Category: commentary

When I started Fingertips in 2003, I had no game plan or road map. I had no idea whether I might be writing my idiosyncratic song reviews here for a few weeks, a few months, or a few years.

And here we are 10 years later.

I am surprised that both I and the MP3 have remained viable for quite so long—me with my idiosyncratic song selections and wordy paragraphs, the MP3 with its unideal sound and tendency to be decoupled from proper copyright considerations.

But things do seem to be shifting. I have noticed a decisive reduction in the number of free and legal MP3s that come along with music industry promotional emails over the last year or two; a clear and growing majority of them now traffic in streams and/or videos only. While I do not personally find any solace in the idea of a future in which access trumps ownership for music fans, I also can’t deny that streaming versus downloading looks now to be a major part of music’s future.

Note that this could yet change. No one knows anything, really. The best we can do is keep our eyes open, acknowledge change, and try not to be blinded by greed and ego.

In an effort to keep my eyes appropriately open, it feels to me that a recalibration of Fingertips is in order. This recalibration will be driven by two changes, which are really more like unshacklings, and which are effective immediately.

To begin with, I release myself from the idea that I am updating this site with three new free and legal MP3s every week. Maybe you’ll be relieved as well; maybe it’s become just as hard for you to keep up with the listening as it’s been for me to keep up with the presenting. Or maybe not. In any case, the weekly gig—which has gotten pretty shaky over the last six months or more in any case—is over. My reviews of free and legal downloads will happen when they happen. And if the industry moves entirely away from free and legal downloads at some point, whether sooner or later, that’s okay too. I’m prepared to move forward.

Next, I release myself from the obligation to read all the incoming email. (Gasp, yes, I know: why was I even reading it in the first place? Psychoanalyze away.) I’m not quite sure what took me so long but I realize now in a relative flash that opening and scanning so many emails, day after day, has been the definition of a Sisyphean task. The boulder can now roll down the hill and stay there.

I am by the way talking about the impersonal, boiler-plate, send-to-a-zillion-blogs-at-once emails that have always filled up at least 80 percent of my inbox. If it’s personal, if it’s email from a visitor or from a musician specifically addressed to me, I will still read it, and I will still listen to music contained in such submissions. So keep those cards and letters coming in.

Everything else, all the endless streams and videos and album releases and tour dates and “my gimmick is better than that other guy’s gimmick” and “they’re an internet sensation!” and (pet peeve!) “he’s 14 but he’s wise beyond his years”—all of it goes to the trash bin. I’ve been reading it all for 10 years. I’ve paid my dues.

I understand I may miss some good music this way. I know that honest, hard-working publicists and bands alike typically feel they have little choice but to send out impersonal, boiler-plate emails. But: what happens if the sum total of what all those honest, hard-working publicists and bands sends out is quite literally far more than one honest, hard-working blogger can possibly read and deal with? A first-world problem, yes. And: no longer my concern.

Unshackled (I feel lighter already), I can also begin to think about moving Fingertips into a new direction or two, based on the aforementioned recognition of the importance of streaming versus downloading to 21st-century music fans. While I’m still not quite sure what specific changes may be coming to the site, they will likely have something to do with musical integration, something to do with a lifelong interest in mixing a satisfying variety of music together. This interest of mine has never been fully engaged by a format presenting only new songs, and only in three-song packages.

To let go the unflinching need for three weekly MP3s while freeing up my time to explore music in a more natural and easy-going way: this is the recalibration. I am hopeful that it will open up some new vistas, bring me back to my roots as a free-form FM radio DJ, and still allow me to put my own small but particular stamp on the digital music scene.

Stay tuned, and thanks for all the fish.

Another essay I have written has found its way over to the Linn music blog, where they are admirably receptive to my way of thinking.

Linn is a high-end audio equipment company, based in the UK. The essay is entitled “The Power of Repeated Listening,” and that’s pretty much what it’s about—the general idea that sometimes you may need to listen to something a number of times before you can form an opinion about it. It’s both a humble and nearly revolutionary idea in this age of instant opinion dissemination.

Meanwhile, here, the hiatus is just getting underway. I’m not really going anywhere, but am just taking the opportunity to recharge without the weekly deadline. Regular updates will return at some point in early August.

The fine folks at the Linn music blog have published a new essay of mine. Linn is a high-end audio equipment company, based in the UK; as such, the title actually is “In Defence of Music.” I like British (i.e., original) spellings, so it’s nice to have a good excuse to use one every once in a while.

And so, here is “In Defence of Music,” via the Linn music blog.

Note that Fingertips is otherwise taking one more summer week off, while summer remains in effect. New free and legal MP3s will return early next week.

Facebook’s ballyhooed IPO and subsequent stumble has generated the expected amount of Monday morning quarterbacking, most if not all focused on the viability of the company’s economic model, or lack thereof.

But while many look at Facebook now and see a company that was overvalued financially, I am looking at a company that has been overvalued morally.

Much the way that it has become clear over a long period of time that corporate values and human values are not in fact aligned, so has it become clear, in a much shorter period of time, that social media values and human values are likewise not aligned.

In our collective love affair with Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and the rest, we have maybe failed to see this clearly.

Social media offer us cool tools and unprecedented connectivity with one another, and I am not here to argue against our using and enjoying services such as Facebook and Twitter. But I do think we will serve ourselves far better if we can begin to approach social media not with the rapt enthusiasm of the zealot (or investor) but, rather, with the informed skepticism of someone approaching anything or anyone that has demonstrated its inability to operate from a system of shared values.

