An 18th century daughter of a bourgeois family whose entire musical life was playing harpsichord at family gatherings? She'd feel pressured to produce whether anyone could even hear it or not if you gave her the tools. Arturia analog lab 4 review pro#If you gave a 14th century streetcorner lutenist a copy of Pro Tools and a Soundcloud account, I bet you dollars to donuts he'd feel "pressured" to produce work, whether or not he thought he could use it to feed himself. If we were to interrupt history and provide these tools to the musicians of antiquity, I think they would act just as we do. These might even be more democratized yet within a more equitable economic system. Long story short, I think the apparent increased pressure for hobbyist musicians (pardon the term) to produce completed recorded works is a consequence of the democratization of the toolboxes of recording and distribution. Even leaving out Napster, you can't wear out an mp3-a digital recording is practically permanent. At least as the RIAA of the '00s would put it, music is increasingly *difficult* to capitalize on in the age of infinite replication. To your point, capitalist economies and the corporate agents operating within them have historically provided bountiful impetus and resources for the advancement of reproductive processes, but the idea of replication, distribution, and musical object-permanence aren't inherently capitalist. What is the human history of recorded music? Maybe something like this?Ģ,800,000 BCE? - 1400 BCE: Oral traditionġ400 BCE - 1500 CE: Written tradition (for the literate, at least)ġ877 - 1940s: Single-pass recording of a complete audio performance directly to mediumġ940s - 1980s: Magnetic tape and the editing studioġ980s - 2010s: Physical digital audio (CD, HDD)Ģ010s - Present day: Cloud computing, streaming digital audioĪt each of these stages, each arriving more quickly than the last, the nature of musicianship changed: but rather than this being a consequence of the culture of capitalism (which arguably begins in the 16th century), I think the nature of "being a musician" has been changed by a culture of replication. For the vast majority of human history, being a musician was not measured by how much recorded output you've produced.
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