It's Still Rock and Roll to Me: A Look at the Online Music Zeitgeist

This week I tackled the daunting task of evaluating the web's expansive body of sites and resources pertaining to the critical role of popular music within American culture. Using the criteria established by the Webby Awards and ISMA, I have produced a linkroll of twenty sites (see below right) that display superior functionality and content within an immersive online environment. My goal was to provide a list of links highlighting the best the web has to offer in analyzing the constantly-evolving zeitgeist of popular music and reflect some of the current cultural tensions evoked by each these sites. To aid in my explanation, I group each site within one of four categories as I evaluate their significance to my blog and the web at large.

The first cluster of links concerns a topic that has consumed much of my blogging energies to date: intellectual property, as the protection of copyrights and the notion of fair compensation are firestorms of fact and opinion. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a logical starting point, a professional, elegant site that promotes legal music downloading practices and parental resources. However, the RIAA's site has the feel of a publicity front, whereas the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) provides a real environment of consumer empowerment in the "Intellectual Property" section of its website. The EFF's somewhat vague but well-meaning mission manifests itself nicely with links to ongoing legal battles over digital rights. Less pedantic is the blog "Recording Industry vs. the People" which despite its populist biases and distracting advertising layout, is packed with superb content written by a New York-based lawyer specializing in infringement cases. On the other hand, the site of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is dry but easy to navigate and approaches intellectual property rights as a multifaceted issue, counter to the "us vs. them" spirit of the RIAA and the EFF. Finally, FreeCulture.org suggests an interesting alternative to legal wrangling: a community of artists and consumers avoiding a financially-driven model for all types of culture, including music. The site is somewhat sparse in design and content but provides dozens of links to grassroots projects and organizational chapters.

It is important to note that the copyright debate was sparked in part by a revolution in the distribution of music, which includes the resurgence of radio and the development of many non-traditional avenues for broadcasting. The Media Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an excellent place to keep abreast of seismic shifts in the laws governing broadcasting, but it might be difficult for the average citizen to find useful information buried under a digital deluge of red tape. The online home of Friday Morning Quarterback, or FMQB (see image below left), is a better place for a casual web surfer to find music industry news paired with intriguing information about radio technology. However, FMQB appears to rely heavily on corporate press releases to keep a steady flow of updates. More industry-oriented is Radio 411, which addresses the entire broadcast spectrum (news, music, sports, etc.) with an impressive diversity in content--sometimes too diverse, in fact, as the site attempts to mix useful applications like career-building resources with random news headlines from wire services. The creation of actual listening communities fares better at Live365 Internet Radio, where users can browse a wide variety of radio stations that stream audio over the web and become Internet broadcasters themselves, though the site's interface makes wading through the many amateurish broadcasts more difficult than it needs to be. Conversely, CMJ.com--the website of the College Music Journal--is an appealing site providing chart information and other resources for college radio stations, despite the presence of irritating animated advertisements.

Print publications like CMJ are increasingly building an online presence to tap into the desires of a new generation of consumers that demand more diverse and immediate information. Rolling Stone's "Rock and Roll Daily" blog is a great example of one of the "old guard" putting together a very slick site that tends to address the past rather than the present vanguard of popular music. There is nothing inherently wrong about this type of nostalgia, but Spin Magazine's "Daily Noise" is a better sample of a "corporate" blog that at least brings the discussion on popular music into the current decade. Nevertheless, both blogs have a specific audience in mind and serve them well, if in a sanitized fashion. The highly commercial but quite useful Billboard Music News and Reviews site is perhaps the most up-to-date example of mainstream music journalism; its design is pleasant and accessible even for non-industry types. MTV's Buzzworthy is a little too synergistic for my liking, mostly focusing its coverage on artists most likely to appear on the parent network, but has a unique energy and a generous amount of multimedia that keeps visitors anchored to the site. Conversely, the refreshing NPR Music blissfully exists outside of the mainstream and covers oft-neglected genres, even if the site lacks adequate contextualization for non-aficionados.

Spearheading a new trend of influential music publications that never actually appear in print, Pitchfork Media has the gloss and the clout of a mainstream music news site with the esoterica and elitism of an alternative periodical. Though the site's layout is a little hard to follow, Pitchfork is nonetheless an essential trendsetting site. The "Andy Whitman on Music" blog, written by the Paste magazine journalist, is a more irreverent destination with main page "jump" links that occur too frequently but are worth following. And for people who find Whitman too boring, there is My Old Kentucky Blog, which pushes the concept of the sarcastic-yet-incisive blogger to its farthest limits; however, its coarse brand of "infotainment" is motivated by a clear love for the music it covers. Coolfer, a level-headed music business blog, looks staid in comparison but supplies a rare commodity--staunchly independent commentary on the music industry. Last but not least is Stereogum (see image above right), a hybrid blog/cultural salon that, despite engaging in some triviality, combines unobtrusive and largely ad-free design with crowd-pleasing features like a built-in media player. Features like this elevate the site's status from simple time-waster to unique online destination--a commonality among the sites and blogs of "new" paperless music journalism that has the old periodicals and institutions scrambling to stay relevant.

