Dwell Music Alternate Weblog
On this weblog submit Keith Negus (Professor of Musicology at Goldsmiths, College of London) and Qian Zhang (Affiliate Professor on the College of Music and Recording Artwork, Communication College of China) current observations and a case-study from their new journal article on the evolution of the stay music financial system and new patterns of commodification which are rising within the face of digitalization.
The article is printed in Fashionable Music and Society and will be accessed at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007766.2021.1921909
The Covid-19 pandemic halted many actions we took as a right, but accelerated modifications underway lengthy earlier than the virus began circulating. It disrupted our habits and routines, but launched new patterns of behaviour into our lives – whether or not in properties, colleges and workplaces, or at sport stadiums, and in bars and eating places. As recounted in lots of posts on the Dwell Music Alternate and past, it has had a huge effect on stay music, but additionally given momentum to modifications already underway.
We think about these modifications, and their broader context, in an article simply printed in Fashionable Music and Society which offers a genealogical narrative of those shifts within the economies and industries of stay music, together with altering understandings of the stay expertise. On this submit, we define among the key arguments of the article and supply an illustrative instance of how these modifications to the music financial system have performed out in China.
Adjustments to the stay expertise
The article highlights how digital applied sciences have been built-in into stay occasions inside a broader ‘expertise financial system’, and the way stay music has been included into digital platforms and social media inside an ‘consideration financial system’. The expertise financial system (usually considered the specialness and shortage of concert events), and the eye financial system (requiring us to barter an abundance of tracks, clips, messages, apps, video games and so forth) exist collectively. As audiences seize performances on smartphones for importing and sharing, so stay music turns into a recorded factor of content material. The streaming of stay motion – whether or not a set from a basement membership, competition area, or a singer’s kitchen – can supply entry to a novel expertise. But, it additionally struggles for consideration within the swirl of plentiful content material, after which turns into a fraction of information saved within the warehouses, mountains, and subterranean caves of cyberjunk.
Digital platforms, streaming, and social media are altering how we take into consideration stay music, and including additional dimensions to being a musician. Changing into a pop musician not entails turning your self right into a ‘performing artist’ and a ‘recording artist’. It additionally entails turning into a ‘platform musician’ or, maybe, a ‘platform artist’. Within the following paragraphs we’ll clarify what we imply by these statements.
In our analysis now we have drawn on the work of Philip Auslander who identified that the time period ‘stay music’ started showing in dictionaries in the course of the Thirties to differentiate between stay and recorded sound in radio broadcasting. When folks listened to a phonograph cylinder or disk they had been fairly clearly listening to voices and music transmitted from a recording. However, the sound of a radio broadcast was extra ambiguous. The stay/recorded distinction turned an moral and a authorized means of categorizing broadcast sound (Auslander 2012). As Auslander additionally notes, the concept of stay music all the time implied a way of spatial and temporal co-presence. But, for a few years, the liveness of the actual place was valued greater than the liveness of the actual time.
Social media and digital platforms are more and more demonstrating that an expertise occurring in actual time is starting to amass higher emphasis and worth within the streaming of music. The stay expertise is not primarily about being current within the place the place a efficiency happens. Simply because the Walkman made recorded music extra cell and built-in into different environment, so streaming permits audiences a special expertise of stay music. Dwell streams will be accessed throughout a transitory journey on a prepare amongst strangers, when sitting alone in a park, or when gathered with buddies in a personal residence or in bars and cafes.
Platform Musicians in China
In our article we embody a extra prolonged dialogue of how the stay turns into a recording, and the way the recording turns into a part of a stay stream, and the way this each challenges and bridges the stay and recorded fashions of reaching audiences, and gaining success. We illustrate this right here as regards to the growing significance of streamed Chinese language expertise exhibits, and the way in which digital and social media have offered alternatives for what we name ‘platform musicians.’ We embody these examples, partially, to counteract the way in which China has been uncared for in discussions of the worldwide music industries, with students usually assuming a North Atlantic construction of the music enterprise and careers of widespread musicians derived from the research of rock music.
Expertise exhibits have been central to the music industries of Japan and South Korea. Expertise exhibits in China began life as showcases for the kind of selection leisure related to tv. They had been just like different expertise exhibits broadcast all over the world, however notably influenced by exhibits produced in Korea. But, a more recent sort of expertise present has been launched and will be seen as a part of an extended historical past that traces again, outdoors of tv, to the ‘battle of the bands’ that happened in native rock venues from the Sixties, and to contests in jazz ballrooms in the course of the Thirties. It’s a trendy digital inheritor to those pre-digital competitions, in addition to drawing on actuality tv.
The streamed Chinese language expertise present has develop into an necessary route by which musicians can attain followers and attain stardom. Though initially dominated by pop idols, the format now embraces a wider vary of genres, types, and identities. It has develop into a strategically vital format for indie, rap, singer-songwriters and dance musicians to interrupt out past restricted alternatives in small venues in native scenes, and out of doors of the trade buildings nonetheless dominated by idol manufacturing. Success on a expertise present will increase an act’s worth and offers efficiency alternatives throughout the standard levels of venues and festivals, together with the proliferating social media and digital platforms that require stay and recorded ‘content material.’
