Before the invention of the gramophone, anyone wanting to hear reproduced music had to rely on the availability of sheet music or the good memory of the musicians involved. The activity of »listening to music« was of necessity dependent upon the physical presence of the medium »musician«. Shellacs were the first attempt to break this dependence. After 1887, it was no longer necessary to have an orchestra present to be able to enjoy a Wagner opera. On the contrary, recordings offered a spatial independence that is brought to bear in archetypal manner in the key image of »Fitzcarraldo« from Werner Herzog’s film of the same name. Klaus Kinski travels through the Amazon while listening to Verdi. The principle of the Walkman was born and with it the possibility of giving one’s own mobile life the appropriate soundtrack.
As the next step came the mass-compatible introduction of the audio cassette in 1975 and, eight years later, the invention of the CD. A new stage in the distribution of music was reached. Handy silver discs, optical data carriers with a storage capacity unknown until then, made possible the last big boom of the music industry up to now, although they were actually only a last step towards the final digitization of the »product« music. In 1993 the German Fraunhofer Institute developed the audio compression format mp3, which, in comparison with the previous standard, WAV, only required a tenth of the storage space. The bitter anti-copyleft anthem »Cop that Shit« by the American hip-hop icon Missy Elliott needs 3.405 MB storage in mp 3 format. Over 34 million instead of 340 million times yes or no for just over three minutes of music. Computers - »engines of abstraction«, as the avant-garde musician and software developer James McCartney calls them – laid the foundations for a radically different approach to music on two sides.

These engines of abstraction had always been of great interest for music in the tradition of John Cage and Steve Reich, which is derived from algorithms and loops. Generations of musicians who counted themselves as avant-garde began to work exultingly with ever more powerful computers and ever more sophisticated programmes. But the new technologies set new standards in pop as well. Sampling and the creation of sound databases was made much easier, and hardware simulations now make it possible to put together complex tracks on nearly every standard computer. But »Laptop sound« as an in-word also denotes the use of and influence through programs with GUI, graphic user interfaces, which, as Lev Manovich has demonstrated in the case of images, inevitably lead to new production processes and thus new products. The majority of the programs represent sound fragments in the form of blocks that can be arranged by the users on several tracks. The patterns produced also run through the tracks. »Copy« and »Paste« are key commands that have inscribed themselves into contemporary music as well as into texts and images. We do not only produce using the copy-and-paste procedure: we now think that way.

Now, individual producers are more actively supporting the ability of their material to be recombined as well. In an industry in which the bass drum of a club hit is sometimes traded like an investment bond, the open-source label Loca Records is planning to include a data CD with its publications containing all the samples and sounds used in them. But even far from such committed tiny suppliers, the new availability of the raw material has led to remarkable new developments. In the past few years, a phenomenon has been hyped under the crude name »bastard pop«. It is based on the effective and popular fusion of well-known hits – mostly disregarding the necessary license rights. On illegally pressed vinyl records of doubtful origin there appear strange marriages between Public Enemy and Herb Albert. So far, the high point has been the »Grey Album« of the American DJ Dangermouse. A perfect mix of the »White Album« by the Beatles and the »Black Album« by Jay-Z, which was never published owing to pressure from the owners of the rights to the material of the Liverpudlians and has since wandered through the exchanges of the Web as a much sought-after download.

And it is there that it encounters the consumers, the other side of the coin, whose face has been radically changed by digitization. P2P systems like Kaazaa or Edonkey make up to 500 million songs available for free downloading. User swaps with user in a value chain that bypasses the music industry and makes one want to launch into a well-known old requiem. After all, the saying »Copying is killing music« comes from the era of the audio cassette.

Once music has been condensed into data, it can be copied as often as desired without any loss of quality. It becomes a copy without an original, freely available for endless reproduction. But the swapping system loses its transparency as the supply increases. As is the case with the Internet in general, its micro-version lacks suitable filters. What should users look for? They either use names learnt offline as an orientation, or – and this is often overlooked – they communicate with other users through the numerous chats and forums and gather information this way. The social aspect of the Internet exchanges is enormously important. Through them, not only the availability and possession of music grows, but also communication about music.

The hit as we knew it no longer exists; it has increased its distribution in exponential fashion. This comes about not only through file-sharing, but also as a result of an increased presence in the public sphere owing to one-sided commercial radio stations and a lucrative second market dealing in ring tones for mobile phones. But this also shortens its half-life enormously, a development that the distribution through the Net takes far more into account than does the involved path from the record company and sales department to the retailer. Pieces are downloaded as long as they meet the criteria of up-to-datedness and disappear from the hard disk again, after a few weeks or even days, to make way for the next wave.

There is also the physical decrease in size of the data carriers. Apples iPod can store 40 GB of music: a Walkman with the potential for choice offered by a medium-sized record collection. Digitization has made possible an undreamt-of degree of availability. But how long the market for popular music can cope with this over-supply and lack of exclusivity will be one of the decisive questions in the coming years. It is not unlikely that the end of commercially produced pop is implicit in its omnipresence.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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