Music 1.0: in memoriam

“Music 1.0 is dead.” (Cohen, in Anderson 2008)

Not surprised by this statement? You shouldn’t be – the past decade has seen almost every imaginable media transition from one- to two-point-zero. Even Vegemite.

But what does this strange numerical suffix actually mean? What was ‘Music 1.0’, and how did it ‘die’?

Harold Innis (1972, in Angus 1998) suggests that in any given society, the dominant forms of communication media establish the limits of what is ‘experienceable’, and the manner in which it is experienced.

“[C]ivilization has been dominated at different stages by various media of communication such as clay, papyrus, parchment, and paper produced first from rags and then from wood. Each medium has its significance for the type of monopoly of knowledge which will be built and which will destroy the conditions suited to creative thought and be displaced by a new medium with its peculiar type of monopoly of knowledge.” (Innis 2004, p74)

Developments in media technology reconfigure the social arrangements of power and control over ‘knowledge’, which in turn reconfigures the way we understand that knowledge. Internetisation is an obvious example of the way communication technology itself can cause a complete revision of social hierarchy and interaction. To understand the implications of this on the music industry, we must look at the development of music publishing technologies which have challenged and reconfigured the existing social order.

MUSIC PUBLISHING HOUSES: THE BEGINNINGS OF AN INDUSTRY

The music industry was born in the early 16^th century with Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.  The piano was the centrepiece of every middle-class European home, and sheet music was the primary vehicle for disseminating music (Garofalo 1999, p319). Control over publishing technology was suddenly freed from the exclusive hold of the church, and placed into the hands of the entrepreneur (Sanjek 1988, cited in Garofalo 1999, p320). Publishing houses formed the new power centre of the industry and publishers began to make substantial incomes, for which they sought legal protection. The first conception of ‘intellectual property’ was born in 1710 with the Statute of Anne. The Statute sought to protect consumers by giving copyright an expiration date and creating a ‘public domain’ or ‘commons’ which was exempt from privatisation. However, royal sanctions were given to stationers’ guilds, granting an effective monopoly on publishing to the wealthy elite who had access to printing technology (Garofalo 1999, p320).

European publishing houses maintained an elitist control over the type of music they printed, favouring classical ‘art’ music from well-respected composers. In the United States, however, a different kind of industry emerged. Publishers chose to print popular works that were considered the collective property of ‘the commons’ rather than individual artists. The industry became rapidly centralised, as publishers congregated in a small area in New York known as Tin Pan Alley. Popularity, rather than high taste, became the keystone to success. Aggressive marketing and a formulaic ‘pop’ mentality became the driving force behind Tin Pan Alley’s “song factories” – traits which would frame commercial music culture for centuries to come (Garofalo 1999, p322).