I was staring at Facebook the other day and thinking about the future and about how and what it meant for media in general.  Same old conversation that I always have with myself.  That being, with a geometric increase in the amount of content available on the web, what were the implications for media companies, for content itself, for old-school monopolistic distribution systems.

We are entering a new age.

See the thing about tools like Garageband, and iPhoto, and video editing that any junior high schooler can do.  The thing is that, the problem is that, so much of it is honestly good.

It’s not just about filters.  It’s not just about a sea of dreck and banality.  There is so much good music out there.  There are so many really funny people out there writing things and making jokes.  There are so many personalities.

These tools really have empowered people in a way that has never been possible before.  They have emboldened and empowered people.  Our culture is, of course, a bit slow to come to terms with these facts.  We still think in terms of stars and celebrities and notoriety.

But those concepts, I think, are easing somewhat.  In favor of something more akin to captains of community.  Not celebrities, per se.  But, you know, that old word, “influencers”.  What celebrities would be if their scope was measurably smaller.  Little bands of people, following or unfollowing people here and there.  Their favorite blog writers.  Their favorite musicians.

Content has flooded the system.  And, again, the problem isn’t that so much of it is bad.  On the contrary, so much of it is genuinely good.  Funny.  Smart.  Well written.  Well produced.

It’s hard to say what it means definitively.  But certainly, the idea that “content is king” seems a little out of touch.  Maybe really hard to produce content is king, like TV shows.  Maybe.  But general content.  People getting paid for being funny and sarcastic and wry and good writers.  I just feel like there can’t be much of a premium on that these days.  I have to think that those folks, the intelligentsia, the people that floated throughout the media and the publishing world, going to cool parties, and posing in fun pictures, those people, if they ever had any money at all, will have less in the future.

I’m not saying this because I have schadenfreude and I’m jealous and wish all those people ill.  Although of course I’m human.  So I want to get invited to all the cool parties too.

I’m just saying it because it seems like the natural course of things.

It’s hard to tell if it’s bad.  Certainly, it’s disruptive.  Certainly, it’s not going to be enough to write a funny blog in the future.  At least, I don’t think it will.

I suspect, and again, perhaps because I’ve justifying my own existence, that we will evolve into a much broader community of hobbyists and creators.  That our notions of exceptionalism around specific kinds of art will diminish.  That hard-to-make art, that is, either expensive or really time-consuming will preserve some of its pricing power.  More art will become easier to make, music included.  And music will become closer (not exactly the same of course, but closer) to things like scrapbooking, gardening, cooking, etc.  Things that many people enjoy doing and many people enjoy doing well.

I can’t really tell if it’s a bad thing or a good thing.  Any one person’s art won’t be that special but that does not mean it won’t be good.  And more people than ever before will feel empowered to create things.  And perhaps new modes of art will evolve that will be hard to create and there will be scarcity.

I have to feel like more people creating beautiful things and expressing themselves has to be a good thing even if we lose that element of common culture that clues in everyone on the planet to that good thing and maybe there are only a couple hundred people that ever find out what this one person is doing or creating.  That’s still good right?

I suppose I have a Hamiltonian view of the nature of man.  I like and want to believe in the inherent goodness of a single man but I’d like to reserve that belief until I’ve been given evidence to the affirmative.  And I have a fundamental problem with big groups of men.  Institutions.

I don’t trust them.

I am deeply skeptical of their ability to do good things.  I am deeply skeptical of their ability to correct themselves once they’ve been sent in a bad direction.   Once big groups of people come together, perverse incentives manifest themselves, politics and bureaucracy come into play, simple problems become complex, constituencies take root, and, ultimately, things become frustrating and weird and the system subsequently breaks.

It doesn’t matter whether you call these big groups of people ‘companies’ or ‘government’ or ‘lobbyists’ or ‘environmentalists’ or ‘tea partiers’ or whatever.  Well, maybe it matters a little bit.

But, ultimately, from my perspective, it all boils down to the same basic premise that institutions are comprised of people and people will pursue the incentives that the system has established for them.