Not sure what I mean? Then have a look. I’ve identified five major values that are, by now, built into the social media world. Understood as attributes of the social media environment, these things are not new news. But I think it’s time that we understand these attributes as actual values being promoted by social media enterprises, and time that we consider whether these values reflect what most of us would consider helpful human values.

The value of rejecting privacy

Facebook has long been spearheading an online movement to trespass on what are otherwise widely recognized as standard principles of human privacy. Convincing people to share personal information in a setting that only appears to be private is by its nature anti-privacy; to do so while repeatedly changing the structure of its privacy settings—always, seemingly, in service of making non-sharing more difficult and sharing more automatic—is all the more suspect.

From a human point of view, Facebook’s shifty, unforthcoming behavior regarding privacy is shameful; from Facebook’s perspective it is both natural and defensible. The company is merely pursuing its goal of being a very large, very dominant social media network.

Social media companies are by their nature uninterested in the value of privacy; in fact, their growth seems to depend in large part upon convincing most people that privacy is somehow quaint or passé and is in any case not important.

The value of quantity over quality

In the social media world, everything, all the time, is about quantity.

Even when it’s been demonstrated that human beings cannot in fact have more than 150 actual friends, over there on Facebook, the orientation has always been to add more friends, and then more. You have to take a conscious stand against the site’s prevailing culture and the behavior of most everyone around you to accept a humanly reasonable number of so-called friends.

And Twitter of course has typically been focused on the number of followers one can accumulate. I have long since lost track of how many people have followed me on Twitter only to unfollow me simply because I did not follow them back. Such people were not concerned with the quality of what I might be sharing on Twitter, they were concerned only with the quantity of followers they themselves were seeking to attain.

And yet in the course of our daily human lives, I am pretty sure we consistently require the capacity to choose based on quality over quantity, and that a value system based on quality is an inherently more connective and compelling one than a value system based on quantity.

The quantity orientation grows subtly dehumanizing day by day on social media sites, with their relentless assumption that you must always want more friends, must always share everything, must always desire a bigger and bigger audience for your life.

Quantity orientation is subtly reinforced by the very structure of social media sites. If you do not post regularly to Facebook, your updates will automatically be less likely to show up in the streams of others. Over in Twitterland, your perceived influence is determined almost exclusively by a combination of how many followers you have and how often you tweet. If you are someone who measures your words carefully, and thinks long and hard before bothering to say something, you are automatically considered less valuable than those who just can’t stop themselves.

The value of the permanent present

Social media is about speed, not reflection. The immediate moment rules the roost. People vie not to be most reliable but to be first, because in many real ways, the only moment that exists in the social media environment is right now.

This is not a philosophical construct but a practical description. If you are successful at playing the social media game, and therefore have large quantities of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, your visible “news stream” is reduced almost entirely to things that are happening right now. Even 15 minutes ago, even five minutes ago, might be off your front page—out of sight and, therefore, out of mind.

This kind of heedless permanent present should not be confused with a spiritual sense of being in the present moment. The instantaneity fostered by social media is akin to the dog in the movie Up, forever distracted by squirrels. Whereas a deeper, more genuine awareness of the present moment means more than being blinded by the surface of life. It’s not that spiritually aware people don’t also get distracted by squirrels—the difference is that they quickly understand that they’ve been distracted. A deep sense of presence allows you to transcend the present moment, not be held prisoner by it.

The permanent present fostered by social media networks tends to imprison users in a landscape overrun with squirrels.

The value of friendship-free friendship

Social media have pioneered a new frontier in human relationships: the friendship-free friendship. Click a button and gain a “friend,” no matter whether you actually know the person in any meaningful way.

Twitter stands out for its honesty and straightforwardness in this regard. On Twitter, you don’t seek friends, you seek followers. Which is semantically a big improvement, although I still question the focus on quantity (see above).

Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, made a conscious decision from the beginning to call the people you connect with on Facebook your “friends.” It was a telling choice, made by a young man who simply could not have previously had experience with the soul-sharing, emotionally interactive relationship between two people—i.e., actual friendship—about which countless poets and philosophers through the centuries have rhapsodized.

The proof is in the pudding: if Zuckerberg had previously had a deep and potent understanding of human friendship, he would have never used the word “friend” to describe a Facebook connection in the first place.

Note that in so saying, I do not belittle the potential for online friendship. Two people can surely exchange thoughts and feelings via this electronic medium in a manner that can both create and nourish a significant friendship. But true friendship, experienced through whatever medium, takes time to blossom and care to tend to. Adding a “friend” on Facebook via the click of a mouse is a feeble shadow of the real thing.

The value of attention-getting

In part because the online world is open to one and all—such a difference from the “old media” model of one-to-many broadcasting—an intractable problem facing anyone who seeks an audience is how to get anyone’s attention.

Thus has the very idea of getting people’s attention risen to a value in and of itself. This is the essence of anything that’s said to have gone “viral”—most typically, videos. As noted in a previous essay—“It’s Called Viral For a Reason“—we all know, instinctively, that the fact that something has grabbed our attention does not have any inherent relation to its qualitative merit. But we somehow lose sight of this far too easily when interacting with social media, where we are daily instructed to be impressed by something’s “viral-ness.”

I’ll say it again: it’s called “viral” for a reason. Viruses are things that do harm to human systems.

The loss of the interior

If these five stated social media values, together, have one thing in common it is a relentless focus on the surface and/or exterior of things rather than the depth and/or interior of things. The social media milieu is by nature marked by information overload—there are endless streams to follow, interests to “pin,” pictures to look at, videos to watch; to operate in this setting effectively one must avoid the depth that might exist in people, places, and/or ideas. There just isn’t time. It is best, in fact, not even to recognize that there is any depth to be had. Just “like” it, share it, move on.

