Sound is for Sale: Entrepreneurial Opportunity for the 21st Century Musician Charles Kim Teachers College, Columbia University cck2135@tc.columbia.edu
We live, we play, we record, we share, and then we feel together. Such is the general order of music production, and hence the very logic upon which the music industry is built - here “music industry” as “…detaching the process of making and selling music from such activities as, for example, concert promotion or music publishing.”1 Yet such simplicity is frustratingly difficult to navigate, especially for an artist seeking to build a career. The music industry and its sale of recorded products, at least from a historical perspective, is fairly nascent when compared to the broad timeline of music as social experience. We are barely past the centennial of sound chiseling onto mechanical plates, while facing the exciting-yet-daunting task of transitioning our analog past into the digital ether - not simply as the products of expression, but also our very mindsets that structure such processes. To understand the digital present, and thus its entrepreneurial opportunities, it can be helpful to examine the revolution that is information technology. Analog-to-digital conversion is the shift from sound as physical (namely, the movement of compressed air into material archival) to sound as I/O (the inputs and outputs that enable travel and communication between computers). This seemingly subtle shift has effectively turned music into information, enabling radically efficient sharing, technological mobility, and instantaneous connectivity. For the 21st century musician, this means that every part of a song is for sale. For the purposes of this article, I am limiting its scope to the entrepreneurial opportunities for the 21st century popular musician - here, read as one who combines the rich history of musical convention with the possibilities of contemporary music technologies, ultimately serving rapidly growing niche consumer communities. What is fascinatingly unique about the modern musical predicament is its access to a vast repository of recorded music. Such pre-recorded and readily available music, today in the information age, exists as media in a social space. Thus what was popularized as “sampling” by Hip-Hop, where media is selected and remixed to create new music, has now extended to any sound that populates the information network of our social connections. From another perspective, recorded music has offered us a new form of listening, one that invites an active reframing of sound as creative utility. In the words of the pioneering composer/ theorist Pierre Schaeffer, whose tape recording/looping techniques paved the way for the Beatles’ iconic use of tape-looping in the 1960s, “It is also, first and foremost (for research purposes), a machine for observing sounds, for ‘decontextualizing’ them, for rediscovering tradiTEMPO
tional objects, listening again to traditional music with a different ear, an ear that, if not new, is at least as deconditioned as possible.”2 Sixty years later, this deconditioning has generated a global marketplace for sounds, loops, and what Schaeffer would call “concrete musical ideas” - samples, in other words. There are varying components to what a sound or sample can be. It can be as simple as an acoustic kick drum, processed with subharmonic frequencies to sway dance floor subwoofers, or it can be as complex as a pastiche of symphonic chords and orchestral melodies, designed to inspire compositions and lyrics that communicate towards an intended audience. Mastery, aside from the economics of demand, is the musician’s ability to serve the composition of songs in multiple genres, localities, and aesthetic tastes. It is algorithmic, namely in its unique goal of achieving scale. As we have already witnessed with Tupac Shakur’s “California Love” use of Roger Troutman’s music, a singular sound can be heard on multiple records, but today bypassing licensing via royalty-free business models. The creative reframing of pre-recorded media, however, has been wrought with frustration: licensing denials, legal battles, and perhaps even accusations of creative theft. But there is a silver lining. These chasms, having grown through the 90s and early 2000s, have created space for a new market made efficiently available via the internet. In other words, musicians can access new revenue streams via royalty-free sampling marketplaces that function on paid subscriptions. This peculiar type of market offers a valuable perspective on creativity - that the selection of and connection between sounds is a value-add to production as musical activity. A sound, a note, or even a single percussive strike, while with its own merits of intrigue, is generally uninteresting in isolation. When such sounds are juxtaposed/ combined/sequenced, the relational connections between sounds create harmony - a fascinating unveiling of creativity within the user. This is perhaps the deconditioning Schaeffer speaks of, that a modern listening of “what-was” postures itself in a creative imagining of “what-could.” It also disrupts the proximal and temporal nature of audio recording: a sound can be created anywhere, at anytime, and synthesized to generate any style. The user, or the musician/producer, is able to take such media and recondition it into a genuinely new idea. Given the mobility of recording and production technologies decentralizing the commercial music studio, musicians can simply create their own sounds, loops, and even fully-composed songs to sell at scale. In bypassing the royalty-based licensing industry altogether, a 40
MAY 2022