The bigger the group of people, the more complicated the solution.  Sometimes there aren’t solutions.  I fundamentally assume that the reason big institutions have trouble finding solutions to difficult problems is because they are difficult, because the institution itself is beholden to so many diverse interests that the very assumption of simplicity is a misnomer and a lie.

I know and believe that there is a fundamental error in most of the Left’s calculati0n about the role of government and the forces that oppose its expansion.  And that is that “them” exists in any meaningful way.  “Them” being lobbyists or “big government” or an “other”.  That there is a good force of good people in the world and a bad force.

That “profit-seeking companies” are bad and “government” is good.  I don’t believe that.  I believe that the same issues plague both groups of people.  That the incentives in place will necessarily dictate the outcomes and that, the bigger the group, the more likely that you’ll see perversity of incentives corrupt the means of the institution.

That is to say, I suppose the only thing I truly trust is a small group of people pursuing a simple objective and having the courage and the focus to forgo other opportunities and distractions.

And a large group of people, like the Federal Government, I simply don’t trust.  I don’t trust the government to spend my money wisely nor do I trust them to be efficient nor do I trust them to hire and fire based on the right incentives and metrics.

Large groups of people, like companies or the government or huge non-profits like The Red Cross, become ends unto themselves.  They exist to continue their existence.  And to grow.  All they know how to do is eat more and more.

So people will tell you to quit your day job and people will say, “Do you want to do this full time?” and people will encourage you to pursue a course that is no longer current or modern or viable. 

For some people it’s viable I suppose.  For Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective there is the possibility that you can license your songs to film or television, sell out some big venues and make a nice middle class living making music.

But the fact remains that money has left the music industry. There is less of it these days than there used to be.  In the old days, there were record deals.  There were pots of cash and, even though there were plenty of strings, those pots of cash were waiting for a specific group of artists.  And not even artists that were just the very very top.  There was a class of investment that was occurring in the music industry and that investment followed a specific set of guidelines.

Those guidelines still exist of course but the payoff has been reduced to nothing or as near nothing as is prudent.

So, for example, the guidelines say that:

a) you should tour and play often to build up a grassroots following
b) you should record often
c) you should network and schmooze and line up your ducks with your lawyer and your manager and your agent and your coterie of assistants and helpers
d) you should invest in merch and schwag and while touring you should sell merch to people as a means of supporting your touring which you recognized was unprofitable

And if you do all of those things, there was a chance, albeit small, that at the end of a rainbow, after years of hard work, there was a middle class lifestyle.  There was an apartment where you could comfortably pay rent every month.  There was health insurance.  There was enough money maybe even to raise a family.  The promise of the “middling” class, as it were.  The artisans and the tradesmen that formed the foundation of the original middle class development in the United States back in the 18th Century.

But now, the risk/reward on all that has shifted, as if it could, even more precariously to the right.  That’s what happens when the pie gets smaller.  There is simply less to go around.

So the question becomes, “Ok what next?”

And the problem is that you have still have the same chorus of voices proclaiming the old rules.  Sometimes they’re proclaiming the old rules because they don’t know any better.  Sometimes they’re proclaiming the old rules because they have a vested interest in sucking the last bits of money out of the system before it collapses completely.  Sometimes they’re proclaiming the old rules because they believe in the mythology of the starving artist and want to believe that the artists they love are broken tragic figures that can suffer for the rest of our collective compromised choices. 

Who knows?

But the point is that, in this day and age, those old methods simply work far less often than they used to.  And, like much with the Internet age, artists are forced to confront, to reckon with a stubborn and obstinate reality that refuses to bend itself to our own preconceptions.

So, if the odds of me becoming rich and famous from making music are greatly diminished in this day and age, and were never that big to begin with, what is the point of why I’m doing this?  If it’s simply to create art, is there a need to play live and perform in front of audiences?  How does that accelerate the progression or further the goal of creating art?  And if it’s because you still need narrative moments to create a compelling story because there’s still an opportunity to become known.  Well, then how many shows and how much art is necessary to create that opening in the public consciousness? 

And do we need albums?  Or is it really just songs that people grativate towards?  Moments in songs even.  Not even the full song.  Just a fragment of it.

