> The music industry’s product is, for want of a better way
> to put it, a relatively simple, relatively traditional
> product. Audio recordings just aren’t that technology-
> heavy.

My main disagreement is that the music industry's product, in terms of how it actually makes money, is celebrity, rather than music per se. And celebrity, by its very nature, will always be expensive to manufacture.

Of course, people do pay for great new sounds and special effects as well as for stars, but if the cost of the former is plummeting, that just makes it more important for the culture industry to bank on the latter, where weight is an advantage that technology can't take away. In other words, even more of your ticket price for a cultural product will need to go towards getting the stars involved into magazines and onto talk shows, and to pay for stars who've already been there.

Edited by author 05-22-2003 12:55 PM
Will everyone PLEASE stop with the William Gibson worship, already?

Even William Gibson is tired of William Gibson.

This isn't 1987, you know....

Xeni is an AI net construct. Meatspace appearances are arranged by hiring an actress who repeats lines fed to her by a wireless earphone.

Two comments:

1) Who the hell is Xeni, really? She appears everywhere, like Wonder Woman.

2) It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.

I hate it when people get into specifics like I'm about to, but this is a slip.

First of all, everyone uses the spelling "John Woo." Whether there really is any difference, or most people are actually wrong about the spelling, despite John Woo being the director of movies that had his name mispelled in the credits (?), I don't know. There is a lot of variation in American spelling of Chinese names. I just know I have never seen "John Wu" used anywhere.

"Wu" is a perfectly valid spelling. I just don't understand why Gibson has to buck the consensus, if he's aware of it.

Secondly, John Woo is not known for wires, whatsoever. Yuen Woo Ping is known for wire work. (I must note that I've always heard "yo ping" when anyone says his name, and it might be that Gibson read "Wu" -- so the Chinese name thing is very debatable. The fact remains that John Woo isn't known for wire work -- he's just more widely known.)

Asian cinema is an obsession of mine, and I realize I'm coming off like an even bigger geek than William Gibson, but this did make me question his intelligence.

>>The future of musicianship is for everyone to become musicians.

that's like saying every Vorgon should be writing their own poetry.

I'm surprised even Gibson missed the mark so badly. Gibson equates music with music recordings. I often think about a remark in the book "Seven Arguments For The Elimination Of Television," it says that everyone likes to listen to music, but it never occurs to them that they could sing, or even whistle their own tune. Music is a medium that needs no instruments, ultimately it all comes from the human voice singing. It doesn't even need a recording medium other than the human brain to remember the tune.
The future of music is not technologically determined. The future of musicianship is for everyone to become musicians. Professional musicians have many roles; performer, composer, teacher, mentor, etc. Why would anyone want to listen to The Beatles for the kazillionth time when they could pick up a guitar and listen to themselves playing The Beatles instead?

I'd love to hear about the audiance's reaction to this speech.

If they were expecting some light-duty Popular Mechanics style futurism, I imagine they'd come out of this feeling rather stunned.