Jazz is an additive idiom, that is, through one artist’s reaction of another’s work- whether antithetical, imitative or even misinterpretive- a mutation takes place that ensues the progression of Jazz music. Listening is an integral part to which jazz artists react to, and are influenced by, other artists. As students of jazz music it is a cardinal pedagogical tool.
Whether it be Joe ‘King’ Oliver’s influence and mentorship of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker’s influence on the bop era, Kenny Wheeler’s influence on Scott Tinkler’s improvisation, or the less explicit influence of Lee Morgan in Ambrose Akinmusire playing, something he often refers to in interviews, one can see that for every artist there is an artist that has influenced them in one way or another. The majority of Oliver’s influence on Armstrong came from them being on the bandstand together, or jamming at Oliver’s home.
The examples above stretch across an entire century of jazz music. In that time, technology has advanced astronomically and has changed the way musicians listen to their ‘influencer’. Since the invention of the phonograph and the continual advancements in music technology since, the majority of jazz music has been consumed through recordings. The last two decades has seen the most dramatic leap for music technology since the invention of recording technology (Boone, 2008).
The world has entered the New Media age, an age of rapid globalisation where instantaneous gratification has become the norm. The way both practitioners and listeners consume jazz music has changed with technology.
With that in mind, this paper will attempt to answer the following question:
How has the New Media Age affected the way we listen to and are influenced by music?
This is an extremely broad topic, especially for such a short work, which embodies a lot more than sociomusicology and the world of cultural and media theory. It is largely a question of science, particularly neuro-plasticity. As such, this overly expansive topic will be answered by three smaller, more reasonable questions:
1- How are we consuming and listening to music differently today?
2- Do our listening and consumption habits give music a lesser value in today’s society?
3- How are these differences affecting the way we are influenced as jazz music students?
Since the invention of the phonograph, the very first recording/playback device, towards the end of the 20th century, music in many ways became more of a physical entity rather than a sonic one- an idea first theorized by Marshall McLuhen in his work ‘Understand Media: The Extension of Man’, where he argues that ‘The Medium is the Message’. (Mcluhen, 1964).
Whether it be phonograph wax cylinders, LP’s, cassettes, or CD’s, the physicality of music in the majority of the twentieth century has shown that listening was limited to a geographical affair. To share and to listen to music, people had to have an actual physical copy. Their worth was directly linked to their material form.
Written in 1964 with the phonograph his predominant musical subject of analysis, one might dismiss Mcluhen’s work as being too outdated to shed any light on the topic of music technology. On the contrary, Mcluhen highlights the considerable developments in music technology and its consumption by stating: “It is a truism among jazz performers that recorded jazz is ‘as stale as yesterday’s newspaper.'” (Mcluhen 310). It is extremely doubtful that such a thought is still considered a truism by the jazz musicians of today, indicating the transformation of social and cultural attitudes of recorded jazz.
Pre-digital music also relied upon a distribution channel. If a consumer wanted to purchase music from an artist, it had to come through intermediaries such as distributors, wholesalers, and retailers. These distribution channels had to work like a chain for consumers to receive a copy. From first reading about the record review in Downbeat Magazine to owning a copy could take a great deal of time and effort, providing a delayed sense of fulfillment. Even with the invention of the portable music playback device the Walkman throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, consumers still had to rely on carrying a physical copy of a cassette or Cd.
Enter the mp3. In a single decade music technology had altered the consumption of music from a physical entity to a virtual one. From the first commercial digital music player, MPMAN, released in 1998 with a capacity of up to 32 megabytes (roughly 8 songs), to 5 gigabytes (roughly 1250 songs) iPod in 2001, the world was introduced to the convenience of completely portable music.
A 1999 Wall Street Journal quoted a schoolboy’s view on mp3’s, saying that “‘At my school, almost everyone who has an internet connection has MP3s,’ says Brendan, who himself has one and a half gigabytes of mp3 music, the equivalent of several hundred singles.” (Burkart, 2006). To the 21st century consumer, one and a half gigabytes isn’t a lot of music considering there 128 gigabyte iPods available purely for playing music on. This quote also highlights the colossal advances the internet has made to the music technology and consumption.