The Pretenders: Pop Music and Political Pandering

American popular music, from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Public Enemy, has a long history of communicating political messages and shaping public opinion. Though a long way from its chart-topping zenith in the 1960s, politically-oriented music survives throughout the United States in hues of both red and blue. However, the greying of the rock 'n roll vanguard--the American youths of the 1950s and 60s--and strength of popular culture as a national vernacular has complicated the artistic landscape by making every chord and every lyric subject to both political and commercial re-interpretation. Ever since Bill Clinton adopted Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" as his campaign anthem in 1992, encounters between politicians and pop music have inspired a great deal of cultural commentary. This week, I chose to respond to commentary in the blogosphere about the campaigns of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain continuing a trend of capitalizing on the emotional nostalgia and raw immediacy of popular music to make their candidacies seem simultaneously familiar and relevant. The first case study, "Jackson Browne and Copyright" comes from John Carroll of the ZDNet technology blog, who writes about the hazards of Republicans utilizing the music of liberally-inclined musicians. Carroll frames Browne's recent lawsuit against McCain as a display of petty political gamesmanship rather than a legitimate copyright complaint and captures my attention by tangentially raising the issue of artistic intention. I also consider a Paste magazine blog post from Loren Lankford entitled "Obama to Release 'Yes We Can' Campaign Soundtrack" and the limitations of music-as-art when bounded by the demands of a specific public image. Lankford's playful writing style underscores the frivolity of celebrity campaign endorsements but, in her ironic wittiness, inspires further consideration of the album's cultural agenda. My comments addressed the authors of each post can be found at their respective blogs and are reproduced below.

"Jackson Browne and Copyright"
Comment (Permalink)
Kudos on bringing attention to this intriguing situation and providing plenty of robust contextualization to boot. In the case of Jackson Browne, I agree with your sentiment that opportunistic political agendas, rather than copyright issues, are at the heart of this dispute. There is no fundamental wrongdoing associated with Browne's protection of his intellectual property if allowed by current federal law, but again I find logic in your excoriation of the "double standard that separates printed media from audiovisual media" and the long, long highway that awaits art on its journey to the public domain (a concept that unfortunately seems on the verge of obsolescence). However, I would be curious to know where you stand regarding an artist's prerogative to protect the original intention of his or her work. As you mention, "intentions don't matter" whether you agree or disagree with the messages embedded in forms of popular culture and media. But in mediating how the work of musicians like Browne is absorbed and appropriated, do you mean to paint both spectator and artist with the same brush? Should the original thematic context of "Running On Empty," a song about 1970s Me Decade alienation, be at least noted if it is to be transformed into another type of propaganda? This imbroglio reminds me of the Reagan campaign's attempt to spin Bruce Springsteen's cynical "Born In the USA" into a sunny patriotic anthem in the 1984 presidential race until Springsteen spoke out against such a blatant misrepresentation of his artistic intentions. The gulf between Browne and McCain might not be as vast with regard to the campaign ad in question, but in many instances the exploitation of popular music by politicians is just as opportunistic and unseemly as Browne's grandstanding lawsuit. Nonetheless, I found your post a highly thought-provoking and well-researched object lesson about the continued limitations on the mutability of media in an ostensible age of access and choice.

"Obama to Release 'Yes We Can' Campaign Soundtrack"
Comment
Thank you for a brief but informative post saturated with information on the relationship of the current musical zeitgeist to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Having read recently about John McCain's difficulties in getting approval from Jackson Browne and Heart to use their songs in campaign materials, your post displays a fascinating polarity between the two candidates and the formation of their respective cultural images. Also, the brief concession to the Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement "soundtrack" as perhaps another example of the media's fixation on Obama's "celebrity" is a rare combination of respect and lightheartedness. Your comment that the album "will be sold right up until Nov. 4 as a campaign fundraiser (and afterwords as a 'fundraiser' for record company Hidden Beach Recordings)" is a great reminder of the commercial and political agendas driving the appropriation of the music.

What intrigues me the most in this post, however, is the issue of semantics. Firstly, do you find any irony in the album's subtitle ("Voices of a Grassroots Movement")? The term "grassroots" gets thrown about by many politicians but often sounds like faux-populist pandering, though the publisher of the record could be more to blame in this case. However, with the album gaining the full endorsement of the Obama to the point where it can be found for sale on his campaign website, it behooves us to examine just who the "voices" of this movement are: highly successful and affluent musicians, such as John Mayer, Stevie Wonder, and Sheryl Crow. Additionally, I am curious to know what you make of the rather middle-of-the-road composition of the tracklist. Though the inclusion of Kanye West may help the endeavor strike a somewhat edgy posture, your allusions to independent musical endorsements from the likes of bawdy rapper Ludacris are likely to pique more attention from those outside the Starbucks-music demographic. At any rate, this is indeed "a new twist on raising money for a presidential campaign," vastly different from the now-obligatory classic rock campaign anthems and even 2004's Vote for Change tour that was more about arraying support against a candidate than for one; however, I personally doubt that Obama supporters are willing to pay a premium for an album that--at least after Election Day--literally undermines the familiar campaign lament of the rich getting richer.

