cmon dude cheer up.have some NERDS.i'll give u a dozen if i ever see u!

Oh I'm totally happy - in an epiphany kind of way - just a bit disgruntled about the way my career is being phased out :) Side note, I would never turn down the offer of Nerds! The sugar rush right now though would probably kill me.

I made my peace awhile back...I realized I can never be a musician to earn a decent level of living. I realized my music never be as interesting as some of my music heroes. However, I also realized that music is the most emotionally charge media for my own self above all my crafts. No matter how imperfect the music I made. They take me to places. The emotions and feelings when I was creating them...happy, sad, pissy, angry, lustful, whatever. It's the only form that can truly "recorded" my feelings. So who cares what exactly happen in the outside world of Burger King DJs and Playstation musicians. Ok. I am going to make some music now. Just press the blinking button, right!?

this app for the iPhone completely blew my mind: -- "The concept behind Shazam is simple: whenever you hear a song playing and can't identify it--on the car radio, at a friend's house, at a bar--you activate the Shazam application on your mobile phone. It "listens" to the song for about 30 seconds, then sends a text message to your phone identifying the artist and title. Shazam's database contains audio fingerprints for nearly 5 million songs, so there's a pretty good chance of a positive ID. once you've tagged a song in Shazam, you can launch iTunes directly from that tagged song and buy the song immediately."

Bam - SonyEricsson have had this feature for a few years. Called TrackID it functions using the same analysis and database as Shazam, but obviously without the iTunes connection. Useful for pop, but it utterly failed to identify "Blauer Schein" by Klangstabil or any of my Aphex Twin :) Pat - only a matter of time. Charlie - it's not even about making a living, it's about people not needing musicians at all. You and I are lucky enough to be able to pour emotions out and turn them into sounds. Once anyone can do that, then recorded musicians become redundant. Music will come from (at the risk of sounding like a hippie dickhead) within. Anyone who has even the slightest desire to do so; will be able to make their song. That's not to say that some songs won't get exceptionally popular if they somehow break free from the background noise. Tom - with you, I'm still gong to make music; just the evolution of music as an art form has changed so much in the last 100 years: What started off as the period of recorded music, moving into the age of broadcast and freely distributed music moving into the age of technology replacing technical ability. The future of this has been bugging me for years; all it took was one too many absinthes and it all became clear :)

Or, to put it another way--art will once again be created by the people, for the people and be part of everyday life. There wasn't even a word for art in the West until the sixteenth century. The word "craft" covered everything. There was art that was more skillfully made, in the visual arts, mostly, and trades, such as building in stone, that required the cataloging and passing along of necessary technical knowledge (or the buildings would fall down, as they sometimes did in the Middle Ages), so "professions" developed to do just this (the guilds). But music was a lot more embedded in everyday life. In the Middle Ages, court composers were stealing popular music for their compositions, so there couldn't have been such a big gap between what the people were doing and what the few aristocrats were doing music wise. Sounds to me, given your current prognostication, that the wheel is threatening to come full circle and take us back to where we used to be. But I still believe that some will always do it better than others, and so there will still be a creative hierarchy. It just won't be kings who are paying for the more skillful artists, but someone else. I wonder who?

Marie: " art will once again be created by the people ... and be part of everyday life" - one of my points exactly! As for who sponsors future artists, sadly I feel it will be marketing and advertising (more so than today) and commercial pop music will finally fall under the transparent remit of advertising jingles; jingles with an idol attached. The wheel isn't exactly going full-circle, but I see what you are saying. Certainly the monetization aspects, but of more concern to me are the emotional connections with recorded music, are being lost with the direction of technology. Hoarding music made by other people will become a quaint past-time of people living in this century. Yes - there will still be a creative hierarchy, whether artificially generated (as it is in pop) or the through the lucky/chance emergence of the talented. The latter becoming more & more difficult as people will be influenced by what they hear, and, with everyone being able to produce music, it will be impossible to determine the originator. Talent gets buried.

