HARNESSING THE TOOLS OF DIGITAL COMMERCE AND OPEN SOURCE MUSIC PLATFORMS TO PASS ON OUR CREATIVE LANGUAGE

by Leighanne Saltsman

August 26th, 2011

Anyone who knows me well knows that, for years now, I have been stuck with my feet on opposite sides of the creative / pragmatic divide. Having been raised as a [classical] musician I am committed to accessing deep emotional reserves through live performance. Yet I’m fairly obsessive about process and procedure. To further complicate matters I came of age at the dawn of the digital revolution, and that experience left me with a lasting fascination with the power of digital connectivity and the positive impact it can have on the task of building community.

These two latter fascinations, procedure and digital community, were all but sublimated during my years at school in the small town of Oberlin, where I focused on learning to communicate by refining my inherent musical prowess. Yet when I came to NYC in 2004 my obsession with process, my desire to find community, and my facility with digital communication raised their seductive heads. As a budding professional musician I realized that in order to survive the hustle and flow I would have to wear my passion on my sleeve. Just loving to make music in the comfort of small venues was no longer enough… I would have to cultivate drive, a certain kind of hunger, and the tools of the industry in order to “succeed”. As I am by nature a nurturing personality and outright competitiveness is truly distasteful to me, this was an extremely daunting task! So instead of focusing on developing “competitive hunger”, I turned my attention to understanding the procedure and process necessary for a musician to successfully reach their community.

At the beginning of this journey my thought was that if I possessed all the tools relevant to the “becoming a successful musician” trade, I would be able to walk the tightrope of performing musiciandom by holding onto the (precarious) railings I had personally strung from plateau to plateau. How wrong I was! But more on that in a bit. While I worked my way up through the ranks of a traditional career in Arts Administration, I became aware that the tools I had set out to learn – creating print product, conducting landline calls to presenters and news outlets, negotiating fees and advancing a tour – were changing more rapidly than I could click on the articles featured in FastCompany.com. Constant advances within the realm of digital communication were completely redefining the industry, and I suddenly had a whole new arsenal of tools to learn. The first harbinger of change I was aware of was Pandora, although I didn’t realize its true nature at the time. It was swiftly followed by Grooveshark, a service with which I had a passing dalliance. Over the next four years the services and apps continued to come fast and furious, and in order to keep up with them my vocation turned into avocation. I myself had the good fortune to set my auto-didactic nature to the task of learning the new digital music industry on the very day MIT Media Lab graduates spun evolver.fm off of The Echo Nest. I was hooked. Since that day, I have expanded my capability from “user of traditional arts administration tools” to “guide through the Music 3.0 landscape.” I am fully aware of the possibilities of connectivity the one-two-three punch FanBridge + BandCamp+DamnTheRadio can deliver, as well as the total importance crowdfunding, metrics, social currency, geolocation marketing and streaming video have in our community. Yet when I talk of these things to my musician friends, their eyes glaze over. I realize that they just don’t care about this stuff. To them, this stuff isn’t going to help them reach their performing-musician goals… it’s just jabber and tech talk.

Right then and there I become aware of a nagging feeling that the creative side of the divide had been neglected. Understanding and possessing facility with the tools of digital marketing – while important – wasn’t the end to this journey I’d undertaken, and so I began to ask myself the questions that set me on a path to Conservatory to begin with. “What was the musician’s original purpose? Did we musicians not exist primarily to pass stories on from generation to generation? To codify directions from one place to another? To beget a certain kind of healing? To help our people express grief, and to express elation? To bring pleasure to those who heard us? And, how can I do that to the very best of my ability?”

As I asked these questions I realized that my obsession with process had completely undermined my first love and purpose: to reach people with the power of music. I was crushed, and spent many weeks in a deep state of confusion, depression and contemplation. I spent my time writing, and reading others’ thoughts of the future of music, and slowly, very slowly, I emerged from my state of disillusion and began to find articles here and there, all written by people who seemed to frame the act of making music in the same idealistic way I did. Although they were few and far between, the amazing part was that their authors blended musical idealism with a refreshing knowledge of – and sense of the possibility inherent in – digital distribution tools. For example, here’s an excerpt of an article by Jesse Langley, a musician who lives near Chicago and has a keen interest social media. He writes;

“To a great extent we are consumers of music rather than thoughtful and grateful appreciators of music. How digital music services benefit artists should be important to music lovers because understanding the implications of the digital music revolution may help us continue to allow artists to create the music they want to make…”

And then the most important part:

“…Part of the inherent genius of digital music services is that artists can create the music they want to, and listeners get to decide if it’s any good.”

This is the best analysis I’ve read on our current situation in the music industry to date, and it expresses the message I’m conveying in this editorial; that being “We can go about using the marketing tools of our new musical landscape for good rather than for evil, and that these tools are necessary to the task of growing musical tribes”. It’s really true: those who make music for the reasons I cited above, i.e. “to pass stories on from generation to generation; to beget a certain kind of healing…” are not at an impasse with the creators of Spotify, Rdio, and other services that aim to make money on those peoples’ creative product.Instead, they can use the connectivity these services offer to create a different kind of value for themselves. Together we can create a value system that rewards their music with gratitude, a warm place to sleep while on tour, and a sense of fulfillment at the work we are doing in this world. Of course we all have to make a living, and I don’t aim to trivialize that fact, but in some ways musicians have now been presented with the opportunity to become pioneers of an alternate lifestyle. A lifestyle where consumerism is NOT king.

So let us all learn to embrace these digital tools to move beyond the confines of the system that has ensnared us, and to move beyond the competitive mandate of “SUCCESS!!”. Let us hone our entrepreneurial skills, take the time to understand the new arsenal of tools at our disposal, and let us progress in the intelligent manner befitting individuals who dwell in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Let us learn to mend the divide between the creative and the procedural.

Which brings me to the point of this essay: I am terribly glad of the research I’ve done over the past ten months, of the six years I’ve spent mastering the craft of digital music distribution and management, and I will continue to offer up my expertise to any musician who understands the importance of understanding and utilizing our new digital tools. However, I’ve come to believe that we’ve reached a point where we managerial types must curtail our fascination with the treacherous waters of corporate marketing tactics, our impending dependence on Klout scores and peer-to-peer marketing metrics, and to instead begin truly nurturing our musical communities. So let’s do that, whaddya say?! In the meantime I’ll continue to craft music that pleases me. Classical tradition be damned… music is music, and the effect it has on those who hear it – however they hear it – remains unparalleled in our world.