So, for instance The Rap of China (Zhōngguó yǒu xīhā) has opened up an area for the presentation of a style of televisual Chinese language rap, whereas encouraging debates about aesthetics, identities, and codes of public expression. Rave Now (Jì kèdiànyīn) is an digital dance music expertise present that provides viewers a window into the way in which tracks are produced and remixed utilizing turntables, laptops, and software program. I’m CZR–I’m Singer-Songwriter (Wŏ shì chàngzuòrén) follows contenders from their early demo tapes, by studio association, after which on to rehearsal, and staged efficiency.
The Huge Band (Yùeduìdexiàtiān), streamed on iQIY owned by Baidu, is a present that permits bands to be acknowledged, usually after years of enjoying small gigs. It has helped revitalise the indie scene, and allowed older performers to achieve newer audiences. A notable instance is the band New Pants (Xinkùzi) that had been shaped in 1996, launched their first album in 1998, but solely achieved wider success and recognition after profitable The Huge Band in 2019.
Streamed Chinese language expertise exhibits cross the stay and recorded. Performances could also be streamed as they’re going down. They might even be pre-recorded, along with narrative sections, after which streamed to permit voting and for stay feedback to be inserted throughout the display screen. Expertise exhibits present stay music to these unable to attend a gig venue (like stay broadcasts), and the publicity provides musicians entry to a extra standard touring profession on stage in entrance of audiences.
The expertise present dramatizes what Simon Frith as soon as known as the ‘shifting boundary between the “staged” and the on a regular basis’ (1996: 204). This commentary from the pre-digital age is equally relevant to digital platforms. It’s dramatized within the narratives and representations within the expertise present, as a lot as within the staged video or streamed performances on YouTube, Kaishou, or TikTok. The expertise present condenses the mechanics of the trendy music trade. It turns into a metaphor for the conflict of aggressive individualism and collective participation, as performers journey the legendary journey from obscurity to stardom, taking advantage of a winner-takes-all financial system while concurrently embedded into scenes, communities and fan cultures.
Outdoors of the expertise exhibits in China, a dynamic digital music infrastructure is creating inside which over 100 platforms, presently reaching over 600 million streaming customers, present shops for musicians to add recordings, stream performances, and obtain commentary. Though, within the early days the rewards had been by way of sorts of ad-hoc ‘digital gifting’, the platforms have gotten more and more redesigned to permit novice and unknown musicians a structured route in direction of audiences, and to attach with media and music industries intermediaries. For instance, in 2017 Tencent Music – a Chinese language firm on-line platform that develops streaming providers – initiated an ‘incentive undertaking’ to inspire indie musicians to add their recordings, claiming to achieve probably 800 million month-to-month customers. Tencent reportedly paid out 590 million Yuan (roughly 84 million U.S. {dollars}) to musicians (though contractual particulars of this aren’t clear, and it’s a difficulty for our ongoing analysis). This undertaking turned extra formally constituted because the Tencent Musician Program – a platform that permits musicians to create and share their music, join with publishers, and to obtain enter and recommendation on publicity, advertising and copyright. On the identical time, the platform permits listening, watching, socialising and interacting. Music platforms in China, starting from quick video platforms like TikTok, social media platforms like SinaWeibo, and music streaming platforms like QQ music, have initiated comparable initiatives to encourage musicians and achieve ‘content material.’ Final yr, Tencent introduced extra initiatives to help extra conventional folks and Chinese language dialect music.
In our article we check with ‘platform musicians’. This emergent id builds upon and extends the way in which commerce, trade and expertise, intersecting with the actions of musicians and audiences, allowed for the emergence of the ‘recording artist’, and industrial venues afforded the ‘stay performer’. An excellent instance of this is able to be No Occasion For Cao Dong (Cao Dong Meiyou Paidui). This Taiwan band has, since its formation, used platforms to launch recordings, to stay stream recordings and performances, and created the title track for the online game Devotion. Though there are lots of variations between what No Occasion For Cao Dong are doing and the presentation of musicians on expertise exhibits (and the way in which idols and celebrities use platforms), there’s a rising development for bands to make use of audio streaming and stay apps from their earliest days. A wide range of platforms afford the mixing of efficiency and recording with different visible arts and transferring photos. Platforms enable musicians to create with different musicians, and to place their work on-line and obtain instant responses, and to achieve followers and to work together with these followers. The platform musician bridges the stage, studio, and display screen. The stage turns into a platform, and the platform turns into a stage.
Keith Negus and Qian Zhang
References
Auslander, Philip (2012) ‘Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective’ PAJ: A Journal of Efficiency and Artwork, 34/3, pp. 3-11.
Frith, Simon (1996) Performing Rites, Oxford: Oxford College Press.