And so back to the original question: is this a human value? Is this how we want to live together? Racing breathlessly along the surface? Considering a near-infinite parade of exteriors, ignoring interiors?

I know there are many of us, already, who resist this—who indeed make a determined effort here online to seek depth and meaningful interaction. But we are thus far operating against the grain of online culture—against the grain of capitalism itself, it often seems, since it is by and large the pursuit of dollars at all costs that typically fosters this misalignment of values in the first place.

In the long run, I am, oddly enough, optimistic. Because I don’t think this cultural landscape is sustainable. We will come to our senses at some point, survey the damage done after the fact, and find a more helpful and meaningful way to forge ahead.

In the meantime, until our human values re-assert themselves here online, we will be living through interesting times indeed. Just try to remember that this interesting period of time does not inform us very much about where we are heading in the long run: first, because none of the values promoted by a social-media-dominated world are helpful with depth-oriented, long-term thinking; second, because our collective awareness during this time period, in thrall to social media values, cannot yet begin to imagine life on the other side of the trance. We will get there someday and wonder at the path we took.

I received an email recently from a music promoter that began by thanking me for checking out a song that he had sent as an MP3 link in a previous email.

Maybe I was having a bad day but his email set off little alarms in my brain. He was thanking me for checking it out? Meaning, he knew that I had downloaded the song and listened to it?

He said it so casually. I was not supposed to be perturbed. I was supposed to realize that of course promoters know when you’re downloading their material.

And yet I felt spied on. I emailed him back, not (oops) as politely as I might have, and he answered, a bit irritated, but we kept going and ended up with a friendly and productive dialogue. My eyes were opened to something that they were perhaps rather willfully closed to in the past. Which is this:

Many if not most emails that are sent by companies are not one-way but two-way communication tools. Information is sent to you, and you send information back to the sender. This is standard operating procedure.

And there’s only one little thing wrong with it.

With very few exceptions, these two-way communication tools are disguising themselves as one-way tools. And so they are really less like two-way communication tools and more like two-way mirrors, with recipients sitting here on the exposed side, not realizing there are people watching what we’re doing.

Some may shrug and wonder what the big deal is. I’m a music blogger, people are sending me links, of course they are going to want to know what I’m clicking on.

But you see the issue isn’t that they know what I’m clicking on. It’s that they know but aren’t telling me. If these companies were to state in clear terms at the top of their emails that any link you click on in the email is traceable and trackable, then everything’s cool. I may choose not to click links as a result, or I may choose to. This is my fully-informed decision.

But tracking your behavior without telling you is a breach of privacy. You are being watched and you don’t realize it. Wiretaps are illegal for the same reason.

This is why (now I get it) the links in music industry emails often arrive with extra code attached. The intention at the sender’s end is to be able to know whether each individual recipient has clicked on a link, without specifically telling the recipient that this is happening.

Ironically enough, the promoter who sent me the email that initially alerted me to this problem does in fact let recipients know, at the very end of the email, that the downloads are “monitored.” It’s a fine-print statement that is not very informative and yet this is more than almost anyone else bothers to do who is sending behavior-tracking email.

I can see why this has developed but I can’t see why it’s right.

I’m raising a fuss here because the concept of simple human privacy is taking a beating in the Facebook Age. Despite the self-serving pronouncements of Mark Zuckerberg it is not true that we have collectively changed, on a dime, our views of privacy. They are being changed for us by companies that will profit mightily from this change while arrogantly believing that no one will either bother to or be able to do anything about it. It is disingenuous of Zuckerberg to proclaim some vast sociological insight, based on absolutely zero expertise and 100 percent vested interest.

No, make that: it’s positively scummy of him.

His hubris on the matter will bring him down in the end, without question. He thinks human nature has magically changed in just a few years and yet, ha, the ancient Greeks knew things that he has yet to fathom. I’ve seen the plays, and they don’t turn out well for those who send the needles into the red zone on the hubris-o-meter.

But the problem right now is that Facebook and Google—equally guilty of positioning privacy violation as 21st-century “normal”—appear to be controlling the conversation about privacy. We have to start asserting otherwise. And I begin here in this small way to call out the deceptive, privacy-violating practice of emails that track your behavior without informing you.

In some ways, these emails are even more troubling than the privacy violation going on at Facebook, because by now, as the diagram above indicates, most of us should be pretty aware that any interaction you have with a web site or an app is inherently non-private.

But emails look and feel private. Do we have to adjust our perception there now too?

Look, I understand that sending out emails that track recipient behavior makes perfect sense to the promoters sending them. They can use this data to help them better target their campaigns. The data is also, obviously, helpful in terms of reporting back to clients (record companies and/or independent musicians) about how effectively a song or album has been disseminated.

I understand, furthermore, that some of what the promoters gain from the metrics doubles back as a benefit to us recipients. Promoters use their email management software to target us more effectively—so that, for instance, I only receive tour information related to Philadelphia, as one simple example. More complexly, they can also use my clicking behavior to help them understand what kind of music I tend to respond to, and send me more of that kind, and less of other kinds.

So, okay, the data is valuable. But why aren’t they up front about the nature of the data they are collecting? This is an affliction of the 21st-century online business world. They love the data they can access but would prefer not to admit they are accessing it.

And how ironic: it’s the Zuckerbergs and the Eric Schmidts who constantly assure us that everyone now has to be transparent, that we have to get used to sharing everything with everyone. Well, then: why are companies who collect our data so eager to hide what they are actually doing?

Please understand that I am not comparing most music promoters to privacy tramplers such as Zuckerberg and Schmidt. Music promoters tend not to be as Machiavellian about it. Many of these folks are good people who are simply trying to do a good job.

