Now that music is free to listen to and free to make, the old industry has been made obsolete, and everybody is a musician, what could the future of the medium look like ? I've been coming to the shocking realization that the recordings we've made decades ago are still in existence, and new ones are being made at an exponential rate by practically everyone under the sun. We now have such a daunting mass of recordings that there exist more genres than any one person can be aware of, let alone individual artists, albums, Bandcamp pages, etc. There now exists such an amount of diverse recordings that trying to discover new music is like scooping up a bucket of sand and trying to pick out the few grains that look the most interesting.
Trying to put this phenomenon into the context of human culture throughout history has been confusing and even slightly unsettling. Music was once an incidental, ephemeral activity that could be done in a participatory, communal way. When my grandparents were my age, they would get together with their friends and sing songs with one another all night long, and they claim that there was never a moment when the singing ceased. There was no stage, nor were there any dedicated performers, but everybody contributed to the energy of the music that surrounded them; this was uniquely defined by the people who were present, never again to be repeated in any plane but that of memory. And what's especially notable is that everybody was perfectly fine with that. Nobody cared about plucking the songs out of the air and storing them forever because each instance of music was understood as something inseparable from the moment, uniquely tied to the air into which it was born.
I suppose the great tragedy is the shift in our social structure from community to individual. No longer is there any sense of binding camaraderie or sobornost that involves the total giving of oneself into an indissoluble whole, and so music in our age is developing in increasing contradiction to what has long been its traditional conception. As our society has become massively hyper-atomized, thus paradoxically contrasting with the definition of "society," so has our music undergone a similar subversion. We no longer make music in common, we no longer listen to music in common. Everybody has a "sound" and everybody has a "taste." The zebras have isolated themselves to display their unique stripes, and in the process negating the actual purpose of the camouflage.
Taking this into consideration, it can be posited that magnetic tape (or even before that, the invention of scoring) has, in a sense, killed the old form of music. No longer is it a living, continual, perennial part of a cultural organism, but rather an individual form of personal expression that can only be shared with a community after it has already completed its cycle of life. An album is, in this sense, akin to a stuffed animal rather than a breathing companion, a musician's role now as something of a cultural taxidermist.
Nonetheless, our desire for community hasn't dissipated in the same way that its actual presence has. We still make music with the intent of contributing to a human collective. But, as music is no longer made as a collective, we do this in the form of sharing our finished works in any way we can. In former eras this was done mainly in concert halls and conservatories, later in record stores, and now in Bandcamp pages. In a metaphorical sense, we are singing into a void and waiting for someone else to sing along, only we are all singing different songs. The result is a much more antisocial reality than we had in the past, and music has become a race to gain exposure, and thus more voices singing along.
The reason I post this is because I'm wondering what to make of all this, and whether there's still any room for music to exist. How much longer can this continue before the possibilities have simply been exhausted ? Will anybody even bother to keep listening to stuff that was recorded just five years in the past ? Is the growth of Bandcamp and similar platforms actually a portent of the collapse of our cultural artifice, bringing the return of ephemeral, communal music into the coming generations ? What does Twoism think ?