Week 12 – On Music Is Your Business, chapter 1 and chapter 6

The value of this work as a primer to the music business is obvious – even the initial charts showing the variety of faces of the ‘fronts’ of music marketing are of value in acquainting musicians with the landscape, as well as providing a full map to choose from (in terms of specific direction – for instance, to go the self- and mom & pop- route through each ‘front’ rather than the more corporate and expensive route). One particular issue that concerned me about the first chapter, though, was the focus on traditional media as outlets for exposure – for instance, within the ‘promotion’ front, the heavy emphasis is still on radio play; my expectation is that most musicians who are fumbling through understanding the landscape of the music business are not yet at a point where they might legitimately be rallying for airplay (since they likely lack a record deal, thus lack the necessary funding and exposure to generate radio play beyond that which they might garner on solely the power of their recordings at small, independent and/or college radio stations).  In fact, upon further reflection, I can’t quite pinpoint the target audience for this book – it doesn’t seem likely that those who would find it most useful are absolute amateurs, but at the same time, I don’t quite know how much value the semi-professionals and new professionals would find in some of this information.

Another question that arises about this work is the relevance of some of the historical survey – it’s not that information about consolidation of media outlets is wrong, (it’s obviously correct), but rather if it’s relevant to the audience of this book. An author who mentions Fugazi must have some understanding of the development of that band and the label all of its releases have come out on – a band and label that eschew commercialism and celebrate independence from corporate conglomeration. The author seems to be attempting to survey the world of ‘the music business,’ including much of what exists as outside of the ‘business’ part, and perhaps focuses too much on historical fact and awkward/incomplete attempts at parallels (especially apparent in the table within the ‘changes in the way music is sold over the last 35 years’ section of chapter 6), rather than on capturing linear developments and admitting to disjunctures (which the Web, and the disconnect between popularity traditional promotional methods/outlets, seem to be).

Week 12 – On the Music Markup Language site, http://www.musicmarkup.info

As the question already indicates by asking ‘what do they leave out?’ the Music Markup Language site seems to be a substantial step forward for music informatics as regards universal readability and easy format switching and description of music, but with gaps in what might be considered the more human side of the informatics dyad, (human and machine/technology). What they leave out, then, includes much of what we’ve been preoccupied with during the length of this course, such as the social and economic issues bound to music production, distribution, and consumption. Indeed, though the technology (put most simply, representation of music in an XML-based language), if functional, could form a significant foundation (via a common language) for mapping music through its human-machine paths, the language alone is not an analysis, nor even a theoretical tool upon which to build analysis.