Category: Thinking

  • Music’s Mystique Mistake

    One of the things I’ve been see­ing recent­ly are peo­ple say­ing that music has lost its mys­tique. I could­n’t agree more. There’s a great line in Guy Debor­d’s Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle that applies here I think; to para­phrase, the things that sep­a­rate celebri­ties from the rest of us are pow­er and vaca­tions. That was…

  • Music’s Demand Problem

    I start­ed read­ing Michae­lan­ge­lo Matos’s Slow Lis­ten­ing Move­ment blog. I’ve seen vari­a­tions of the argu­ment for slow­ing down, like the slow food move­ment, as a means of chang­ing con­sump­tion habits, which in turn con­tribute to a dif­fer­ent way of liv­ing one’s life. It’s an inter­est­ing idea, but I think the notion of “slow lis­ten­ing” should…

  • Why We Are Debating Free

    The answer’s easy: it does­n’t work for music. Unless you were liv­ing under a rock on Fri­day, you prob­a­bly read Techcrunch’s post, “The Sor­ry State of Music Star­tups.” With­out going into great detail, Arring­ton’s com­plete­ly right, and for once, he does­n’t resort to the whole “music just wants to be free” argu­ment so com­mon among…

  • Music 2.0’s Blue Sky Mines Collapsing

    Blender’s print edi­tion is fin­ished. You prob­a­bly already know this if you spent any time on the Inter­net yes­ter­day, but it’s just anoth­er instance where a music mag com­plete­ly changes its appear­ance to remain “rel­e­vant” (what­ev­er that means now) and ends up clos­ing shop any­way. As Matos wrote on his blog, “It’s hot, it’s sexy,…

  • Pandora’s Box

    Scott Ten­nent makes an emo­tion­al plea for music fans to ignore leaks over at  Pret­ty Goes with Pret­ty. We’ve all seen vari­a­tions of this argu­ment before. The MPAA even made spots that echoed this sen­ti­ment. It’s heart­felt, but hope­less. Count­less clich­es could be used to describe what’s hap­pened, but I’ll use this one: you can’t…