In case you have not yet heard, I have been working on an album with my old bandmates Mike and Jen, and we have 45 minutes of music out, available here.

In the past I think I would have been a lot more interested in going into very great detail about how the music came to be and what the recording process was like, but at the moment that seems to me not only a little self-indulgent but also no better than boring. We did all the composing and recording under some pretty novel circumstances, but I'd rather have the work just stand for itself.

I will say just this much: in the era of the Internet and cheap computers, it's very possible (and I'm not saying I've ever done it) to make music at a level that's indistinguishable from professional productions. People have been saying things like this for a while now, but I'm not sure if anyone really understands what this means in terms of the status of music as a creative act versus music as a vocation. If distribution and production are basically zero-cost, then the only thing that really justifies the existence of the music industry is its ability to convince many people to buy one particular recording instead of another. And the purpose of this, in turn, is primarily to make money for certain media interests, and then secondarily to support the lifestyles of people who want to live off of their creative work. The former is a truism; I don't point out in this instance as a kind of sophomoric, cynical statement, but merely so I don't ignore an obvious thing. The latter is what's more interesting, since I think the current trajectory of technology is making more and more clear how fundamentally untenable it is to sell things that you can digitize, i.e., intellectual property at large.

I guess, in a basic sense, I find it wrong to deny or allow access to the music you make on the basis of a person's ability to pay you. The ethics of it are complicated, and they depend on which point of view you adopt. It's easy to say that we can dispense with all of the excess and spectacle of stardom--which isn't to say that the music is bad, but to claim merely that the economics of it aren't necessary--but then there are lots of hard-working musicians who desire no more than a modest income to do what they love to do full-time. If musicians were able to support themselves only on the basis of selling their music, then I would say that nobody deserves to live off of their music, because it would necessitate all the retrograde contrivances that exist currently to treat music as property. Even if you aren't willing to discard the idea of intellectual property entirely, if e.g. you believe that it provides society with some sort of entrepreneurial incentive, I still think most of the counter-arguments are irrelevant in music, simply because creative work has absolutely no calculable contribution to society in any definition of "progress" you might prefer. In fact, I actually believe in something like the opposite of the incentives argument: commodification of music limits its creative potential, and it limits the scope of what we consider to be acceptable music, right down to the form (e.g. aren't albums and 3-5 minute songs kind of arbitrary?) in which we consume it.

And consider the technical reality I pointed out earlier: anyone can make music, and they can send it to anyone, and all of this occurs with very little investment beyond the time you decide to put into it. In this situation, there is no reason to feel that some musicians deserve to be paid for access to their work, while others don't. Really, I think it's kind of presumptuous to have that expectation in the first place. It's possible that you might resent such a view, because it seems to lead to the claim that we should not have professional artists at all. That's certainly one possible end to this logic, although I'd prefer to focus only on the music-as-commodity aspect. I don't know enough about the economics of it to really know for sure, but one can imagine alternatives: selling merchandise, selling artwork, selling music for advertisement purposes (although I'm not altogether convinced this is possible if what I said earlier about the viability of defending music as property applies in any context, to any extreme), and/or selling admission to live performance. Or if we felt, as a society, that there is a place for professional artists, we could just get together and establish a fund to support them. The point is that defending the professional artist by making creative work into a sellable thing is neither very ethical nor particularly sensible in light of technological advance.

There has been a lot of brouhaha over Radiohead allowing fans to pay whatever they want for their most recent album. I suspect they have no illusions that this kind of mass patronage is a sustainable business model for the long term, or for any band with less loyal a fanbase. About this I felt kind of the way I feel about philanthropy in general--of course we are all better off for it, but we have to see it as something less than true generosity. That Radiohead did it was on the one hand very cool, because nobody else at their level of commercial viability had done it, and on the other hand both very short of revolutionary, since it was kind of half-assed--they only released 128k MP3s, which I'll admit is "good enough", but their reluctance to release any higher-fidelity versions means even they themselves believe that those who pay full price should get something "better"--and still pretty defensive of the essentially conservative idea that people should pay for music in the first place.