THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

the digital revolution by ISABEL DUKE WHY KEEPING TECH-SAAVY MAKES US BETTER LISTENERS MELISMAopinions

There are a million ways in which the Internet has affected contemporary music listening. An individual could only purchase so many records, tapes or CDs in a span of time to create a music library, leaving the average American with a modest one at best. The Internet rolls around and BOOM! Peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as Napster and Kazaa allow people to download quickly and cheaply whatever music they want. This, coupled with a growing expansion of storage space on the average computer, facilitated personal music libraries to expand exponentially, unaffected by financial constraint or availability of music. If one person in the world has a song on the Internet, it is accessible to the rest of us regardless of distance, culture or marketing. Now, music libraries have the potential to make any person on the Internet unique. We can create libraries with as much and of whatever type of music we want. Music collections can be an expression of personal identity with little constraint in letting our distinct tastes shine through. I’ve heard many argue that the music they listen to is a part of who they are, if not a reflection of all that they are.

Although stricter copyright laws have been enacted since this initial boom, making music more difficult to access cheaply, listening has been changed forever by this phenomenon – namely due to new accessibility to the diverse forms of music in existence today. New music itself is a growing area as more and more people (with the help of computers!) are writing and creating their own music without any professional help, and self-marketing their sound via the internet. With all the music out there in cyberspace and accessibility from Bangladesh to Boston, the Internet gives listeners an infinite variety of music to choose from and creates the ultimate forum for new music to be shared and exposed, all at the click of a button.

A variety of revolutionary websites have been created to further push along and facilitate this growing phenomenon. Think Amazon or the iTunes store. When using these to browse music, a person is inevitably hit with automatic recommendations based on browsing and purchase history. While this feature is not necessarily intended as benevolence towards the consumer, but rather to maximize the profits of the companies, it nonetheless exposes people with similar taste to new music. As a pioneering force in the digital music biz, iTunes constantly works to improve upon this idea with service additions such as the new iTunes Mini-Store, which automatically lists on a toolbar similar artists to those being heard at any given time by a listener via his or her own existing private collection. Then, all you have to do is click and listen to a sample of an artist to which you otherwise may never have been exposed.

I could go on forever about the wonders that MySpace has done for the exposure of new music, but I think that’s pretty clear to all of us. Anyone anywhere can post their personal music, including and especially the music that he has written and created on his own, on a MySpace page for the world to see. Similar, but lesser known websites such as PureVolume.com have appeared which specialize in music sharing specifically. PureVolume is essentially a “MySpace,” but without all the other information on people’s profiles. Its point is purely and eloquently to share new sounds.

The “create-your-own” radio wave is likely the most exciting and promising new form of music sharing on the net. As it exposes people at no cost to tons of new music, it is quickly and massively growing in popularity. A group of music majors at Harvard University created Pandora. com, a leading site in this trend, where one can type in any song or artist of his or her liking and the musical “genes” of that music will be analyzed and deciphered, so that Pandora can spit out a “radio station” which only plays music with similar music “genes.” The “Music Genome Project,” as it is referred to, finds patterns in musical form – basic codes (like human genes) common to all music that assign attributes to certain songs. Once these attributes have been analyzed and recognized, Pandora conducts its search through its enormous music database for music with similar attributes and creates a custom radio station, potentially filled with music its listeners have never heard of, but are likely to enjoy. A similar website, Last.fm, creates similarly personalized radio stations, while letting listeners hear the song that was searched for initially. There are a million features on both of these websites, however, that are constantly being tweaked and expanded to tighten the customization abilities of these “radio stations.” For example, if a personal station plays a song that a listener doesn’t like, that person can tell the site not to play that song anymore. In addition to not doing so, the site will furthermore take into consideration the listener’s distaste for that particular song (and perhaps its specific “genes”) in order to adjust and improve the station so that it is more likely to play music that that specific individual will love. Additionally, a person can have multiple different “stations” saved in existence at a time. Maybe someone has a station that plays music for when they want to be woken up and another that puts them to sleep, all the while continually playing new, foreign music that the person may never have been exposed to were it not for these new sites.

The internet-radio boom may well be the next big revolutionary tool in music listening. It goes so far as to remove some of those pesky copyright restrictions being put on music today, which, of course, put a damper on what the public can listen to by virtue of making music expensive again. Because radio stations (not the listeners themselves) buy the rights to play music on a song by song basis, people can listen to whatever they want for free using these personalized station websites. Furthermore, we don’t necessarily need to rely on the music geeks at Harvard to tell us what we might like. Websites like radioblogclub.com, for instance, have arrived where people can post and share their own personal playlists, which radio station websites, in turn, have license to play songs from at the click of the listener. Unlike iTunes, which also displays “iMixes” you might enjoy but would have to purchase in order to listen to in full, a private communications company pays for the radio listening music experience instead. Essentially this means that the general public can now listen to the recommended music of anyone in the world legally and for free. This is the next step in the future of music. One can only imagine the repercussions this growing trend will have on the future daily lives of the world’s music listeners.