As such, it is my hope that the better souls out there in the industry begin to think twice about collecting this data without openly informing us. You want your data? Fine. Just tell us what you’re doing.

And not in fine print at the bottom, but in a clear and present statement in the email. Give us the option of giving you your data, or not.

I’m not holding my breath about this, however. The free market is notoriously disinclined to police itself.

This also raises the interesting issue of whether the data is itself only valuable, or in any case notably more valuable, when it is collected on the sly. It is likely truer that way, no question. But do we, as end users, somehow “owe” companies who are trying to sell us things all the information they would ideally like to have?

How you answer that question to yourself will determine how concerned you might want to be about the proliferation of email two-way mirrors and what if anything can be done about it.

Image Credit: Dave Makes

I was listening to an album on Spotify the other day when I heard an ad between tracks that was promoting Spotify itself, focused on how “social” the service is. Because after all, as the ad said: “Music is made to be shared.”

And there it is, folks, perhaps the single greatest misconception at the heart of the technologist view of music here in the 21st century. “Music is made to be shared”: that’s what Spotify is pushing, that’s what Facebook is pushing, that’s what all the buzz and activity around the music/social media nexus is about.

This idea of so-called “social music” is such a forceful technologist assumption at this point that articles are being written like “Has Apple Missed the Social-Music Train?“; and, “Is Pandora’s Wait-and-See Social Strategy a Big Mistake?”

I contend that the mistake here is the idea of social music itself. Music is not made to be shared. It is made to be listened to. Music is inherently, and often movingly, a private experience. Even when being experienced in a communal setting, as in a concert—even, that is, when the internal experience is enhanced by the knowledge that other people are having similar experiences concurrently—music remains, at heart, an internal experience. An experience of the soul, if you will.

I think I understand why the technologists seem to need to insist that music somehow only matters when you share it. Here, to illustrate, is a technologist writing about why music is special—it’s a gentleman named Paul Lamere, a software developer who works at The Echo Nest, a “music intelligence company” in Massachusetts, and it comes from a recent blog post he wrote entitled, “What Is So Special About Music?”

“Music is social. People love to share music. They express their identity to others by the music they listen to. They give each other playlists and mixtapes. Music is a big part of who we are.”

Here is the sleight of hand and/or misunderstanding: “Music is a big part of who we are” does not automatically equate to “People love to share music.” Likewise, the fact that the music we most like feels part of our identity does not equate to the idea that we “express our identity to others by the music we listen to.”

Personally, I feel strongly attached to the music I love. And yet I do not use music to “express my identity” to others. I mostly use my words, my thoughts, and my relationships to do that. My music is pretty much kept out of it; there are few actual, real-life friends with whom I talk about music, and maybe only one or two whose musical taste I feel any connection to.

Yes, it is great and wonderful to bond with people over music. But such a bond when it happens is a rightfully unusual moment of connection, not something that can be generated through convenience and volume.

As Mark Zuckerberg has so flagrantly illustrated, guys who write code for a living are not, generally speaking, the best judges of how to interact socially in the real world. It’s not their fault, it’s just an occupational hazard.

The underlying issue is that guys who write code are—again, generally speaking—not all that attuned to those parts of life that involve emotional intelligence. This is not a criticism; as has been well described by now, different people have different kinds of intelligences. The technologist is not typically in his strength or comfort zone on matters of emotional intelligence.

And so the same guys who have been trying to turn friendship into a nuance-free accumulation of contacts are now aiming to turn music into something it likewise isn’t. The qualitative and compassionate and self-reflective act of listening to and appreciating a piece of music becomes a quantitative and competitive and surface-level act of spreading a file around the network most robustly.

So let us not be hoodwinked by technologist zealotry and venture-capital-fueled delusions. Despite the enthusiasm there may be for sharing music among an active coterie of web users, sharing music in the way Spotify and Facebook encourage is not a mainstream activity, by a long shot. It’s not what most people are doing, it’s not what most people will ever be doing, and companies that aren’t yet on the “social-music train” aren’t missing out on anything.

This is not to say that people don’t occasionally enjoy getting some music recommendations from friends. But the first key word here is “occasionally”; the second key word is “friends.”

The vision of “social music” bulldozes both of those factors into oblivion. Imagine, if you dare, a world in which everyone is sharing the music they are listening to with everyone. Say you have 300 Facebook friends (a modest number in Zuckerbergland) and say everyone is sharing a modest five songs a day. That’s 1,500 songs in your stream a day. That’s more than 95 hours of music being shared with you, daily. Do the math. Is this sharing, or is this spam? Does it have any meaning or is it a pointless flow of information?

Technologists tend to mistake technology for solutions and this seems to be happening here. In the past, people could not share music this easily, it is true. But the capacity for this kind of sharing is “solving” a problem we didn’t have in the first place. Most people were not trying to be inundated by more music than they can possibly ever listen to, were not hoping that more or less complete strangers should easily be able to start sending us endless music suggestions, and were not yearning to transform listening to music into some kind of externally focused game or popularity contest.

In the end, despite the breathless articles about the social-music train having left the station, this is going nowhere near where Spotify and Facebook are assuming it will go. Sharing music via the internet may be an engaging pleasure for a small segment of people. But “social music” is a buzzword and a fad, not the inexorable future of music, perhaps most of all for a reason I discussed in an essay I posted last year called Playlist Nation.

The reason is this: sharing music socially, whether in the form of a mixtape or a playlist or even just a random string of Spotify songs, is by and large an activity that’s more fun for the person on the giving end of the sharing than the person on the receiving end. That was always the dirty secret of the mixtape era, as I said in the essay. It remains the dirty secret of the social music era. It’s much more fun to tell people what you’re listening to than to slog through a stream of what someone else is listening to.

