Eric Harvey

A good macrohistorical review of the MP3's place in the history of the music industry and of people's interactions with their cultural production. Harvey makes a lot of the connections that are obvious when you think about them--the difference between the CD's mass boutiqueness, which revitalized music by laying open the treasury of the past, all in print again (the argument of Seven Years of Plenty, but also perpetuated the treatment of music as a commodity--new liner notes! 'indestructible' storage media! and the MP3, which is the least boutiquey medium imaginable but extends the CD's mass reach ad absurdum (although, importantly, only to people with high-speed internet); the way the resulting plummet in music's monetary value causes a sag in its cultural value--BUT the way this reproduces the move from one-to-many TV to many-to-many internet, and could possibly slowly foster a fecund musical netroots of people creating and uploading music the same way they interact(ed) with their blogs and their facebooks and etc. And how this amounts to an iconoclasm--less vivid, maybe more social, premodern, villagey, engaged? People going on, like, cridecoeur.futuredomainname.fdn and saving their bank of sounds and writing their songs and producing each other's and uploading 'em and promoting themselves that way, and a billion flowers blooming? We'd still be losing something, I suppose. But given the choice between great music that's famous for fifteen people and the mediocrities we have for stars these days, the bland generality that is needed to appeal to the scared sheeple who are the only ones still too scared to do something different than just, like, whatever everyone else at the office is into ... if the choice is between the Revolucionary Cyborg Wedding Band Mobile Unit and John Mayer, well, then even if the projected future of mass creation and engagement never materializes and people who care about music are just fringe eccentrics--still, give-a me this, please:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4341622

I do not endorse the opening act! People's Island Republic forever!

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