As a recovering Wall Street technology stock analyst, I was struck when reading 'Music: A Subversive History' of the parallels I had encountered years ago reading Clayton Christensen's 'The Innovator's Dilemma; When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.' The big difference, though, was the element of time - in the world of hardwar…
As a recovering Wall Street technology stock analyst, I was struck when reading 'Music: A Subversive History' of the parallels I had encountered years ago reading Clayton Christensen's 'The Innovator's Dilemma; When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.' The big difference, though, was the element of time - in the world of hardware, there is an element of physics at play (things need to be developed, produced, distributed, sold and deployed, so just as nine women can't produce a newborn in one month, there's a built-in governor on the speed of displacement). But in the creative/intellectual realm, the physical limitations are secondary to cultural limitations. As a result, it gets back to the fundamental tug-of-war between greed and fear .
Be that as it may, the similarity between the two books is the focus on the significance of the disrespect shown to the upstart. In 'Dilemma' the point is stressed that the benefits of change work to favor the smaller and faster-growing elements, while the older, more-entrenched competitors are slower (and often dumber due to their vested interests). This is akin to the work of the late, great Air Force Col. John Boyd, who stressed his OODA loop - observation, orientation, decision, action; pilots who had tighter OODA loops would invariably triumph over their slower competitors - as well as his Energy/Maneuverability Theory. I believe that the problems you've identified in music are different only because the innovators can be temporarily trampled by the status quo - right up to the point when they rise up in volcanic fashion to totally disrupt the landscape.
Because entertainment (in general) and music (specifically) are gaseous in nature (they rapidly expand to fill available volume, but compress quite easily), they tend to grow very fast. While beneficial, that rapid growth also means that they encounter the problems of maturity and the effects of technological change are revealed that much faster. These industries are to business what fruit flies are to geneticists - they tend to demonstrate what happens to everything else, just on a much-shortened time scale.
If there's anything that music shares with a host of other elements of the business world right now, it is the detrimental effects of excessive capital -the entrenched are more so, and the availability of so much money means that a lot of really crappy ideas are getting funded along with the usual amount of good ones. The result is that the next wave of greatness is confronted by a two-fold problem (irritatingly poor competition and frustratingly stupid vested interests. But not to fear - this situation will correct. The longer it takes to occur, the more dramatic the correction/inflection point is likely to be. And it's likely to be obvious only with benefit of hindsight.
Sorry for the length of this comment - as usual, you provoke a bunch of thinking. Thanks for that. And I started reading John Mauceri's 'For the Love of Music: A Conductor's Guide to the Art of Listening' yesterday, so the pump was primed!
As a recovering Wall Street technology stock analyst, I was struck when reading 'Music: A Subversive History' of the parallels I had encountered years ago reading Clayton Christensen's 'The Innovator's Dilemma; When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.' The big difference, though, was the element of time - in the world of hardware, there is an element of physics at play (things need to be developed, produced, distributed, sold and deployed, so just as nine women can't produce a newborn in one month, there's a built-in governor on the speed of displacement). But in the creative/intellectual realm, the physical limitations are secondary to cultural limitations. As a result, it gets back to the fundamental tug-of-war between greed and fear .
Be that as it may, the similarity between the two books is the focus on the significance of the disrespect shown to the upstart. In 'Dilemma' the point is stressed that the benefits of change work to favor the smaller and faster-growing elements, while the older, more-entrenched competitors are slower (and often dumber due to their vested interests). This is akin to the work of the late, great Air Force Col. John Boyd, who stressed his OODA loop - observation, orientation, decision, action; pilots who had tighter OODA loops would invariably triumph over their slower competitors - as well as his Energy/Maneuverability Theory. I believe that the problems you've identified in music are different only because the innovators can be temporarily trampled by the status quo - right up to the point when they rise up in volcanic fashion to totally disrupt the landscape.
Because entertainment (in general) and music (specifically) are gaseous in nature (they rapidly expand to fill available volume, but compress quite easily), they tend to grow very fast. While beneficial, that rapid growth also means that they encounter the problems of maturity and the effects of technological change are revealed that much faster. These industries are to business what fruit flies are to geneticists - they tend to demonstrate what happens to everything else, just on a much-shortened time scale.
If there's anything that music shares with a host of other elements of the business world right now, it is the detrimental effects of excessive capital -the entrenched are more so, and the availability of so much money means that a lot of really crappy ideas are getting funded along with the usual amount of good ones. The result is that the next wave of greatness is confronted by a two-fold problem (irritatingly poor competition and frustratingly stupid vested interests. But not to fear - this situation will correct. The longer it takes to occur, the more dramatic the correction/inflection point is likely to be. And it's likely to be obvious only with benefit of hindsight.
Sorry for the length of this comment - as usual, you provoke a bunch of thinking. Thanks for that. And I started reading John Mauceri's 'For the Love of Music: A Conductor's Guide to the Art of Listening' yesterday, so the pump was primed!