Some of this relates to the previously mentioned math problem: we just don’t have time in the day for absorbing shared music in the social-music future being foisted upon us.

But some of this also relates to the previously mentioned internal experience problem. Truly internal experiences can’t be foisted upon us from the outside willy-nilly. Merely adding unprecedented volume to the problem of music discovery helps few people except those who are seeking to profit financially from the public disclosure of previously private matters of taste.

Music is made to be shared? No, it isn’t. Unless you happen to run a large, international social media company. In which case, everything is made to be shared. As the old saying goes: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In the relative blink of an eye, we have culturally swallowed a crazy idea: that the capacity to grab people’s attention is more important than what is being done to grab their attention.

We have, in other words, bought into the myth of “going viral.” I see press releases every week touting a band’s worthiness based on the apparent viral success of its latest video. If I am not too late, I would like to suggest a massive reboot on the matter.

Because the plain fact of going viral actually says nothing whatsoever about the worthiness of whatever it is that which has gone viral. To take the viral-ness of something as a de facto sign of value is lunacy.

Remember, it’s called viral for a reason. Either online or offline, viruses are things we know we need to avoid, are things that are insidiously unhealthy.

How the viral thing started is easy enough to see. Because the online world is open to one and all—such a difference from the “old media” model of one-to-many broadcasting—an intractable problem facing anyone who seeks an audience is how to get anyone’s attention. Thus has the very idea of getting people’s attention risen to a value in and of itself.

And yet, removed from the addictive context of social media, we understand as human beings that simply because something has wrested our attention away doesn’t require it to be either good or true or meaningful in any way. Valuing the viral is like being guided, for entertainment, from car wreck to car wreck, while the art museums and theaters remain empty, waiting for patrons.

Valuing the viral for its viral-ness overlooks the fact that there are many things that grab our attention unduly. Valuing the viral for its viral-ness also overlooks how shallow a connection is being made here. All someone has to do to “participate” here is click. This is not a big commitment, clicking. How much does it cost in time or energy or money to click? One million clicks on a free video has none of the weight and importance of one million products or services or experiences sold for actual money. I think we forget this, seduced by apparent quantity that actually reflects nothing of what quantity in the physical world may reflect.

(And never mind the fact that even in the physical world quantity is hardly a flawless measure of quality in the first place, but that’s a separate can of worms.)

In off-screen life, things are not valued merely for the fact that they have grabbed our attention. It’s actually rather silly, if you think about it, especially considering that most of us are aware that the things that most easily gain our attention are things that simply loudest or shiniest, or things that are merely abrupt or unexpected.

In on-screen life, it should be no different. A viral video may in fact be charming and original and worthy of your time, or it may not be. The mere fact of its “going viral,” however, is no indication of its worthiness. All a viral video has done has hijacked our attention. Truly, this is not much of an accomplishment.

Officially 20 years old this fall, the World Wide Web remains a tenaciously chaotic place—a bottomless pool of electronic information, presented in a linked-together, more-is-better format. Anarchy, in motion, without end. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it induces a kind of information vertigo.

The web’s intrinsic chaos is cultivated by the medium’s three signature characteristics: its interactivity, its accessibility, and its effectually infinite size. Every individual web user is at any moment, instantly, a potential web contributor; there are few if any gatekeepers to block the way; and there’s no space to run out of. (Most efforts to organize physical space arise, after all, in response to space constraints.)

This place is so chaotic that efforts to contain chaos online often end up adding to it. A case in point is the MP3 blog.

MP3 blogs blossomed in the early to mid ’00s to filter the music the web was propagating, legally or otherwise. Before long there were so many blogs that sorting through them was hardly easier than sorting through the music itself.

One prominent attempt to tame this chaos was the rise of so-called “aggregator” sites such as The Hype Machine, Elbo.ws, and, more recently, Shuffler.fm, which gather the music offered on blogs into one place. These are valuable sites to be sure, providing a variety of effective filters through which to approach the chaos of online music. But in the end, aggregation necessarily reflects the underlying anarchy of the information being aggregated.

Half of infinity, after all, is still infinity.

More recently a new strategy—or, at least, buzzword—has captivated the pundit class. The idea/buzzword is curation. In May of 2010, Wired, in full prophet mode, welcomed us to the so-called “Age of Curation,” predicting an imminent day when the parade of links, sites, apps, comments, songs, photos, videos, feeds, and more, that vie for attention on our screens are rendered manageable by, yes, curation.

The article was unconvincing, beginning with the fact that it never really told us what curation is, or should be, beyond the vague idea that it entails narrowing down from too many choices. (Gee, thanks.) But if we stop to define what it means to curate online, we can see that the idea has merit as a potential antidote to the web’s innate chaos.




What curating is

So, a definition: curating is the purposeful selection of a small number of items from a large array of choices, presented in an informed and informative manner.

Slight expansion of definition: the curator aims to create a contained and meaningful experience for visitors via his or her expertise.

Right away the allure in the anarchic online space is clear, at least to me. A contained and meaningful experience? Knowledgeable narrowing down to a manageable number of selections? Bring it on.

The verb “curate” is a relatively recent coinage, deriving from the function of being a curator, which has traditionally been associated with someone who puts art exhibits together for museums. Despite some huffing and puffing from the curator community, the word is not owned by PhDs in art history. If you are using your expertise and aesthetic sense to sort through a large number of somethings, whatever they may be, and are offering up a narrow selection, complete with some context and explanation, you are curating.

