The State of The Art: Music, the Internet and You.

Music is a changing art.

Ask anyone with any iota of musical knowledge and they'll tell you that the art is in flux. It changes. Fast. What was big on the scene three, two even a year ago is not what's big now. Late eighties, early nineties? What we call old school rap. As that decade blossomed we beheld the rise and fall of the grunge movement. Then a fixation with R&B and hip-hop. Then came Rock-rap, followed by a surge of punk interest.

And now . . . what?

See, musical society isn't just changing it's top forty like years gone by. The face of music is changing it underlaying fundamentals. And the amazing thing is it has absolutely nothing, NOTHING to do with the artists or the actual recording industry.

Name some of the top acts today. Of course you'll get a generous helping of Beyonce's, Justin Timberlake's and Nickleback's. But the real interesting shift is the presence of more Indie and niche bands. Groups like Death Cab For Cutie, Guster (Who has recently earned the accolade of the current most popular internet album) to Wolfmother and Arctic Monkeys and host of others like them. This is something that would have been virtually unheard of five or ten years ago.

Time was, popular music was dictated largely by the recording industry's marketing arm. Radio and television stations supplied music to the listeners, who went out to purchase the albums. As album sales increased, so did alloted air-time to artists. As well, labels would push for more air-time for their artists as a method of hype. An example of this is Madonna's recent album, “Confessions on a Dance floor.” During the pre-release marketing blitz, local radio stations (at least those owned by Canada's Roger's media company) were suddenly playing a lot more of her older hits. This also explains my sudden ability to recite from memory the lyrics to 'Holiday' or 'Like a prayer'.

But now, things are changing. Artists and groups whose labels don't pump massive amounts of dollars into market strategy are filtering their way to the top. The Arctic Monkeys, for example have become a bit of an international sensation despite resisting a major label deal and staying rooted in their native UK.

So, what has changed? What's causing this shift away from the traditional top 40 which was nearly always solidly one genre at a time?

Is it political fallout from Britney's baby negligence and a slew of drug charges against other singers? Or are people finally just waking up to the fact that cookie-cutter bands and teenybopper bimbos are really quite terrible music? Maybe the big record labels suddenly find themselves thinking 'hey, let's forget our bottom line and branch out into the new and undiscovered?'

No, no, and excuse my cynical laughter here, absolutely not.

The answer here is simply, the Internet.

The web is finally seeing the emergence of what early surfers were calling a global village, a vast network of common users unified by a shared interest. Connections are quickly and easily being made between fans and followers of niche genres, subcultures and splinter-groups in staggering numbers. And those numbers continue to grow daily. Blogs, both syndicated and amateur, podcasts and sites like Myspace.com provide a forum for people to engage each others musical interests and seek out new content. Many of the new bands I've added to my playlist come as suggestions from people I've never seen in person from places as far away as Los Angeles and England.

Which leads into the next musical catharsis brought about by the web. You see, it's not enough that a user can discover a great new band to rock out to. A distribution method needs to be employed that can deliver the content to the consumer. The traditional CD store wasn't best equipped to deal with increasingly niche demand. Obscure CD's couldn't be brought in regularly, they represented a bad investment as something that stood of good chance of not selling. To keep in the black most larger chains had to effectively cater to the lowest common denominator, leading to box stores that were not nimble enough to keep up with consumers.

Enter Napster. This was merely the very beginning of it all, really. File sharing existed prior to this, but the legal issues plaguing the ill-fated service brought the concept of digitally distributed music to society's collective consciousness. But the pseudo-criminalities of downloading songs made the method less than appealing. California's Apple inc. stepped in with their immensely successful ipod and itunes music store. Suddenly there was an easy and importantly, fully legal, to use service that allowed listeners to efficiently seek out and purchase the music the interested them. Not only that, but individual songs were being sold, not just full albums. Gone were the days of crude quality mix-tapes, here were readily available, good quality tracks from all over the globe. True supply and demand could now be charted, not just the demand of the supply status quo.

Music lovers now have access to nearly the full spectrum of music being produced on a planetary scale. Competition among legal download sites, through in it's infancy, is beginning to warrant the creation of better or supplementary content, better offers, better speeds. In the coming years the digital marketplace, already surging, is going to explode as the availability of not just retail products (a'la eBay) but entertainment content. iTunes is already selling videos for its video capable iPods, ABC and Warner are experimenting with new internet distribution systems for its most popular programs the popularity of amateur to amateur sites like Youtube.com are solidifying the internet as the greatest market potential of the future.

Despite the current legal troubles surrounding the recording industry and internet users, the sonic landscape is poised to evolve into a spectacularly accessible front both on the side of the consumer and the creator. And that, my friends, is the state of the art.