And what does it mean to be a musician in this case?  Are we all simply hobbyists?  Is there a grander calling?  Is it more honorable to forsake the creature comforts of a self-sustaining lifestyle?  Must you be willing to give everything up for the myth of the artist in order to get the acclaim and the attention you require?  And if so, isn’t something wrong with it if that acclaim and attention can’t pay you back in any real way?  Can’t put food in your mouth or help you avoid a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle?

What is the point?  I guess we’re all figuring it out as we go.

The biggest blog besides AudioMuffin is probably Largehearted Boy.  We also got some coverage on a covers blog called Cover Me.  We also got some nice coverage on The Music Slut and Surviving the Golden Age.

And I think there might be more forthcoming.  Thanks to everyone for getting the word out.

Back in 2008, when I was just getting the band together, we covered the song ‘All My Friends’ by LCD Soundsystem a few times.  We played it at, I think, our first 2 or 3 shows.  The great thing about Rockwood (and basically every club these days) is that they offer a recording option for bands to pull the shows right off the board.  So I grabbed the recording, sent it off to Joe Lambert to spruce it up a bit and then sent it out to my fan club.  Again, this was about 18 months ago.

Various things have happened since then.  Originally, Lucas Jensen at Hypeful picked up on it and voted it #18 best cover of 2008.  That was fun mainly because I hadn’t really promoted it that much.  A few people here and there heard it.  Then, months later, I noticed that someone in the comments section of the blog at The AudioMuffin had mentioned our version of the tune.  So that was strange and fun and weird as well.  Because somehow, even for an artist as small as lil ol me, these little rivulets of the internet had trickled into someone’s mind and I hadn’t really had to do anything or make anything.

Then, last week, I finally got off my ass and got the show from December 2009 mastered.  I emailed Frank at The AudioMuffin to see if they wanted an exclusive on this new cover of ‘Someone Great’ that we’d done, also off of Sound of Silver.  He jumped on it.  And then posted a nice write-up that mentioned the other cover of ‘All My Friends’ and, because it’s the internet and these songs are in digital form and easily accessible and findable, he posted the other cover and a few other things about the band.

Long story long.

The point is that since Frank gave us that nice write-up there’s been this nice little mini-renaissance for this thing that I did nearly 2 years ago.  A few people have posted it on their blogs, a few people have tweeted about it, it’s made some headway on the Hype Machine Twitter charts.  And it’s not really anything new.  It’s not something that I’ve just done.  It’s just been this piece of content that’s been floating around the internet and the nature of digitality is that it’s remained exactly as it was 18 months ago.

The optionality of that infinite digital lifespan is something that is very interesting, very alluring.  While the digital era has indeed commoditized the music industry it has also reduced the cost of maintaining an infinite catalogue to virtually nothing.  There are no additional production costs, no additional distribution costs I had to undertake to get our cover of ‘All My Friends’ into a few more hands.  The marginal cost was zero.  A few more people wanted to hear the song and a few more people did.

If I was an accountant, I’d have trouble figuring out the right depreciation schedule for a song.  Certainly, the head of the tail, the early part of the song’s existence is where the likelihood is greatest that you’ll be able to monetize something, be able to get somebody’s attention, be able to do something with it.  But perhaps, like other things on the internet, the long part of the tail is a little fatter.  Maybe there’s a little more space between 0 and the making something/anything out of your digital relic when you’re able to capture all that optionality at absolutely no cost.

Something about that fact gives me some kind of hope.  It means that maybe the answer for an artist is to just keep adding to your catalogue.  Keep creating content.  Keep writing songs.  Keep building.  And building.  And every time you build a little something and think it’s not worth anything you remind yourself you’re buying a call option on the future.  On the possibility that this good thing that you’ve done will bounce around in eternity for a period of time and then surface to make you some money.

If you’re not an artist, but a company, it seems pretty clear that there’s something to be said for developing a huge catalogue of songs or videos or whatever, probably as cheaply as you can, and understand that each of these little grains of sands are little lottery tickets that might yield more than you thought they might originally.

That’s what the Internet creates.  It creates infinity and eternity.  Options into the distance.

This is probably not surprising to anyone that actually visits Metacritic.  If you spend any time on the site, you see that there are so many albums that come out that seem “great” by the standards of critics.  Whereas, for film the critics are much tougher and much more skeptical and it’s simply far less frequent that a film gets a great grade.

So why is this?

There are many possibilities.

One possibility is that Metacritic has a bunch of hacks in the music department or film department respectively and it’s grading system is all out of whack for either film or music.  I doubt this is true.

Another possibility is that there is so much music that, when it gets reviewed at all, its much more likely to get a high score.  Thus, the act of reviewing an album is itself a positive declaration and the likelihood that any review will therefore be negative is correspondingly low.

Which is another way of saying that there’s a lot of good music out there.  So much, in fact, that the act of selecting a piece of good music from the metaphorical pile is almost arbitrary.

And the reason there’s a lot of good music out there is because, fundamentally, popular music is neither terribly difficult nor terribly expensive to create.  Even the stuff we all say is “crap” is better than the crap that we consume through other media.

Music is not a comprehensive art form.  It engages a very specific set of senses.  And it has a specific set of parameters.  Namely, I-IV-V chordal relationships that define a lot of how we listen to and process popular music.  And those relationships are in place because, frankly, they sound good.  They’re pleasing.

So the reason that music scores are, on average, higher, is because:

a) it’s easier to make good music therefore
b) there is a lot more of it therefore
c) on average, it will “score” better

Which is another way of saying it’s easy to make good music.  Not rocket science I guess.

What’s the implication?  It means that “good” music is essentially a commodity.  There is no economic profit in it.  No specific unique set of competitive differentiators to exploit.  It’s interchangeable.

So, that means that any business model built on plucking “great” songs out of the ether from merely “good” songs is doomed to failure (Music Xray for example) and it will fail only because finding “great” songs isn’t actually a problem that anyone has, since there’s an abundance of them.

It also means that there’s no percentage in being an artist or creating music because, again, there is a surfeit of good music out there already.  You’ll, by definition, be in the long tail.  Getting into the music making business is like starting a lemonade business.  Or maybe it’s like getting into the oil business if the cost of oil was free.

Here’s what he had to say about it:

Someone Great brings The Flying Change to an orchestral 13-piece band. Each member of the band adds their own rhythm and titillating flourish.  If anyone has video of this please leave a link in the comments – it sounds epic!

Thanks for the kind words, Frank!  Check out our cover of ‘Someone Great’ on Audio Muffin when you have a chance.

This isn’t a novel thought.  Just that there doesn’t seem to be any direct correlation between, say, the web traffic that Seth Godin gets and the number of solved problems in the world.  Actually, that may not entirely be true.  But I just find it a strange and disconcerting thing.  All these dudes doling out advice.  And the reason they’re giving advice is because they’ve “made it”.  They’ve written some best-selling books.  They’ve started some cool new companies.

And the premise is that if if you can just ingest these lessons.  If you can take them to heart and really live them then, maybe slowly but surely, you can remodel your DNA after these gurus and then be successful or rich or happy or whatever.  And people do indeed crave that assurance.  That if they just make a few switches here and there and internalize the thousands of lessons being.

I’m either a skeptic or a determinist or just a bummer.  But as much as I enjoy reading these guys and think about what they write, I am still skeptical about the power of their words, or anyone’s words, to really change things or change behavior.  But then, I’m doing the same thing.

And I doubt if you asked them they’d say the point was to “change people’s lives”.  Rather, they’re more likely just in the business of spreading good ideas.

Nevertheless, it’s always struck me that there’s no comparison to just being right.  There are many paths to success.  And many ways to achieve your goals.  And if you read Seth Godin’s blog or the Bible or any other weighty tome that has a lot of little nuggets of wisdom, you’ll most likely find that they contradict each other, and that they’re often helpful but in very specific circumstances.  And that’s okay.

But there are no books to help you emulate Jack Welch or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.  At least, I don’t really  believe in them.  I believe that certain people have good taste and the discipline to pursue it and those people succeed.  And if they’re good writers they write a book about it or a blog about it.  And the people reading that book will most likely not have good taste and, aside from hiring the author to make all their decisions for them, won’t be able to implement a lot of the rules consistently enough to make a difference.