Armchair DJs: Napster, Muxtape, and the Dilemmas of Democratization

The online distribution of music has fostered the growth of new commercial and artistic opportunities for both musicians and record companies. However, this has also created a conflict between the traditional arbiters of taste in the music business--major label executives and radio station programmers--and the individual record-buyer, who has wrested a great deal of control and influence away from the industry elite. So while record companies and large broadcasters relish the immediacy and immensity of the Internet as a marketing tool, the democratizing potential of new online tools for the average armchair DJ have threatened to tip the scales in an ongoing music culture war from the corporation to the consumer. The recent sale of Napster, the former illegal fire-sharing network and current online music store and streaming service, to big-box conglomerate Best Buy for $121 million epitomizes the scramble to climb higher in the pecking order amongst online commercial music ventures (the highly successful Apple iTunes service being the alpha dog of the digital music world). But what of the ventures that consider the establishment of self-sustained, eclectic cultural communities as high of a priority as making money? The disappearance of Muxtape, an online playlist-sharing forum, at the end of August due to continuing legal issues with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) (see image below left) illustrates a latent tension in the struggle to adapt old business models to the potential of new media. While corporate attempts to mediate this transition are legally justified and morally sensible, they harm the framework of a great democratization in popular music that is crucial to the continued financial and cultural success of the industry.

Most music lovers have experience in the pleasurable art of the mixtape: a craft of equal parts technique and taste, culling tracks from radio airplay and personal collections to create a sequence of songs with a brand new emotional resonance. Muxtape, founded by entrepreneur Justin Oullette, essentially provided a way for users to replicate this process with their MP3 libraries and disseminate their mixes not only to personal acquaintances but also far-flung strangers. From a commercial standpoint, this type of purely sociological mission enthusiastically invites criticism. Dan Frommer, a technology critic at the Silicon Valley Insider blog, notes that "Muxtape hasn't sold itself -- either to a bigger media company that can shoulder its costs or a record label looking for a hot brand." His broader point about the sustainability of a community like Muxtape is valid enough--the server space to host all those playlists is not cheap--but his solutions are too utilitarian for the online music zeitgeist. Turning a completely independent, democratized environment like Muxtape into a record company sandbox would suffocate the hypertextual, cross-pollinating forces unique to online music ventures. Furthermore, a deal with a larger media conglomerate also complicates and restricts the potential for musical discovery and evolution with issues of exclusivity.

Yet it is also important to consider the issue of legality in the case of Muxtape, a problem that Oullette does not seem close to solving despite vague ideas for monetizing the site and some requisite anti-RIAA fist-shaking. The Best Buy/Napster alliance provides an expedient example of a harmonious democratic promise fulfilled, though this outcome is not without its own contradictions. Napster (see image below right) has remained a player in digital music by adopting a subscription-based business model after its infamous origins as the lawsuit-baiting Wild West of tune-swapping. The concurrent rise of iTunes alongside a tamed Napster points to a winnowing of a generation's rebellious impulse towards the rank injustices of actually paying for music. However, the recent sale has commentators in a rush to display their ambivalence for what is largely analyzed as a mutually desparate business transaction. To Bruce Houghton of WebProNews, the $121 million purchase confirms that "Napster was worth even less than I thought" and a Product Placement News article reports the story as if Napster had not been operating as a legitimate online music store for the past five years. After Napster's own RIAA imbroglio, the perception of the site and the brand has changed, perhaps irrevocably. To the many (including myself) who remember Napster's outlaw salad days, the Best Buy sale inspires nostalgia and, intriguingly, stories of much-appreciated cultural access and eclecticism. Though initially attracted by the smash-and-grab approach to music shopping, the comments at the Geeksugar blog reveal that the new philosophy behind the perpetual motion of the music industry--including leaks, giveaways, and other forms of fan diplomacy--is the power of exposure and appeals to new consumer sophistication.

The goals of free culture and free capitalism, arguably impossible to reconcile, at least now share a commitment to combating homogenization in the online realm. Whereas traditional over-the-air radio gradually becomes saturated by programming "systems" with absolute sets of standards (such as the DJ-free Jack FM), the world of digital music offers a hopeful alternative. Limited-access audio streamers like LastFM and 8tracks (potential heir to Muxtape's recently vacated throne) exemplify the accordion affect of vast online music exposure. The local armchair DJ posits a cultural identity to a global audience, which is then consumed, processed, and shared amongst similar cultural niches. The democratization of online music, the very peer-to-peer immediacy of the act, demonstrates that in our time the local is the global: all that great ideas--and great songs--need is a bandwidth wide enough to transmit them.