Week 10 – on The Future of the Music Business, chapters 19-20

The final chapters of Gordon’s book finally catch up to the present, with both the likely demise of the traditional music industry (revealed in an interview with the former president of Grokster, Wayne Rosso – at least as regards a substantial drop in revenue generation), and the spread of music into the virtual world. Gordon’s conclusions about the current state of the digital music marketplace are interesting, and show an historical trajectory that actually deflates some of the speculation in the previous chapters: Gordon not only points to the failure of the subscription model for music access, but also to the decreasing space of competitors in the virtual ‘box store’ environment dominated by iTunes and Amazon. The exploration of Second Life as a revenue-generating performance space seems like it may have some promise as a niche opportunity—when the entire world can show up virtually to ‘watch’ a ‘live’ performance in Second Life, it seems reasonable to assume that packing a virtual concert hall is quite a bit easier than trying to fill an actual concert hall.

Week 10 – on the Visual Complexity site, http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/index.cfm?domain=Music

Although this commentary will be similar to some of what I wrote in class last semester, I have doubts about the effectiveness of visualization of networks as a tool. I do believe this sort of project can be effective as a tool for discovery—for instance, illustrating connections between related artists—but I don’t quite understand the value (other than aesthetic) of this form of representation of connection rather than simple text lists. Interestingly, many of the projects linked to from the Visual Complexity site (at least music-related links) are based on data collected from various streaming sources, like Last.FM. It would be interesting to see this tool represented across multiple sites, especially if the resulting graphics could proportionally represent popularity, (like focus on a certain band across their Facebook and MySpace pages, as well as through Pandora, Last.FM, and other services – although this is sloppy, and FB or MySpace wouldn’t provide any data that would be really comparable to that collected from streaming audio sources ).