Music’s clouded future?
By Steve Mullins. Technology is changing the way we experience music, and recent developments could impact how we access and appreciate it more than all the pirates combined, say Bengt Asplund and Jesse Suchmann of Digitas in the agency’s Digitas Cache II interactive publication.
“So while our parents bought, stole, or traded for every album they ever owned, kids who can’t yet drive now own thousands of albums,” they say. “Yes, they’re more connected to music (which is good), but do they appreciate it? Giving anyone too much of something before they can understand and respect it is the easiest way to teach them to disregard its worth. Now people download merely because they can, and it comes at a cost – mostly to our memory, but also to our collective musical psyche.”
Now here comes the cloud, which might finish off downloads, according to some observers. However, people will always want to own their music, and free is going to be as good in five years as it is today, say the authors.
“It also takes most new artists time to get in the cloud, and who wants to wait? Plus, what about the times when we can’t connect? If being in the woods with nothing actually on our iPods and no signal means no music… well, that’s the 800-pound gorilla no one is talking about.”
Digitising music has made ownership more complicated, but it doesn’t have to do the same for appreciation.
“Will future generations hold the same reverence for music as we were taught? I hope so. But, as a drunken, tattooed transient named Jimmy Buffet once said, ‘Only time will tell’.
