Wayne's World

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Is it possible that Mr Shorter hears this mindless adulation and says to himself: “ Hmmn.. I detect the presence of dickheads. Obviously I should play some dickhead stuff. “? Whatever the reason we had the components of a modern religious experience. We got it. There was a rehearsal of once relevant ritual forms heavily ornamented by theatrical declarations of well-trained virtuosity. Remember the AACM? That was a long time ago. This was not innovation. Jason Moran gave us the Cook´s tour of the lost chord. Histrionic snarling in the last urgent kit flailing of the night highlighted Brian Blade´s studious athletic punctuation. Only John Patitucci remained resolutely musical and imaginative.

Wayne Shorter has a beautiful sound, a lot of history and an idiom of enduring musical quality. All these were on display. With this degree of expertise you would expect high quality interaction and internal coherence. But the promised conversation was awkward and sporadic. At the end of Wayne Shorter´s set the stage manager had to gesture frantically to encourage the applause for the “encore”. The religious experience was a curate´s egg.

On the other hand John Scofield has no pretensions. His trio of Bill Stewart and Steve Swallow played integrated music with imagination, energy, sensitivity and occasional risk. If you have been lucky enough to trace Sco´s musical career in live performance for over twenty years you will already be aware that his is an improvisational talent which includes tradition at the same time as celebrating the landmarks of modernity. If you go for metaphors you get joy, humour, surprise and sensitivity to both the composition and his fellow musicians. If you go for the technical stuff he has a marvelous knack with displaced phrasing and harmonic extension of an idea nudging the limits of the composition he is exploring. If you are a guitarist… I hope you slept well.

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The price of podcasting

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"Podcasting" is basically the downloading of pre-recorded audio files from a web server to a handheld listening device - not in real time, but in a similar way that a person reserves books at a local library then collects the books for later reading. The handheld listening device will access audio files queued on the listener's PC. This handheld listening device may be a mp3 player, Ipod, or even a mobile phone.

With Podcasting, you can indicate via PC based software that you want to listen to new interviews, discussions, poetry, or original music tracks which have been uploaded to the internet, by nominating the source website or content creator. Every time a new work by an author/ composer/commentator/ interviewer/writer becomes available, notifications will reach your PC and the audio content will then be queued and loaded onto your handheld listening device for later consumption.

This is being touted as new technology, and a replacement for radio. This seems wrong on several counts, principally given the notion of "immediacy". Radio news is live. The radio weather is live. Radio interviews with politicans are live. Talkback radio is live. In our legal environment, commercial copyright music tracks (most of what we listen to) may not be distributed freely without a licence. It is difficult to envisage major record companies embracing Podcasting on a free-to-air basis - a charge per download would be the only sensible model of commercial audio distribution. To support a pay-per-listen economic model, one might expect a traditional internet payment gateway to handle audio subscriptions. ITunes already offers one such mechanism.

 

"License? No thanks, I'm good..."

Alternatively, advertising subsidies might apply. The catch here however is that the number of downloads of a file is not necessarily representative of its distribution - so the internet equivalent of "ratings" are hard to supply to advertisers. "Hits" are not a reliable statistic. For every paid-for track, thousands of unlicenced copies circulate.

It is technically feasible that peer-to-peer file sharing programs (in the same vein as Kazaa) will soon arrive as an add-on for Podcasting. These file sharing programs will enable wireless networks (also now proliferating) to distribute files from handheld device to handheld device. These devices effectively become both file servers (able to send files to other devices)as well as being clients (receiving files). At this point, Podcasting will be no different to Kazaa and other existing mechanisms in terms of music piracy. Intellectual property will pass through the ether in a manner which evades commercial returns. The passage of data across the internet readily defies any means to trace or control distribution of intellectual property - music included, especially given the advent of peer-to-peer transfers across wireless networks.

Under the traditional supply-versus-demand principle, once people are offered a greater supply of free content, they are prepared to pay less for commercial content. This principle applies to commercial music CDs, whose revenue streams are adversely impacted by file sharing, CD burners, piracy, taping, and other means of theft. It also applies to commercial software, impacted by freeware and readily available copying mechanisms which neatly bypass the exchange of product for dollars.

Very few copy protection mechanisms have survived. Even the unique ID number Intel introduced on the Pentium 3 chip (which could have circumvented such piracy) has now been removed on later versions of Intel chips.

Once music and audio material becomes so free and abundant and accessible that no-one wants (or needs) to pay for it, one must ask the question why educational institutions are pumping money into music programs to train students to learn a craft which, in ten years' time, will be as vocationally useful as stenography, bookbinding, or tram conducting.

Podcasting is just another evil step towards music having no lasting commercial value. Initially Podcasting will be hailed as a miraculous means of receiving audio content. Then, once peer-to-peer networks invade the handheld device market, the relentless surge of pirated music will starve out every last dinosaur within the music industry.

In cyberspace, given Podcasting, anyone can now hear you scream. But how will an audience hear your voice over the towering Babel of every other audible ego on the planet?

The cacophony across IP networks ultimately stands to silence the commercial musician forever.

Does David James agree? See what he has to say about intellectual property in the Business article in this issue.

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