Obsolescence Plans

The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to. People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis’ record but never think of hearing any of them twice in a row—there’s just too much to get through. You’re thinking, “I’ve got ‘Sketches of Spain and ‘Bitches Brew’—let’s zip through those while I’m finishing that e-mail.” That abundance can push any music into background music, furniture music.

— Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood

I’m constantly fighting against this in my own music listening habits. There’s so much of it now, that it’s hard to devote much attention to particular bits and pieces. I’ve approached this in a couple of different ways:

1. Make a concerted effort to concentrate and listen more deeply to fewer sounds. Also, I’ve tried to cut down on the new music I download, while spending more quality time with the back catalog of tracks I’ve already got.
2. Give up and give in to the mountain of music. Put everything on random, and let my attention identify what’s really good. If something can push its way to the front of my brain, then I know it’s good.

Neither approach is entirely satisfying. For example, with new releases from Yo La Tengo, Reigning Sound, and Mew, how the hell am I supposed to reign in my attention and focus on the more neglected areas of my hard drive? In a tilt toward the new, I’ve devoted a significant amount of listening time this week to streaming the above records. Not so much to my resolutions made a few weeks ago.

The second approach falls prey to a different bias. Inevitably, the stuff that “pushes its way to the front” is old, familiar music I enjoyed before the advent of the mp3. Listening to stuff before 1999 means traveling to a world without e-mail or gainful employment. A world where someone else paid my rent, and I regularly went to record stores and read magazines, because for me, there was no internet.

It’s not an accident that I value pre-Web music more.  I had oceans of time and attention, and fewer recordings were available to me. Both because music was more expensive, and information was less abundant. Now, music and information about music is infinite, while attention is more scarce. So when attention is scarce, where is it best directed for someone like me?

The above diagram is intended to illustrate two markets: the market for attention (entertainments) and the market for music. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick is constantly pointing out, the music business is much bigger than just recorded music. But if recorded music, by itself, is commoditized to the point where it is both commercially irrelevant and more distant from the hearts of listeners, how would we expect consumers and artists to react?

I expect to see more:

• press-kit stories of songwriters going into the [woods/mountains/prison] to recover from [ennui, personal tragedy] and emerging to deliver [fire, 10 commandments, new records]
• bands spending more time on the road, where they actually make money
• festivals (ugh)
• tie-ins with video games, however awful or inappropriate (e.g., Kurt Cobain’s appearance in Guitar Hero 5)
• soundtrack work for films
• interaction with audiences via social networking
• singles instead of albums, where press attention comes more frequently and content is more digestible (see e.g., Radiohead, Weird “Al”)
• covers records as artists seek to interact with older music already familiar to audiences as part of the cannon
• supergroups and interaction between artists so that projects attract more attention

Most of this is pretty obvious and it’s been happening for a while, but I’ve dragged one example out of the bulleted list because it seems to embrace so many different strategies at once. I’ve not been a huge fan of the actual music, but Beck’s Record Club is brilliant in its multifaceted approach. Basically, he’s gathering a bunch of famous pals and re-recording classic records, then making the results available on his Web site. The music itself is almost irrelevant, but the decision to eschew new songs and focus on classic records like Velvet Underground and Nico and Songs of Leonard Cohen removes from the audience the burden of evaluating new music. Instead, this is a play we’ve already seen. The focus is on the narrative aspects of music making, the process and the personalities.

Aside from the record club, Beck’s entire web site is an example of what I’d like to see from more artists. Instead of boring us with posts about video shoots, recording sessions, and new merch, Beck posts interviews with Tom Waits and Will Farrell along with links to songs and videos from old, little known artists in which he’s personally interested. He also has a series of sound-collage / DJ-session sound files called Planned Obsolescence with playlists that veer wildly from Herbie Hancock to Lee Hazelwood to Outkast, Adam Ant, and the Kinks, plus a bunch of people I’ve never heard of (which is part of the point, I guess).

Beck has reimagined what it means to be a well-known musician. His site is an acknowledgement that artists are not just generators, they are consumers. And they are in a unique position to cut through the clutter and share with us their own experience of music listening. Because in a jungle where everything looks like miles and miles of identical foliage, sometimes you need a guide who can lead you to where the water has collected into a particularly beautiful pool.

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This is unrelated, but in case you missed it, here’s Kenny Rogers head-faking Michael Jordan and draining a 20-footer. But Michael strikes back with a block shot on Kenny’s next drive to the hole. Yes, that Kenny Rogers and Michael Jordan.