I guess, because I'm not in the business, my taken isn't quite so gloomy. The majority of the population has been able to read and write since the Protestant Reformation in the West. Even people without higher education can now read and write. With the advent of computers and word processing, it has gotten easier and easier to say what you mean (and spell it correctly in English with some hope of using accepted grammar constructions). Everyone seems to be writing books, novels, screen plays, etc. But the cream still rises to the top. Very little of what gets written has what one might call literary merit. While all of that verbiage is on the internet for all to see (FaceBook, etc.), few are actually reading it. But I see your point, too, because with all this writing (I won't call most of it literature) out there, people seem less inclined than ever to read serious literature. It is a very tough market for talented writers, as a consequence. Democracy isn't always the best thing for art--the lowest common denominator and all of that. But I do have a friend who is a serious composer living in New York. He has been in the business for close to 20 years. In the beginning, he did work in advertising, writing and orchestrating for television ads, and even conducting the orchestra in the recording sessions. But, as his own work found an audience (mostly with other musicians), he was able to concentrate more of his time on his own compositions (which are a complex mix of modern classical, jazz and tango--a lot more avant garde than Piazzolla) and performing with his own groups. He is now signed to Nonesuch, has a solo album out, and continues to collaborate with artists the caliber of the Kronos Quartet, as well as arranging and producing Ricardo Arjona (Fernando is the pianist on the Tarde clips I posted). Quincy Jones is very interested in having him do a film score, etc. His music is quintessentially non-commercial. Unless you are into progressive jazz or modern classical, you won't be a fan of his music. It is challenging to listen to, but so rewarding once you invest the time. So, Nonesuch is interested in this guy. Go figure! Good for Fernando, after years of recording for boutique labels with no distribution and no support. He is taking his music on tours of Europe, the US and Argentina with the sponsorship of his label. He is getting press coverage and finding his audience more than ever before. Maybe with popular music the picture is different, but someone out there still cares about serious, cutting-edge art music, and it ain't advertisers. If you want to check out some of Fernando's own music so you have a sense of what I'm talking about, you can get to it through his homepage: www.fernandootero.com.

I guess its the same can be said of many of the creative fields... These days everyone is a "designer" too or a "graphic artist".. They have tools and software that allow them to mess about with things that they never would have normally.. "Hey look, if I press this button the text goes all 3D and in multi-colors!" Having the tools does not an expert make. Even knowing how to use the tools still does not mean that you're going to be any good. Most, if not all the young, grad designers I interview know much more about ALL the software and what it can do than I will ever know - but most still can't come up with a simple good idea. Execution is nothing without an idea. I think we're safe for a while Dan. It's when the technology starts thinking for itself and coming up with original ideas and concepts and having a quality control function that we need to worry... Until then, we can all eat sweeties and look out the window at the sunshine, listen to our favourite tunes. And smile...

Jay - yeah the parallels are huge between what you & I do ... or are at least what we're trying to do! I would say that the software now is still very much an obstacle. It's much easier (and cheaper) than ever before to be creative on a professional level, but the tools and hardware still require a lot of effort to get idea pushed through to the end result. It still requires a great deal of will. Think about a future where the only obstacle against creating something in the digital realm would be simply having the whim! > Execution is nothing without an idea. Exactly. Look at the endless number of pointless tracks on Beatport, for example. I'm sure there are an equal if not greater number of design related projects out there lacking a reason!

Truly great art is rare, in whatever field. Even eras that are held up as exemplars of greatness, the Italian Renaissance in painting, for example, produced a huge amount of pedestrian work. Hell, even some of the greatest artists in said Renaissance have produced some pretty unimaginative work, to say nothing of the pap churned out like it was on an assembly line by their workshops. There is an awful lot of chaff compared to the wheat. We just forget this fact because we live in a world of "masterpieces", chosen by a committee somewhere and agreed upon in advance by a panel of experts before the canon is released to the masses. Creating art is a risky business and never a sure thing. Few are truly creative trailblazers, most are simply pedestrian followers. Technical mastery alone won't take you very far, I think we can all agree on that. That is why it is so exciting to discover a living artist who seems to be producing great work, and often enough to have you think what you first encountered wasn't a fluke. It is those days that I want to get down on my knees and thank the universe that there is still genuine creativity out there, and that I was able to find it!