4 ms·

> What happened next was that the technology got so cheap that anybody could record. Stanislaw Lem wrote about this in the '60's. He predicted that "cybernetic

> What happened next was that the technology got so cheap that anybody could record. Stanislaw Lem wrote about this in the '60's. He predicted that "cybernetics" and democracy would allow the number of creators to increase enormously, but posited that the number of actual "geniuses" was small, fixed, and already almost exhausted within the current artistic community. Therefore the signal (great art) would get lost in the noise (junk produced because it could be.) There are issues with this view--it assumes that great art is an objectively real phenomenon rather than a contingent social creation, amongst other things--but a brief perusal of Amazon's e-book offerings makes it hard to argue that the rate of creation has vastly outpaced the quality of creation. I daresay the same has happened with regard to music. The great unsolved problem of the new era is criticism. Critics (who may have simply been record company flacs) acted as gatekeepers who allowed only material of a certain quality through. It may not have been the "best" by some standards, but it usually met some basic threshold of technical quality, which is more than can be said for the current era.

digi_owl 12y ago
There is an odd duality there. I recall reading a claim that during the early rock era, labels where run by old guys that would basically do short runs of singles and see if they sold. If they did they would get hold of the band or solo artist that pitched the demo and make some more. But then came a generational change, where new execs were hired that believed they knew what good music was. And so there was much more of a filter between hopeful bands and the masses. Now the filer seems to have gone away, in a massive sense. Now anyone with a computer have theoretically global reach.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Same observation by Frank Zappa: One thing that did happen during the Sixties was some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded or did get released. Now look at who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is. Record it. Stick it out. If it sells, alright.’ We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives who are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace. The young guys are more conservative and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. [...] http://boingboing.net/2012/02/19/frank-zappa-explains-the-decli.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/19/frank-zappa-explains-the-de...
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Could well be my source. Was reading boingboing for a couple of years, until i got tired of having my feed reader throwing horrors at me at odd hours of the day...

digi_owl 12y ago

There is an odd duality there. I recall reading a claim that during the early rock era, labels where run by old guys that would basically do short runs of singles and see if they sold. If they did they would get hold of the band or solo artist that pitched the demo and make some more. But then came a generational change, where new execs were hired that believed they knew what good music was. And so there was much more of a filter between hopeful bands and the masses. Now the filer seems to have gone away, in a massive sense. Now anyone with a computer have theoretically global reach.

danieldk 12y ago
Same observation by Frank Zappa: One thing that did happen during the Sixties was some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded or did get released. Now look at who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is. Record it. Stick it out. If it sells, alright.’ We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives who are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace. The young guys are more conservative and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. [...] http://boingboing.net/2012/02/19/frank-zappa-explains-the-decli.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/19/frank-zappa-explains-the-de...
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Could well be my source. Was reading boingboing for a couple of years, until i got tired of having my feed reader throwing horrors at me at odd hours of the day...