2007: The Year The Music Industry Broke?

It's been an interesting year for music biz: MTV just published the first installment of a  three-part series on the future of music, &  take a look back at 'what went wrong' and when in this article:  "Madonna Ditches Label, Radiohead Go Renegade: The Year The Music Industry Broke". MTV also posted this video & interviews with various industry notables:

The Future Of Music: What's Next? Experts weigh in on what the future holds, what makes a star and how the music industry changed this year. Are Things Really That Bad? Album sales might be down, but downloads, ringtones, ticket sales and other aspects of the industry are booming.

And WIRED magazine posted this  interview with Doug Morris, CEO of Universal: "Universal's CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He's Giving Songs Away" with another terrific article from David Byrne, Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars (highly recommended - after all, as he says, 'what is music, anyway?': 

• In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. 
  

Are we confusing 'recordings' with 'music'? Alternatively, what about the 'art' in 'virtual' record production themselves (eg, seminal works & 'paintings' like Sgt. Peppers,Dark Side of the Moon,etc). Jonathan Sterne's 'The Audible Past' (over at Sterneworks) is a great read - puts the very recent technological history of music into some perspective. 

Createworld 2007 keynote

This is an excerpt of the Music 2.0 keynote address on 26 November, to the Apple University Consortium (AUC) CreateWorld 2007 conference. The presentation features a recent case study in the Fullbright-supported iOrpheus: Art Among Us project (aka, the iPod Opera), held on the South Bank Parklands in August 2007. This involved the work of US Internet music pioneers William Duckworth and Nora Farrell, as well as students and staff from the Queensland Conservatorium and the Griffith Film School.  

A 10 minute documentary film made about the iOrpheus events was screened on state-of-the-art projection and 5.1 surround sound systems, followed by a live cross to New York to iChat with William and Nora. A transcript of the lecture and interviews is available at the Radio IMERSD site.

Reading Music in the Digital Realm

As an adjunct to the recent QCRC Twilight Lecture, I wrote a short piece called Reading Music in the Digital Realm for The Australian newspaper, published in the Higher Education feature on 28 November.

This also profiled the upcoming CreateWorld 2007 'Music 2.0' keynote as well as taking about the work we're doing at the Queensland Conseravtoirum in online publishing at Radio IMERSD. The full article can be read here on The Australian Higher Education website.

iOrpheus – The Movie

iOrpheus – the Movie was produced and directed by Masters (Honours) student Paul Davidson who led Griffith Film School student crews as part of a Community Engagement project. 5.1 sound production for DVD was completed in IMERSD by myself as part of a Music Technology (Honours) research training project. The film documents iOrpheus: Art Among Us (the iPod Opera), a concept developed by New York-based composer and internet music pioneer William Duckworth together with co-artistic director and technology developer Nora Farrell. Bill was a visiting scholar with Griffith University from June–August 2007 on a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant awarded for iOrpheus.

The project gratefully acknowledges the support of Griffith University’s DVC-Academic, Prof John Dewar, MacBook Pros from Apple Computer Australia, wearable sound systems from MusicLab, a state-of-the-art 5.1 surround sound PA system from Acoustic Technologies Electronics, and wireless network systems from Griffith Research Computing Services. Full production credits are listed over at the iOrpheus site.

The DVD can be ordered from the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre and also is part of the collection at the Australian Government's National Film & Sound Archive.