23 March 2018 - weekly round up (Music Matters)

A summary of the latest news from the music industry; How the streaming of music presages the end of ownership of everything In an article published on Forbes, the contributor proposes that the changes going in the music industry might be a leading indicator of changes in other spheres of society and industry. The contributor refers to a thesis he wrote which speaks of "cloud-based" media becoming readily accessible at any time and there being a distinct sense of a rapidly accelerating movement away from the need to ever own or possess media. A decade after the thesis was published, it appears that the transition from any type of locally stored media to an all-streamed/cloud-based access model is nearly complete. Applications like Google Photos render Apple's iPhoto happily unnecessary. Music was as it often is the precursor to all this; and thus, music tends to presage and preview the broader media technological trends. The contributor, in hindsight, makes insights on how Napster was really the first peer-to-peer network - a precursor to Facebook, Instagram, etc... not to mention a precursor to the soon-to-emerge decentralised (and potentially blockchain based) social networks - he adds. He remarks that when an expensive view is taken, it can be noticed the way in which people (typically, young) engage with music as an instructive for more than just adjacent media concerns.

He highlights the "gig" economy - Über, Airbnb, Task Rabbit, etc. - with all its implied freedoms and benefits for those seeking to make a little extra cash via arbitraging surplus (time or space) has a very dark and less discussed downside; almost exactly the same downside that those musicians, for whom the word "gig" was heretofore associated, have contended with since the beginning of gigs: a life devoid of a safety net, health insurance, retirement planning, etc. Beyond this parallel between the life of a gigging musician and the "gig" economy participant, he identifies another implication of how our relationship to music foretells a larger relationship to society. Indeed, digital natives are the first generation for whom the notion of actually owning and storing a digital music file on their devices makes no sense. For the generations who preceded Generation Z, there was still a sentiment of, I'm happy to stream music to a certain point, but I want to own it and have it on my device, because I do not trust that the streaming services will be around forever, and I do not want to lose my music." He states that the verdict is out on whether the current crop of streaming services are durable and will still be around but points out that there is no doubt that you do not tend to worry about losing something you never had. He states that the very notion of owning music - and increasingly any media - is foreign to this generation (why would they possibly want to store music they never owned and can always access?) "The answer is that they wouldn't. The larger implication that I believe the music industry - once again - providing the line of sight around how this generation might view the idea of ownership of... anything." As economic disparity continues to accelerate, the idea of the current generation not being able to, for, instance, own a house becomes an increasingly likely scenario. Instead a generation - or generations - of renters will emerge. Similarly, as we move to an economic paradigm in which owning a car is challenging and self-driving autonomous become prominent, the rationale of actually taking possession/title of a car will start making little sense. He asks; how long before the plurality of subscription services render ownership of virtually everything just as unnecessary as the ownership of a music file? Just as Generation Z's complete move from ownership of music was a result of a confluence of economic factors and technological forces; the same forces appear to be combining to result in precisely the same outcome of access rather than ownership from everything. Music has, as it always seems to, provided the example. It is on us, however, to look beyond the inexorability that music shows and to also examine the consequences of these types of moves, both culturally and economically.