The internet changed the face of music technology, spoiling consumers with endless choices and also providing the phenomenon of instantaneous gratification. Damon Krukowski (of Galaxie 500) acknowledges the extraordinary change the internet has made to the face of music by stating ‘I’m sure each generation of musicians feels they’ve lived through a time of tremendous change, but the shifts I’ve witnessed in my relatively short music career– from morphing formats to dissolving business models– do seem extraordinary.’ Consumers can go on the internet and with a few clicks own the music they are seeking, both legally and illegally. The distribution channel has completely changed, with many of the intermediaries mentioned earlier are being left out completely as consumers are purchasing music directly from the source. (Burkart, 2006).
Consumers don’t even need to purchase music to listen to it anymore, with websites such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and YouTube providing free music to be listened to at any time. On top of that, we have to consider growing illegal downloads market, which is growing exponentially according to Muso Magazines Global Music Piracy Insight Report 2016, with 31% growth in 2015 and a further 60% growth in 2016 reported.
Even more noticeable is the growth of the increasingly popular music streaming services that have gained enormous followings in the last few years. Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, and Vivo are the most well known free music streaming services, with large global corporations Apple (Apple Music), Microsoft (Microsoft Groove), and Google (Google Play Music All Access) taking a piece of the pie with monthly paid streaming after a trial period. Even smaller companies like Australia’s JB Hi-Fi (JB Hi-Fi Now) have a paid streaming service, indicating the just how large the music streaming market is.
So what does this mean for musicians? As Krukowski says, ‘The first album I made was originally released on LP only, in 1988– and my next will likely only be pressed on LP again. But in between, the music industry seems to have done everything it could to screw up that simple model of exchange; today it is no longer possible for most of us to earn even a modest wage through our recordings.’ Krukowski is drawing attention to the fact we place lesser value on music today, with artists who thrived on record sales in the 20th century now struggling to even sell records in the 21st century due to the rise of the internet, the mp3, and music streaming services.
The ethics and economics of music streaming services has been debated for as long as these services have been around, leaving musicians ranging from local to world renowned artists very restless and discontent when only receiving ‘between $0.006 and $0.0084’ per stream/play on Spotify according to Verge Magazine. Spotify created Spotify Artists (https://artists.spotify.com/), a website dedicated to defending its business model attempting to extinguish the arguments of the growing horde of angry musicians. The fact they had to create this website only strengthens the argument for how flawed their business model (and those of other streaming services) are, and how grossly unfair they are to musicians. Despite the concerns of musicians worldwide, Spotify is still growing at an enormous rate reaching 50 million paying members in March 2017, growing from 40 million in September 2016, and 30 million in March 2016. These alarming figures taken from Spotify’s twitter account only enhance the argument that we as a society are placing a much lesser value on music today.
David Byrne, a blogger, is harshly critical of society in relation to the current state of music, comparing the decline in the music industry with that of depleting natural resources. He expresses that streaming services ‘allow one to play exactly what you want, when you want it—as if you own the record… This reinforces the idea that music is something you can (and should) get for free, even if now it’s “legal.” For consumers this is a pretty amazing deal—it’s like Napster, but legal! The government tends to view things that way too—what’s good for the consumer is theoretically encouraged and supported. Sadly, consumers and businesses that cater to their demands don’t often take the long view; they’ve been known to overfish huge swaths of the oceans, spill oil over and over, chop down all the trees in a forest and then wonder why the topsoil that would support reforesting has washed away. So, I wonder similarly if streaming-on-demand might be similarly a business model that will deplete the resource—we who create music—that it depends upon. Many industries have depleted the resources they depend on, it’s not like it hasn’t happened before.’
So why as a society are we subscribing to this new music technology knowing full well that it is destroying the music industry? The phenomenon of instant gratification made available by this new technology has made it all too easy, with the sense of remorse and guilt usually overridden by feelings of joy and fulfillment of having unlimited music resources at our fingertips. Quite simply, the consumers relationship has with music has changed along with technology.
In saying that, new music technology is not all bad. Even though it has changed consumers listening habits to the detriment of the music industry, it has allowed consumers access to the most obscure, well hidden music from anywhere in the world. The internet has well and truly smashed through regional barriers and created a global market for global consumers. It connects people with each other to discuss and share music, promoting the social aspect of music and often keeping smaller, more specialised genres alive. The ‘Jam of the Week’ Facebook Group is a prime example of this, with musicians all around the world posting various videos, and other musicians often starting a conversation about the music.
