Here is the fourth and final part of a transcripted lecture Bill Drummond gave on the state of music to BBC Radio 3. You can find parts 1, 2 and 3 here.
The relationship that a listener might have with any piece of recorded music was always the same, be it a middle aged connoisseur listening to Herbert Von Carugen’s recording of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Or a 13 year old girl in 1996 listening to the first Spice Girls album. We built and bought shelves to keep our collections of vinyl and CDs on. We took pride on what these growing collections that we had, invested our money in what it said about us, in the same way that the content of bookshelves did. There was no reason that this should ever stop. By the time the new century was dawning the iPod was being launched along with iTunes and numerous file sharing sites. This changed everything. This was the biggest development in the history of music in the past 100 years. We could now download from the internet with a few clicks from the mouse any piece of music from the entire history of recorded music we thought we might want and plenty more we didn’t want. All of this could be stored on the iPod in our pocket to be listened to whenever, wherever while doing almost whatever. The album as a format was now meaningless.
A graphical representation of a bit-torrent swarm
This thing that we had used to measure and judge the music makers of the last five decades no longer had any real purpose, other than historical. The music that we owned no long said anything about us as we could now own everything without investment from ourselves. The groaning shelves of vinyl and CDs were redundant. Music was just something that made the bus ride to work or the jog round the park more bearable. Something used to fill in the uncomfortable silences or block out the racket of real life. The breadth and depth of meanings that music once contained was fast draining from it. Art, like religion exists to give life meaning. When any art form loses its meaning it no long has any real worth. No long has a function other than something to gather dust in the museum. There are those that have thought of the iPod as little more than the modern equivalent to the wireless set. They are wrong. The wireless unwittingly promoted the sales of records. The iPod does away with ever having to buy music again.
A museum piece
The flip side of all I have just gone on about in the last few minutes means music is now in the process of being liberated from the shackles of the recorded music genre. These forward thinking music makers will not want to make music that can be downloaded off the internet or listened to at any time, any place, while doing almost any thing on a future version of the iPod. They will want to make music that is about time, place and occasion. They will want their music to reach parts of the soul that words and images have always failed to do. Nothing can commune the unknowable like music. But most importantly they will want their music to have meaning beyond sometime to fill in the background while people get on with the drudgery of life.
