New and Current Music

In the digital age the means through which music fans and casual enthusiasts can be apprised of ongoing developments in the current music scene have greatly increased in availability and ease of use, with new artists and record labels ascending quickly into the forefront of new music in large part due to the quick methods of exposure they gain access to through popular online sites and services. Though major and long established music acts have frequently seemed confused about the requirements of navigating this very new and different media landscape of the post-analogue era, successful stars of current music have typically manifested a facility with and ability to take advantage of the new opportunities posed by digital means. Music fans who feel they are lagging behind in comfort level and knowledge of new music would do well to attend closely to some of the most avidly followed and respected institutions of the current music world and understand how they can use the various services and functions offered by these sites to their advantage in keeping up with their long established favorites as well as finding new enthusiasms to follow, while people hoping to make an impression as performers or behind-the-scenes professionals in the new music world would also do well to be apprised of the methods through digital news and gossip is spread and gathered.

The cornerstone of the current music scene of digitally driven marketing and distribution can today be considered to take the form of iTunes, which through its companion device the iPod helped to popularize the use of digital file formats, often at no point derived from a physical form such as a CD, as a widely available mode for listening to current music. iTunes offers the functions of allowing the purchase of a large degree of commercially available back catalogs and new music through its Internet-enabled function, while the iPod, though not unique as a small and portable device to listening to such music files, did attain a degree of commercial success which eluded other formats.

The state of music journalism, which for a long time had been dominated by the institution of Rolling Stone Magazine, with its roots in the countercultural rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s and its subsequent adoption of an establishment status in the music industry, has also been changed by new music developments, such as the widespread creation of online sites which post mp3s, articles and reviews of older and current music. Though many are fairly limited in scope and commercial viability and can at most be considered amateur projects, a site which might be considered the Rolling Stone of the current music scene exists in the form of the site Pitchfork, which offers extensive coverage of new music and thus far in the time that it has existed has played an important role in creating the foundations for the popular success of new artists and bands, in the process earning a wide degree of visibility in the music industry.

Types of Music

Though in a certain sense music might be thought of as one of the purely entertainment-providing forms of art, essentially direct and sensory in its appeal to listeners, as opposed to an artwork with essential visual or narrative elements, the way in which music is understood and quantified by formal systems of academic analysis and the informal habits of fans is far from being unselfconscious or completely intuitive. Sorting and understanding the different types of music that are in existence is a task that is heavily conditioned by both currents of thought in existence in intellectual culture and social practices and rituals governing the circumstances under which music is made into something of use by its listeners. Music scholars who have departed from the strictly technical means through compositions are created and performed have often looked at the ways in which types of music are created, not only for the purpose of providing classifications for newly formed genres, but also for inquiring into the basis for recognizing differences between types of music and drawing value judgments from such observations. One such important distinction often made by both serious scholars and casual enthusiasts in that made between types of music consists of the supposed difference in existence between serious and popular music.
Though this boundary has long existed for the purpose of differentiating between types of music, it is often applied in different ways and to different fields of music, so that one genre considered to be popular and not worthy of receiving serious analysis during one era in musical thought made by another have come to assumed preeminence in intangible standards of “respectability” and prestige over another, more recently formed genre in music. For instance, jazz music at the start of the 20th century was considered a strictly popular genre, intended primarily for entertainment and for holding dances between people of low social status. Later in the century, however, jazz had been accorded great respect among the different types of music, in comparison to which enthusiasts for jazz music often considered records released in the rock & roll genres to be “merely” commercial, jazz in the interim have moved upward in critical respectability and downward in commercial value. As rock music became more important in the cultural experience of younger generations, for whom it moved away from the strictly social function of functioning as a sonic backdrop to dances and became a genre noted in its own worth for containing worthwhile means for expression, a distinction was created in the rock world between records that were considered to attain the condition of seriousness and those that remained entirely in the realm of popular culture. An ongoing phenomenon in the culture surrounding the production and reception of music in the contemporary world is that of the increasing proliferation in types of music that are identified as existing by serious and casual observers, with the partisans of such fields finding qualities of seriousness that others may be less capable of picking up on.

Music Cds

In the history of the modern popular music industry, a recurrent phenomenon has appeared in the form of the business’s need to adapt to new delivery mechanisms for the distribution of albums and songs to consumers, which later is occasioned by some measure of resistance and reluctance on the part of the industry’s business leaders. Over the course of the 20th century recording industry, new innovations were introduced for distributing music in physical form, each of which seemed to threaten current industry practices by changing the means through which consumers could access music. One particularly major innovation came in the form of compact discs, or cds, which introduced the seeds of long-term change in the form of utilization of digital technology. Consumers who purchased music cds could conceivably make a relatively high-quality copy of the music contained therein and then easily pass the new music cds to other would-be paying customers. Another complaint that arose on the part of consumers, though this criticism more gradually and with more of an aesthetic than a practical basis, as to the small size of cds, which at first had increased their usability by ensuring that music cds were easily transported and stored in comparison to larger formats like vinyl LPs, but also fostered the suspicion that the high prices charged for rather unremarkable-appearing devices were inflated more for the music industry’s convenience than by necessity of the production techniques involved. When relatively high-speed internet became widely available, to some extent the bottom dropped out of the market for music cds, which had been superseded by the digital file formats they initially helped introduce. Illegal downloads of popular music originally released on cds have become widespread through peer to peer sharing websites, as have legitimate music downloads enabled through online formats such as iTunes.

In a move that has been taken as an early sign of what measures the beleaguered music industry might take to adjust its business model to the exigencies of the online age, the world’s largest music company, the Universal Music Group, has announced that as a matter of policy it will be undertaking an experiment in lowering the prices asked for cds. In the press release, reported through Billboard Magazine, Universal Music spread the news that it would be lowering the price of cds released onto the market to $10 or lower. The change will not take effect immediately and is being referred to by Universal Music Group as only a “pricing test,” which will not apply across the board to purchases, but will be limited in its applicability to newly released music cds and then only to those released in the U.S. For all of these provisions, the move is still being looked to by the company and by the executives of other music industry labels as a possible stop-gap measure to fulfill the dual functions of helping to return older fans and introduce younger fans to the habit of looking to cds as a source for music.