Exposure is another positive to come from the New Media Age. One might consider this an oxymoron considering musicians on Spotify and other streaming platforms are being streamed for ‘exposure’, but exposure is a thing that musicians worldwide are taking advantage of. Take Jacob Collier for example. A multi instrumentalist who created home split screen videos of popular songs often with extreme reharmonisation became an YouTube sensation in 2012 when his video cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ went viral. He has since become a household name to jazz musicians worldwide. Other examples of musicians that hit the big time after going viral are Gotye with his 2011 hit ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, and Sydney’s own Dane Laboyrie, with his 2016 composition ‘Rock Out With Your Lockout’.
Considering all of the above, what does this mean for us as music students? With virtually no studies investigating the uses of listening as a pedagogical means it is difficult to come up with a definitive response.
Listening, for a jazz musician, is a cardinal tool for acquiring knowledge, authenticity, and artistic integrity in the jazz idiom. Almost all of the most used jazz pedagogy ‘textbooks’ place a strong emphasis on listening, with Jamie Aebersold’s ‘Jazz Handbook’ assigning entire chapters to listening, and David Baker’s ‘Jazz Improvisation’ providing each exercise with some prescribed listening. With such a strong emphasis on the jazz canon by leading authors of jazz pedagogy, one can understand the significance of listening on students of jazz music.
Fred Hersch, a New York based jazz pianist, gave a masterclass in 2013 in which he discussed the need for ‘dedicated listening’ (Sun, 2013). He suggests ‘listening to a track seven times and checking out something specific every time: how the piano comps behind different soloists, how the bass player sets the time, etc.’ He also suggests that listening should be more of a social occasion, saying that in his younger days he would ‘hang out with friends and listen to LPs—late night listening sessions, hangs, whatever.’ Apart from being very sound advice to the prospective jazz student, it also highlights the difference in the way consumers are listening to jazz in today’s age. Listening to jazz used to be a social occasion, but now with more technology it has become more and more of a solitary activity.
‘Blessed’ with an ever expanding library of music, the idea of information overload (too much information for one person to absorb in a world of expanding digital technology), a term conceived during the New Media Age, has come to the fore in many technological reports since the birth of the internet.
Nicholas Carr, the renowned author of ‘What the Internet is doing to our Brains’, discusses the decline in libraries and books and debating that computers serve only as distractions. “A book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distraction that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It is designed to scatter our attention. It doesn’t shield us from environmental distractions; it adds to them. The words on a computer screen exist in a welter of contending stimuli.” Although not specifically stated, it has hard not to draw the assumption that Carr’s argument would be the same with jazz music being his subject instead of books. This is particularly alarming for jazz music students, with jazz requiring ‘maximal participation among players’ (McLuhen, 1964).
Science has warned us that our attention spans and memories are being altered by computers in the age of connectivity and instant gratification. People are retaining less and less information because the need to ‘remember information has instead been replaced with the imperative to remember where information is located’. (Wittingslow, 2011). In the same vein, Pat Metheny describes his reasoning to his 70 minute through-composed composition as ‘a reaction to a world where things are getting shorter, dumber, less interesting, less detailed, more predictable’ (Adler, 2005). The idea that a world renowned music in Metheny created this masterpiece with that reasoning firms the belief that new media technology is affecting the way we, as jazz music students, listen to and are influenced by music. Quite simply, without ‘dedicated listening’ (Sun 2013), we are limiting our growth as jazz musicians.
To summarise, jazz musicians and students of the past had far more limited resources than those in today’s New Media Age, and would either have to attend gigs or listen to a single album on repeat. They did not have the phenomenon of instant gratification. The New Media Age has changed the way we listen to music, with more and more music is being consumed each year from music streaming services, CD’s, and other online platforms. Although there are positives like global networking and the exposure to new unheard music, the negative connotations firmly outweigh the positives, with musicians struggling to make a living, many music distribution intermediaries going out of business, the devaluation of music, and above all less and less is being properly listened too. Listening is an extremely important device not only in a pedagogical sense, but also a social aspect. Backed by scientific research and firmly believed by renowned jazz musicians our brains are retaining less information in the New Media Age as we only need to remember where information is rather than the information itself.