And yet I don’t think that honest-to-goodness curating is what the buzzword folks are buzzing about. Curation is being rapidly transformed into another meaningless bit of jargon for venture capitalists to toss around in pursuit of the next lottery winner temporarily masquerading as a business enterprise. Encouraging everyone from stay-at-home parent bloggers to companies with global brand recognition to engage in “content curation,” via a series of bullet-pointed action steps, assisted by specialized software and credentialed consultants, borders on parody.

In the name of curation, what I see being ballyhooed are schemes and short-cuts to maximize page views. There’s nothing (necessarily) wrong with that but it’s not curating, it’s business as usual.

Posts like “Content Curation in 13 Minutes a Day,” however well-intentioned, are just silly. The web’s abiding chaos is the result of speed and quantity; any curation effort emphasizing speed and quantity is more of the problem rather than any kind of solution.




Curating is not just filtering

An obvious difference between filtering (or editing, or aggregating, both of which are different words for filtering) and curating is that filterers still end up offering large numbers of items to sort through. Curators must keep selections to a rigorous minimum. One long-running model is the site Very Short List, which selects but one thing a day to inform you about.

Or then there’s the granddaddy of curating sites, Arts & Letters Daily, which gives us three annotated links a day. The site looks to be a jumble but has a rigorous (if idiosyncratic) structure, with new material added to the top, older material dropping downward.

The difference between filtering and curating is, however, more than quantitative. A curator aims to present web content in a manner that removes it from the medium’s inherent endlessness as well as its relentless robotic-ness. This can be done only with the care and attention of an individual intelligence. A curator, alive to context and nuance, has a voice, a sensibility, a vibe; there is something inherently idiosyncratic about curating.

As such, curating cannot, by definition, be done by algorithm or formula. Algorithms and formulas are terrific at filtering, but lack the nuance required for curating.

Likewise, curating cannot be democratized; it is not about voting and polling and telling us what’s most popular.

Curation succeeds because it’s one activity in this vast, automated medium in which an individual human being must intervene. Even if you could invent a robotic curator, which does everything a human could do, it fails at curating because as a human user, you want and need the connection to another human being in this particular function. To curate is to perform an act of human intelligence on behalf of other humans.

But, as such, curation may be doomed to failure. Because as much as the web wants and needs curation content-wise, it tends to defeat curation efforts structure-wise. The medium’s insatiable addiction to quantitative measurement tends to overpower the curator’s modus operandi.




Visibility versus idiosyncrasy

We all know that to succeed, web sites require visibility. Visibility demands the dogged pursuit of page views. The pursuit of page views requires a strategy maximizing both search engine placement and, for lack of a better word, buzzability. That is to say, a web site raises its profile by offering content that people are already looking for.

MP3 blogs have always known this, which is why buzz bands gain such momentum—once a band is trending popular, blogs seeking more visitors go out of their way to post songs by said band, knowing that the band’s fans will find their way to the blog.

Visibility furthermore demands more linkage and more options than a site that’s legitimately curating should be offering. (Links improve search engine standing; options increase “stickiness”—i.e., time spent per visit.)

True curation, as a result, often keeps a web site effectively invisible, since the curator is using only his or her knowledge and aesthetic sense to guide the content, not SEO tricks or buzz-factor arm-waving.

I speak from experience. Fingertips, curating free and legal music since 2003, has a small following, but remains undetectable to the web’s masses. And I am not alone. There are any number of other honest-to-goodness music curators out here, most likewise toiling in obscurity.

Which is a shame. Not just because I would love to share the music here with more people—it’s a shame because music in particular is ideally suited for curation.

That’s all radio ever was, back in rock radio’s heyday. The original free-form FM DJs were marvelous curators. And although no one would have thought to pinpoint this back then, radio was blessed with an effective curation tool we now call “real time.” On the radio, there’s no way to offer 20 or 40 or 60 songs simultaneously and then say “Okay, you sort through them.”




So where are the curators?

Meanwhile, the web’s most visible music blogs are by and large filterers—they have too many posts, too many songs, too many other distractions on the page to be considered curators. They seek to offer as much as they can either because they aim to succeed as advertising vehicles or just because they’re caught in the more-is-better mindset that generally afflicts web sites.

An undue number of smaller blogs likewise do not curate effectively. They post too often, they offer lists of songs without context, they recycle press releases, they clutter things with small print and action options, they do not communicate effectively, they do not display a wide enough range of knowledge to be trustworthy—and on and on it goes.

Some bloggers post too infrequently to be good curators, which is an opposite problem, but still a problem; and many simply haven’t been online long enough to have a track record. A good curator is a regular presence, a consistent resource, an established authority.

This is not to say that all music bloggers are supposed to be curators. There are plenty who don’t want or need to be doing that. And then there’s the question of how many people out there, music fans or otherwise, actually want things curated for them. Perhaps we’ve trained a generation of people to be so focused on what they themselves are sharing that they care not for what anyone else is sharing, however knowledgeably.

And yet, even so, talented and effective music curators are out there. (Less good news, from my perspective, is that most of them do not limit themselves to free and legal MP3s, but I’ll overlook that problem for this particular essay.)

A handful of higher-profile bloggers are successful curators, including Matthew Perpetua (whose Fluxblog, started in 2002, claims credit as the very first MP3 blog) and Heather Browne (of I Am Fuel, Your Are Friends), along with the imaginative and literary crew behind Said the Gramophone.

Each of these blogs has its curatorial quirks. But among the “elite” music blogs, these are three that are curating more effectively than most.

Beyond that, curators tend to be lost among the much larger number of low-profile blogs that persist as a background hum on the 21st-century music scene. And now we get back to the visibility problem. How many talented music curators exist among the web’s thousands of blogs is anyone’s guess.