But tell me if I’m being an idiot or a downer unnecessarily.  It just strikes me that nothing beats being right.

This is going to be an interesting process.

I want the record to be up tempo and have some rhythm and momentum.  But of course, without a drummer and a lot of my own percussive skills, the songs all end up coming out sounding like acoustic folks songs.  Part of it will be getting Paul and myself and the band to stretch the limits of our imagination around the possibilities of the music.  And the other part will be allowing the stated intention of the record to settle into whatever the actual result ends up being.

Matt and I were saying we should have a seeded tournament.  A “Song Off” where top seeds and sure picks go up against lesser opponents and maybe we get a few people involved in this song off and ultimately winnow down the list in a different fashion.

I know that a few songs that I really like might not make it on the record.  And a few that I had only just written might make it.  And that’s how these things go.  Certain songs kind of offer themselves up for imagination.  And other ones feel more momentuous when you have the germ of an idea but somehow can’t seem to coalesce into something that feels like a complete whole.

Nevertheless, it’s nice to have the well to draw from and it’s nice to know that there are options.  Songwriting is so interesting because, for me, it’s all about the quick jab.  The quick punch.  The fist.  The pound on the table.  Not a fugue.  Not a concerto.  But an expression or a gesture that feels, by necessity, incomplete.  The incompleteness of songs and song lyrics lend them their beauty and their mystery and the power of these phrases and these musical moments lies in their stated intention and their unstated mystery.

For the sessions with Matt, the running time for 13 songs is 40 minutes.  Average song length is right around 2:50.  That’s just how I do it.  I am terrified of repeating something too often and having it be boring.  I’d rather have it be short and pithy and leave you wistful and nostalgic for a moment that just ended.

The funny thing about people and about masters imparting lessons is that it’s all impossible and besides the point, of course.  It’s not because Eno practiced a certain way of doing things or had a specific strategy in mind.  It’s because he has impeccable taste and great judgement.  And those things are very hard to teach.  The problem with reading self-help books or self-help blogs or whatever is that ultimately it simply comes down to being right and who is right most of the time.  Eno is right most of the time.  Another guy that jumps to mind is David Geffen.  Also someone that is right most of the time.

But that’s neither hither nor yon, as my English teacher used to say.  The thing that I’ve been thinking about and that Eno points to and that Dubber linked to is the following snippet:

“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”

It’s interesting to think of it that way.  Because even though we’re all in 2010 and even though so many people are talking about the death of the album as the default format for a collection of songs.  I still find myself working on a new “album”.  And maybe it’s sort of back to the points that I made yesterday — that is I need to produce things within certain conventions in order to register my work with the cognoscenti that have the power to provide enhanced distribution to it.

So maybe the album is totally arbitrary.  And it’s nice to be cold and dispassionate and say that.  And shrug your shoulders.  Listen, bros, the jig is up.  Time for the next thing.  Albums are  a function of the physical means of production and distribution.  It’s an arbitrary amount of time based on how much sound a vinyl record could hold.

Maybe.

But you know, things flow in the world.  And there are submerged and hidden relationships between things.  And it could be totally arbitrary or it could be part of a series of implicit rhythms in the universe.  Maybe vinyl was created the way it was because there is something special about 45 minutes of music.

I suppose my point is merely that I do find something interesting in a series of 8-10 songs.  I like 35 minutes of music, I think.  I don’t really like 70 minutes of music.  I can’t sit and listen to a 70 minute record all the way through.  Not even really a 45 or 48 minute record.  But 35 minutes seems like a good amount of time to me.  Even if it’s on the internet.  Even if I have the ability to mix and match songs and pluck things from different artists.  I like the format.

It’s hard, in those instances, to tell whether you’re being sentimental and a luddite or whether there’s some deeper truth to your opinion or whether that distinction matters at all.

Anyway, I’m working on a record.  And maybe I won’t in the future.  And maybe it’s just whale blubber.  I can dig that.  But my next record is going to be good nonetheless.