Are They Saying Music Was The Message?

Reviewing the reading on new media’s impact on society from two different viewpoints, I decided to relate the material to the music industry.

Marshall Luhan states that social interaction is determined more by the changing formats of media than by the information that media delivers. These mediums have now become the triggers of events, where they originally were designed to report them.

McLuhan proposes that media itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.

 A prime example in the music industry is the role of a performer. The Bard originally traveled and performed in social settings, now due to the invention of recording, the musician now has to worry about who is receiving what percentage of a royalty from their record or sheet music.

Many artists of the past 50 years started in live performance and only sustained their fame through recording and acting in movies. A prime example is Doris Day.

Doris Day was originally a big band chanteuse who, through radio appearances, gained a recording contract. Her popularity then led to her acting in movies and television. If she had not adapted to the new mediums of performance her career would not have taken off as it did. Henry Jenkins introduces the concept of convergence, where the end result becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This horizontal marketing allowed her to have more widespread appeal than those who just stuck to music or film.

Artists are now being swept to short-term fame by viral distribution through non-commercial groups that spreads their name through mediums such as YouTube and Twitter. These in-the-moment formats cause those artists to disappear just as quickly when they are no longer the most popular act of the moment. The ability to make the most of this marketing is lost by the sheer vastness of these sites, creating a lack of longevity with today’s artists.

 The participatory perspective of social networking forums like FaceBook, allows quality to suffer in direct relation to quantity. The new business format of music offers a quantity over quality perspective where artists are not given enough time to put forward fully developed musical ideas which would give them sustainability.

The convergence of mediums, which is in some way essential, can also be frustrating and irrelevant to an aspiring musician. In the end, a musician cannot afford to rely on product sales alone and may return to performing live for a fee to attempt commercial success. These mediums grant access to the public’s mind, but lack the ability to help you stay in their hearts with a lasting impression. Jenkins suggests being able to stick in the mind of an audience, to the exclusion of other distractions, might come back to the message being more meaningful to an audience than the mediums they are presented on. This returns to the quality of an act needing to equal the hype surrounding it. Luham’s contention that the medium is the message now needs synergy with the value of the content.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/ / CC BY 2.0

Tags: artist, convergance, facebook, Henry Jenkins, Marshall Luhan, media, social networking, spreadability, stickiness