The only thing certain is that none is getting all that much attention. Chaos, pretty much, yet reigns.




And then do we curate the curators?

Although hang on a second. Let’s imagine that true music curation catches on, and good curators become more visible. Does this help?

Or, if the world is convinced to desire the services of curators, do the curators themselves become impossible to sort through? If you then have to “curate the curators,” this seems to take us down an absurd road.

Or maybe not. Maybe when the end point is a place of curation, the sense of information vertigo that so easily sets in online is relieved. Because the vertiginous sensation relates, I think, to the sense of endless trap doors opening everywhere you go—each new site opening onto countless other sites, offering countless other links.

A good curator offers a kind of conclusion, or at least an oasis. You’ve arrived in the hands of someone who just wants to show you a few things, and have you pay attention to them. Items on display are there for their own thing-iness, so to speak. If a music curator is sharing a song, it’s that song, at that moment. It’s not the band’s whole catalog, it’s not the 35 other bands that people who like that band also like.

In the curatorial context, if only for a short time, the linking stops. The vain, mindless sharing of everything stops. Your attention is directed to one thing at a time. Not everyone may want or need this, but the cultural history of the human race to date tells me that occasional focus and attention paid is a good thing, even a necessary thing. I, for one, will keep at it.




* * * * * *

In addition to any comments you might have about the essay, I would love it if you used the comment space to post the names of blogs and/or web sites that you feel are doing a good job curating music, in alignment with the definition laid out above.

This week, the results of a survey commissioned by the subscription online music store eMusic were released, and they were notable. The survey targeted people who buy music online. Among the findings:

● 89 percent of respondents said they would rather own the music they like than stream it
● 86 percent said that owning the music gives them security that their files will not disappear
● 79 percent said that they don’t think they will ever abandon ownership for streaming
● 76 percent said they use streaming to discover music and to decide whether they will buy it

These aren’t just iffy numbers, these are landslide numbers.

And yes, this survey was sponsored by eMusic, a company with a business model based on paid downloads. Yes, it was a survey of online music buyers. As a result, on web sites that reported on the survey, commenters insisting the survey is bullshit were not hard to find.

The music industry site Music Ally itself put it this way: “Company whose business model is built around downloads rather than streaming releases research claiming music fans prefer downloads to streaming— shock!”

Okay, then, where’s the shock when a man whose business is built around streaming claims that the future of music is access not ownership? I saw no such blowback when Daniel Ek went on his media blitz in July as Spotify arrived in the U.S.

The respondents in the survey were online music buyers, sure, but don’t the opinions of online music buyers matter? Rather than scoff at them, I should think that musicians and music-industry pundits alike should be very interested in them.

The mere fact that online music buyers exist, and actually in very large numbers, means that the opinions of this group should be noted and reckoned with, not brushed aside simply because they don’t align with the grand vision of Music in the Cloud.

And speaking of absent skepticism, where is the skepticism that greets the opinions of those whose livelihood depends upon promoting the cloud as the future of music? There are any number of pundits and consultants who go around talking about this and making a pretty penny in the process. (They make more money than the vast majority of the musicians providing the cloud with the music, but that’s another story.) Why do we accept the pronouncements of these folks with any less skepticism than the eMusic survey was greeted?

Why are we trained not to listen to the people who are actually out there buying music? Why do we seem readier to listen to the people who have a strong vested interest in telling us what they think we are going to want?

Look, Music in the Cloud makes a nice fairy story, but the reality is going to be much more complicated than that. The main point that the eMusic survey makes is that access does not replace ownership for a sizable and, dare I say, important audience. Access is a great new development—don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy Spotify—but does not foretell the categorical disappearance of ownership.

This should not even be news. But so hypnotized have we been in the 21st century by digital ideologues that when we receive a rare dispatch from the reality-based world, well, it does seem like news. And rather welcome news at that.

I was talking to a music industry acquaintance on the phone not long ago and he was matter-of-factly moving on, leaving music behind for the world of social media marketing. Music has had its day, said Kevin (not his real name); now it’s over. “No one cares the way they used to,” he said, sounding more pissed off than sorry. “Music isn’t special to people any more.”

This is certainly one conclusion to draw 10-plus years into the download era. And withdrawal is one logical enough reaction, especially from a music industry veteran. Forget all this crap (and boy is there a lot of crap). Find something else to sink your teeth into, find another way to make a living, because there’s no living here, that seems clear.

Kevin is neither a romantic nor a nostalgist. For him it’s reality: music is no longer special to people, deal with it, move on.

But here’s the thing. If the world around us doesn’t think music is special, guess what? The world is wrong. Music is an ancient, mysterious, compelling means of expression. If we’ve arrived at a point in our cultural life cycle at which music is “not special,” this says much more about us than it does about music. Music didn’t become “not special”; we, collectively, have become unable or unwilling to appreciate its specialness.

Which is a development worthy of investigation, actually. How did this come to be?

The easy answer is the mundane matter of supply and demand. Nothing can be special when there’s so freaking much of it. Submitted as evidence: in 2009, the most recent year this statistic is available, 97,751 albums were released, according to Nielsen SoundScan. To listen to 97,751 albums would take more than eight years of 24/7 listening. If you actually only have a couple of hours a day to listen to music, make that 100 years. You maybe should’ve started already.

Is sand special? Is dust? The digital age has given birth to an unforeseen, mind-boggling blizzard of music, and it’s piling up far beyond the capacity of the plows to clear roads for us.

And why is there so much of it? Another easy answer: digital technology. The famous “barrier to entry” that previously kept the market at a (somewhat) manageable size has been not just breached but obliterated by digital reality. Previously, the need for a physical product kept a natural lid on the amount of something that could or would be produced, as there is no economic or logistical reason to produce any product beyond what the market demands.

