Music that sings you your coffee

David Byrne writes,

Now, with cable TV and the Internet, the marketing of mainstream music takes place in a whirlwind of media bits. Gossip, paparazzi pix, photo opportunities and appearances and even some actual music is the content. In a way this bundle that constitutes mainstream music begins to establish a model that could be the future of recorded music — that the recordings are the “loss leaders” for everything else. Loss leaders are the taste of a product you give away free in order to lead someone into your world. PDF software could be viewed that way, flash players, etc. And now maybe free recorded music will be the thing that hooks you into the universe of Britney, Ashley or the Ying Yang Twins. The music will be your introduction into a universe of merch, relationships, video clips, links, on and on.

The role of graphic designers will change. Rather than being called upon to create one or two iconic images that are emblematic of an artist and a new product their job will be to imagine sets of links, connections and relationships…. and to make those visually enticing, fun and rewarding. I can’t imagine what exactly that might be, but it will be whole lot more than LP sleeves.

Yah. Madame Helmut has her iPod, her graphic design branding stuff; Helmut has his cd player for burning LPs, of which about 4000 take up a wall in the bedroom much to Madame Helmut's consternation.

The LPs aren't old-guy old habits. I simply prefer them. I prefer them not only for their packaging - which Byrne maintains was determined by the record companies rather than the musicians (this wasn't always true) - and their warmer sound (which I've found translates comparatively well when burned to cds). I prefer them mostly because of two things: the hunt, and the fact that so much music has been filtered out of the market due to the greater expenses of marketing (the "universe of merch, relationships, video clips, links, on and on").

The music industry today functions as a giant funnel that squeezes out of its rectal tip the most banal of music. Yes, a lot can be found online, and there's even real merit to being able to search out and download music you like without being assaulted with advertising campaigns. But I have so much music that's simply unavailable now in any format. I've googled without luck plenty of music that I know exists. As everything becomes increasingly digital, it's not as if nothing is left behind. Granted, there's lots of bad music that may as well be left out of the digisphere. There's quite a bit in the soundtracks to our lives, however, that will never appear digitally.

LPs carry this function - an individualized cultural memory. They also carry the function of sustaining culturally outmoded tastes, events, and historical aural polaroids. I have, for instance, an avant-garde jazz record made at a gallery opening in NYC in the mid-60s. There were maybe 50 copies made of the record. I've had no success finding more information about it through the internet. It's a lost item, left behind in the analogsphere. And who knows anything about the lovely little record I found a few years ago by a young Swedish artpop folk group from the early 1970s, Vestenvinden's "Gummimasker"?

As for the hunt, I realized yesterday the importance of this to me while talking with a neighbor. I'm going to Hungary next week for a conference, and I'm spending a few days in Budapest before the conference. I told the neighbor something I realized while I was saying it. I often visit cities at least in part by searching out record shops and local music. It's often a way of exploring those parts of cities off the trail of tourism, of meeting interesting people, of discovering what's going on in the less culturally ostentatious parts of the city. This isn't for everyone, of course. While we talk about the digital age closing distances, however, I find that the distance to be traveled by sitting in front of the computer is usually illusory.