one taken by the average professional a century ago. We are all photographers. Likewise, typography was once an arcane profession. It required many years of expertise to be able to place type on a page in a pleasing and clear way, since there was no WYSIWYG. Maybe a thousand people knew what kerning was. Today they teach kerning in grammar school, and even newbies can accomplish far better typography with digital tools than the average typesetter of old. Same for cartography. The average web hipster can do more with maps today than the best cartographers could manage in the past. So too it will be for music. With new tools accelerating the fluid flow of bits and copies, we will all become musicians.
As music goes, so goes the other media, and then other industries.
Movies repeated the pattern. A movie was once a rare event, one of the most expensive products to produce. It took highly paid guilds of professionals to make even a B-rated movie. Expensive projection equipment was need to view it, so it was troublesome and rare to see a particular one. Then video cameras came along with file sharing networks, and you could watch any film anytime you wanted. Films that you might be able to see once in your life you could now study by watching hundreds of times. A hundred million people became film students, starting to make their own videos and uploading them to YouTube in the billions. Again, the audience pyramid flipped. We are all filmmakers now.
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The grand move from fixity to flows can be starkly illustrated in the status of books. Books began as authoritative fixed masterpieces. Crafted with great care and reverence, they were machined to last generations. A big fat paper book is the very essence of stability. It sits on a shelf, not moving, not changing, perhaps for thousands of years. Book lover and critic Nick Carr enumerated four ways books embody fixity. Here’s my rendition of how books stay:
Fixity of the page—The page stays the same. Whenever you pick it up, it’s the same. You can count on it. That means you can reference or cite it, certain it will say the same thing.
Fixity of the edition—No matter which copy of the book you pick up, no matter where or when you purchased it, it will be the same (for that edition), so its text is shared between us. We can discuss a book sure that we are looking at the identical content.
Fixity of the object—With proper care, paper books last a very long time (centuries longer than digital formats), and their text doesn’t change as they age.
Fixity of completion—A paper book carries with it a sense of finality and closure. It is done. Complete. Part of the attraction of printed literature is that it is committed to paper, almost like a vow. The author stands upon it.
These four stabilities are very attractive qualities. They make books monumental, something to reckon with. Yet anyone who loves paper books understands that printed volumes are increasingly expensive compared to a digital copy; it’s not hard to imagine a time when very few new books will be printed. Today most books are predominantly born as ebooks. Even old books have had their texts scanned and blasted into every corner of the internet, encouraging them to flow freely on the superconducting wires of the net. The four fixities are not present in ebooks, at least not in the versions of ebooks we see today. But while book lovers will miss the fixities, we should be aware that ebooks offer four fluidities to counter them:
Fluidity of the page—The page is a flexible unit. Content will flow to fit any available space, from a tiny screen in a pair of glasses to a wall. It can adapt to your preferred reading device or reading style. The page fits you.