In retrospect we can see the inherent wisdom of the physical marketplace. This is not to say that the digital marketplace doesn’t have its own wisdom, only that we haven’t located it yet. Attempting to protect and limit access to digital files as if they are physical products makes no sense. And yet—this is important, folks—pretending that digital files have no value at all, because they aren’t physical products, also makes no sense.

In the meantime, we are left with a kind of over-production no one could have anticipated in the record store’s heyday. We now make far more albums, together, than anyone can market (for any price, even free)—more than anyone can come to terms with in any meaningful way at all.

That we are inundated with digitalia as could not have been possible with physical creations is obviously a factor in stripping music of that specialness Kevin talked about. But there is something less obvious at work as well. It’s not just sheer inundation that has done the trick. There’s also the matter of effort, or lack thereof.

By effort I mean a more than casual expenditure of time and/or resources. And—this seems an obvious point but is being vigorously overlooked in our bubble of social-media-mania—the less effort involved in doing something, the less special it’s going to seem, especially over the long run.

Psychologists are well aware of this phenomenon, which has in recent years been given the name “The Ikea Effect,” based on the apparently documented and well-researched fact that people end up liking a piece of furniture they had to build out of proportion to its value. “Labor enhances affection for its results,” according to the Harvard Business Review, discussing the research in 2009.

Our culture has been battling itself over convenience since the end of the Second World War, if not earlier. We want things to be easier and easier, and yet when it’s too easy, there’s something wrong, something dissatisfying. The digital revolution has brought the battle to a fever pitch. We’re bringing more and more literally to our fingertips, via portable digital devices. The one overriding goal of digital technology has seemingly become to make anything and everything as effortless as possible.

To find out the cost of this ostensible progress, look no further than what’s been happening in music these last 10 years.

While making, recording, and distributing music can of course still require a significant amount of effort, it may also, now, require very little effort. Because believe me, if the music everyone is making in the 21st century were still generally requiring a lot of effort, there could never have been 97,751 albums released in a year.

When one required years of practice to master an instrument, when playing an instrument involved muscular effort, when special equipment and special locations were required to record even just a song, never mind an album, not many people could do it. And then there was the sizable undertaking involved in physically producing and distributing the record.

That all added up to a lot of effort. Note that spending money—some of this process has traditionally been expensive—counts as a certain kind of effort; money is after all a stand-in for effort, since earning it typically requires actual work of one sort or another. But there have always been those who found a way around a lot of the expense by (yes) sheer effort. (Huge gulfs of exertion separate yesterday’s DIYers from today’s, by and large.)

When making music requires in some cases no more than a preexisting laptop and inexpensive if not free software, and when distributing this music involves clicking a mouse a few times, we’re talking about an entirely different level of effort. It’s the effort of no effort. When sending bulk emails and monitoring social media channels are a musician’s most laborious tasks, music has arrived in a strange new place indeed.

I’m not saying some of this isn’t a little difficult (maybe), but if the music itself isn’t generated by effort, I’m pretty sure, over time, this becomes apparent. The Age of No Effort too easily produces products of no value.

Mirroring the lack of effort that can be involved in making music is the lack of effort now involved in listening to music. This is the final and perhaps most important piece of the no-effort puzzle.

For we have trained a new generation of music listeners to believe that acquiring music should in fact involve no effort at all. Isn’t this one of the most compelling rationales offered by file-sharers for their file-sharing habit? That acquiring music through legitimate channels is just too much of a bother? That people pirate music because they can, because it’s just “too easy”?

No amount of technology can change this human fact: where there is no effort, there can be no real value. It’s magical thinking otherwise. If we’re not vigilant, the internet can turn us into those characters in fairy tales who always want something for nothing. Give us that goose there that’s laying all those golden eggs!

(I’m sure that’ll turn out well.)

And so: if no effort is required either to create or to listen to music, what do you think this leads to in the marketplace for that music? How do you think the no-effort consumers in a market over-supplied by no-effort producers view the product at this point?

Do you think they see over-abundance of music as a treasure trove of untold value? Or are lots of people now insisting that recorded music should now be free?

Turns out the people who need things to lack effort are the people who want things to be free. The people who want things to be free in turn demand that no effort be involved in acquiring them. And technology companies are happy to oblige, continuing to promise more and more for our little screens with less and less and less effort.

It’s a crazy vicious mindless cycle, with the apparent goal of reducing all effort in life to the tapping of a fingertip. It would be a great plug for my web site but otherwise I see no benefits. (And if you’ve seen the movie WALL-E, you shouldn’t either.)

I have no idea where there is all actually going but it is not going where the digital ideologists believe it to be going. Human nature will at some point reassert itself. More to the point, musicians will begin to reassert themselves. It may take a half generation or more for this drama to play out, but in the end, we will realize, collectively, that music remains special, has value, is (imagine!) worth money.

How, exactly, do we get there? Lord only knows. At the risk of sounding like a spiritual cliche, my only advice is to be the change you wish to see in the world. Take a hard look at your own efforts. Decide whether your life is actually improved by adopting every latest convenience your portable digital device wants to offer you.

And: decide whether you want music to be special or not. We can’t any of us, individually, change the way people choose to record and distribute music but we can certainly change the way we choose to interact with it, spend time with it, and spend money on it.

And I believe that the more effort you put in as a listener and supporter, the clearer it will be whether something you are making an effort to connect with is worthy of that connection. Whether it is special. A lot of it—the source of Kevin’s frustration—isn’t. But some of it remains very much so. Kevin, by his choice, didn’t want to make the effort it took to discern this.

Where do you stand?