Essay on How the Internet has Changed Music

The music business can be defined as the ensemble or complex of practices and institutions that make possible and regulate the production, distribution and consumption of music.
Since music is generally situated in the sphere of the communicative, this definition has the merit of being structurally homologous with the tripartite and venerable model of communication that posits a linear relay between sender, message and receiver (William Knoedelseder, 1993).

Any sustained attempt to unpack the components of ‘production’, ‘distribution’ or ‘consumption’ would immediately and inevitably begin to complicate and problematise this neat triad. For instance, should ‘production’ include performance and recording as well as composition, and, if so, in what dimension? And how far can a model of musical production (or any form of semiotic or symbolic production) are based on the political economy categories of relations, forces and means of production? Here is one of the no doubt several – junctures where such an analysis would be confronted by Adorno, who, it will be recalled, deployed certain categories drawn from the discourse of production in his Philosophy of Modern Music and elsewhere.

In the new era of Internet publishing and self–promotional Web sites it might seem that the comprehensive services that Durand et Cie provided for Debussy (and Ravel) in the first quarter of the last century no longer had any relevance. Like his father Auguste before him, Jacques Durand acted for his chosen composers as a benevolent factotum (Peter Pullman, 1991).

This combination of legal and artistic adviser, impresario, public relations officer, moneylender and personal friend seems like a forgotten ideal in what is now a much more commercially orientated world. Thus, in a halcyon age when composers composed and publishers saw to everything else, Debussy could disdain the activities of the ‘business–man’ and pursue a path of financial incompetence..................

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY