Left Center Left

I’d written before that an “iPodization” of music culture is chipping away at album integrity as a mode of music production and reception. Now that Apple is marketing its new iPod Shuffle by foregrounding the destruction of old ways of listening to music, the issue might be worth revisiting.

Anne Galloway does just that, considers the paradox of “gaining control by losing it”. Taking issue with the Pangloss voices seeing only triumph in the iPod’s breakdown of traditional music formats, she argues that technologies - as social institutions like any other - impose control on its users.

I don’t think that simple technologies are “doing just fine” and can be left well enough alone while we sort the “other stuff”. I am wary of the tensions between agency and control that get ignored when we focus on layering control systems of a policy kind on top of control systems of a technological kind

My reply is “Yes, but…” Readers will know that I’m too nostalgic for latter-(20th)-century music culture to embrace the dawning age of the Mix, much less celebrate it. But the analogy with 20th century music commodity forms is instructive. What’s valuable about popular music came not because there was no control, no technological restriction, or no commodity form. Just a look at the strictures of radio formatting in the mid-1950s is enough to make one amazed anything vital came through. But it did. And it did because the commodity forms of mass reproducibility brought about things - celebrity, national markets, amplification, advances in music production - that transformed popular music and gave it subcultural voice. Similarly, music consumers will bring their own meaning to digitally-consumed music, and will do so regardless of whether Apple makes marketing claims of liberation.

Rather than talk in metaphyical terms about “technology” and “control”, then, I’d suggest the concept of medium specificity. Is there something about the digital format and the iPods which are fundamentally changing the meaning of the music itself? It’s not a question of better than/worse than, but different.