Never before has music been so easy to create, distribute, and obtain. And never before has it been less inspired and inspiring; never before has it been so inconsequential to human affairs. The villain behind this terrible irony? Ones and zeros.
The digitization of music, while in some ways advantageous (and in any case inevitable), has nonetheless resulted in profoundly deleterious effects from which all of the music industry’s current woes emanate. Let us count the ways.
Digitization has democratized the processes of musical composition and recording, beckoning the masses to participate in once rarefied and expensive art forms.
To be an artist was once to be elite by definition. Artistic mastery which the public revered (and, if you were lucky, payed for), was obtainable only through years of sacrifice, study, and struggle. This arduous and uncertain life had the glorious effect of weeding out all but the most dedicated and talented from the artistic professions.
No more. Today, the technology to create and compose music has become idiot proof and dirt cheap – the gates have been thrown open, and the hordes have rushed in. As a result, the quantity of music has risen to choke the fiber cables and wi-fi networks encircling the globe, just as the quality has suffered a corresponding and predictable degradation.
This democratization in composition and recording has been accompanied by a democratization in performance, as seen in the rise of Karaoke (and its ultimate manifestation, American Idol), as well as the advent of performance games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
The former phenomena are merely depressing, but Guitar Hero and its ilk are truly insidious. They simulate the rewards of musical artistry without the gamer having to acquire or display any actual skill.
Which begs the question: Are there any teenagers these days, sitting on the edge of their bed with real guitars, for eight or ten hours straight, learning, jamming, playing along with records, as Eddie Van Halen once described his childhood? Not likely. Learning to master the guitar is hard. Why bother, when a virtual, screaming audience already awaits you in your living room? Unfortunately for the health and future of Rock & Roll, it is the few exceptionally talented musicians like Mr. Van Halen who elevate the form to high art and inspire others to the cause.
Digitization has also devalued music in the minds of the purchasing public, and no wonder: When you take a once solid commodity and make it intangible, you automatically make its worth less apparent. Hey, kids figure, its all just floating in the air. How can you steal air? And they have a point. The consequences have been devastating for the music business and the ability of musicians to generate income.
Astoundingly, bands and record companies – who once rightly fought file sharing and illegal downloading – are now actively participating in the destruction of their own livelihood. Case in point – the new U2 album, “No Line On the Horizon,” was leaked online before its release on March 2. In response, the band decided to stream the entire album for free on their website before it was available for purchase.
Bad idea. According to the Times Online, “The band’s decision to allow fans to stream “No Line”…may have backfired,” Many U2 fans sampled tracks for free online, and, unimpressed, decided against purchasing, suppressing the album’s crucial initial sales.
These fans have thus cheated themselves out of a remarkable sonic experience, and the band helped them to do so. For “No Line” is not the kind of work whose rewards are immediately apparent – it is a dense, layered, and challenging album, whose pleasures are subtle but many for the patient and attentive listener.
Sadly, because “No Line” was available free online, people treated it like they treat all free things – essentially worthless (see: the Tragedy of the Commons).
Digitization has been disastrous for the recording process as well. As Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2006:
“…you fight the technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious…there’s no definition of nothing…I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.'”
Modern records sound atrocious for two reasons:
1) Microphones used to be placed at strategic distances and positions relative to the amplifiers and/or instruments in the recording process, resulting in endless variation in acoustic sensibility. Jimmy Page, a master of this now lost art, summed up this principle as “distance equals depth.” The famous, looming drum sound on Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” for instance, was captured by placing John Bonham’s drum kit at the bottom of a stairwell, with microphones stationed three stories up. The result of this ingenious use of natural echo is the most sampled and copied drum sound of all time, a menacing thunder booming up seemingly from the depths of hell itself.
In the digital age, by contrast, instruments, if not preprogrammed outright, are plugged directly into the mixing console or digital effects board, resulting in perfect, flat, boring signals.
(The downside of the old way, of course, was that live mics occasionally picked up stray studio noise; an engineer’s cough, laughter in the control room, etc. But even these seeming defects lent considerable charm to the old records, transporting the listener into the room with the musicians at the moment of creation.)
2) Nowadays music is most often consumed in compressed form via computer speakers or tiny earbuds. Engineers and producers have compensated for these limited delivery systems by ultra compressing tracks and mixing them at ever louder levels to grab and hold the listener’s attention as they surf the net or are otherwise occupied. As a result, albums are now so loud and compressed, they are virtual walls of indistinguishable noise.
Rolling Stone summed up the toll digital technology has taken on the processes of recording and listening to music in a 2007 article titled “The Death of High Definition:”
Producers and engineers call this ‘the loudness war,’… But volume isn’t the only issue. Computer programs…let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, [making] musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today’s listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow.
Tinny and hollow – not much worth paying for. The results can be seen in the vacant lots where record stores once stood.
And what of ringtones, in which music companies pinned great hope? Well, sales of ringtones have fallen off lately as well, and even if they hadn’t, there would be no cause to rejoice. Ringtones represent an end of music as something to be cherished and savored for its own sake, demoting it to the position of herald only, worthy merely of signifying an incoming and entirely inconsequential phone call.
What can be done about all of this? Nothing, really. The Digital Demon is out of the bottle. We have loosed him for the sake of convenience and cost; in return, he is strangling our Muse.
She is not yet dead but dying, her cries drowned out by the static in our tiny white earbuds.
Matt Patterson’s commentary has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Townhall. He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.” His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com
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