If a book publishing company prohibited a nonfiction author to cite other texts, banned their usage of footnotes and edited out and deleted every passage that seemed to reference another text, what’s left? If Soundcloud, and then other free media streaming sites, deletes all of the mixes, remixes, and songs with samples then what’s left? (The answers are a pure type of fiction and a pure type of ”original song”, respectively. Why are these categories deemed more valid, and how are they really that different when they take, sample and appropriate, but just change it enough so that it can be claimed as new?)

Terre Thaemlitz, in a lecture recently, exclaimed in response to this authorship panic that “DJs aren’t artists - artists are DJs!”

the world is for profit, the mall is huge...

the thickest single mp3

To ask “what is the bpm of a song?” is to ask “what is a minute?” and also “what is a beat?”

Italian classical music includes an extensive terminology to communicate tempo, changes in tempo and mood associated with tempo. If live performance were our current form of playback technology and somehow we still had the genres and type of musical output of 2015 a score for footwork might include ‘playing rap, jazz samples as “saltando”which translates to “jumpy, fast, short” or a witch house score might call for rap samples to be played “misterioso,” or “mystical, in a shady manner”. The usage of these words and phrases acknowledges the expressive emotional power that tempo has on a song, identifying a spectrum of emotions that can be manifested through acceleration, deceleration, swiftness and sluggishness.

THE WORLD IS OVERPOPULATED WITH MUSIC! There is too much audio, there are too many soundclouds, bandcamps, mixclouds, djs, events, bands, electronic musicians, solo artists, labels, music festivals, music blogs, music magazines, mixtapes, tapes, records, cds, mp3s, aiffs, wavs, flacs, torrents, ETC. But for some reason we (I) continue onwards; we produce, surging with output. Often it feels like there is no music product that can be “new.” Somewhere in between the blur of streaming, downloading, buying, collecting, archiving, listening, consuming, processing, creating, producing, playing, performing, djing, uploading and sharing there might be some room for innovation, if it’s not just the smear of all of those actions itself.

However, the frequency and pace of how music is listened to and consumed has been cranked up to a relative bpm of 3,000 and is certainly a symptom of a technologically accelerating culture. At one point people supposedly listened to entire albums, divided into two halves, first with records and then with tapes. With digital formats, such as cds, people began to listen to albums divided into songs. With streaming, a listener will listen to an individual song, divided into 30 second durations, at which point she may choose to switch to another song.

Once saved for specific occasions, music has reached a state where it is present at all times and circumstances. Music, relentlessly, becomes a soundtrack for social events, entertainment, shopping, jogging, driving, taking the subway, cooking, making love, working, walking, dancing, worshipping, drinking, smoking, sleeping, drawing, waiting, television shows, partying, relaxing, tasks, cleaning, the gym (the elliptical, the stationary bike, lifting, the treadmill, the stairmaster) biking, celebrating, meditating, advertising, clubbing, dining, “surfing the web,” thinking, conversing.. Music becomes less of an activity in itself and more commonly a continuous soundtrack, whether from a computer, headphones or external speakers. Music is treated less as a valuable or coveted object and more like the cheap and insignificant couple of megabytes that it is.