The Residents launch a cd filled with nothing
The first time i read that new I though it was amazing and everytime I think about it I like it even more!
let me explain, the discs aren´t filled with nothing and they're not empty too: they contain a key-code giving access to their buyers to download the music and extra artworks from the internet. This way, are the users also the builders of this product?!
The first time i read that new I though it was amazing and everytime I think about it I like it even more!
let me explain, the discs aren´t filled with nothing and they're not empty too: they contain a key-code giving access to their buyers to download the music and extra artworks from the internet. This way, are the users also the builders of this product?! You may say yes!
The artists give freedom to their listeners to choose all or some of their sequentially released creations and burn them into the physicall side of their piece. The user has the final choice power and more than that has the power to create something (even if not totally) unique and to get their "hands dirty" assembling "their own" The Residents album!
Does it seem senseless?!
Throughtout the history of the world wide web and its relations with the music creation and industry music has never been the same. Lets take a peek in (not so far way) history:
Precious user-friendly and colaborative ideas have been used by David Bowie (1999) in the creation of "his" songs allowing his fans to participate and collaborate in the ceation of lyrics, rehearsals, studio recordings and mixing, "premiéring" 360º camera webcast technologies to share these proccesses with the mundane web user.
Metallica were never the same after violently sueing Napster (2000) for allowing users to download illegally their musics and instead of selling more and wining a battle against "evil pirates" they sold less and lost a lot of their fans and listeners (lots of them "voluntarily" banned by Napter).
Communities have been created using the web as basis for their interaction and distribution of their contents, many of them (if not the most) for free; taking an action against the music industry monopoly of taste and choice and distribution (e.g. www.micromusic.net).
By the year 2000 the creation of CreativeCommons platform gave (and still gives) authors the legal power to share for free or not their creations and to be respected for that, allowing artists collaborations and interchange of samples and ideas.
Most of the sells of music are now done by the online music stores: on its first day Apple's itunes music store sold the equivalent of 6 months of all sellings from online music stores, by 2005 it surpassed the sellings of traditional music shops.
In a world where the information has become the power and digital media has become omnipresent, to buy a physicall format of your favourite media just to have it on your shelves is making less sense each day, and even if it is not, it is happennig as everyone can see from the sales reports of online music stores and ubiquous mp3players.
Neverthelless, this digital media formats are also keeping us far from the cult of having the representative physicall object and :
as Paul Levinson said "The more information we get, the more we need of physicall reality".