Sep 11 2008
Podcast: The Devil and Benjamin Johnston – opinions on a changing musical landscape.
Exegesis for The Devil and Benjamin Johnston
In the course of the interview with Ben, I hoped to discover his opinions on various topics and themes relating to community and participatory culture. These topics and themes are well suited to Ben, in his position as both a producer and consumer of music in the current transitional climate. That is, music is now easier than ever before to produce, and indeed reproduce. The traditional support structures for emerging artists remain, record labels and publishers, with their capacity to both publish the records that contain the music, send them across the world and advertise them to people who may be open to hearing the music. Now one asks oneself “are these necessary”, given the increased ease of distribution afforded by such technology as streaming, or the social phenomena of social networking sites, such as Myspace. Furthermore, Ben offers an insight into the nature of “community feeling” when this is detached from a physical space, and instead triggered by a common interest or similar.
Ben’s opinion is that Myspace is not an ideal space to open a dialogue between fans and musicians, and that it doesn’t really open any new channels of communication and interconnectedness. Although theoretically musicians will communicate with the fans who are their Myspace “friends” this is hardly a dialogue. Fans may post on the wall, and bands may send out bulletins, or write blog notes, but neither is really engaging with the other. To continue along this manner of thinking, online interactions between fans have existed without Myspace, in the form of forums on bands’ official sites. However, one could contend that Myspace, being a Social Networking Site (SNS) engages fans in a manner different from forums, in that it works on a more web-like framework. A fan who looks at a band’s Myspace will see links to personal profiles of other fans, and, perhaps more importantly to other bands, who presumably share some common ground with the original band. While a forum may offer this as a feature, it will be because a user has gone out of their way to create it, whereas it is an integrated feature of Myspace. Whether this feature is promoting of a participatory culture or not is open to conjecture, but it definitely does simplify and extend the web nature of a fan community on Myspace.
On the relationship of a band and a record label, Ben clearly feels that bands are still reliant on the support offered by a record label. In order to reach upper echelons and traditional ideas of success it is necessary to have a label, an opinion which rings true, at least as far as I have researched, not knowing of anybody who has achieved widespread commercial success in the truest sense of the word. Incidentally, projects such as DJ DangerMouse’s The Grey Album may not have directly earned the authors any commercial capital, but have acted as free advertising for their later careers, thanks to the social and cultural capital they have earned. Ben views the relationship between artist and publisher as being two-way, with neither being taken advantage of, at least in concept. In practice he has concerns and cites the work of Steve Albini as an example. However, he believes a strong internet following grants a musician a large bargaining chip in negotiating a record deal, and that it is advantageous to have an internet following, even if it no more than a means to an ends. One can contend that if an artist doesn’t necessarily wish to achieve the traditional measures of success, and instead tailors their work to a market that wants low output from individual producers, but a high degree of specialisation. This market model is highly suited to participatory means of distribution, being as it follows the Long Tail theory of economics. The relatively small number of people who are looking for this musician’s product are able to find it thanks to various mechanisms in the internet – tagging of related music, online shops – and given it is exactly what they are looking for, will buy it.
Ben sees geographical proximity is a necessary stepping stone, more effective earlier than the internet community, and not as far reaching, particularly in a place like Perth. With this in mind, he also feels a connection with other bands based on nothing more than similar musical style, and hopes they would share this emotion. Clearly he feels a sense of community with these people, based on their common interests, which is commonly accepted to be a trait of people immersed in participatory culture, articulated by Henry Jenkins (among others) – “People who may not ever meet face to face and thus have few real-world connections with each other can tap into the shared framework of popular culture to facilitate communication” (Jenkins, Henry ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture’ accessed Sept 2008).
Ben offers an opinion that is somewhat reserved about the potential for fullscale change, and almost suggests that the present system is not going to change, at least not for musicians who hope to appeal to (and be exposed to) a large audience, the scale of which we are familiar with today. As an exploration of themes, I feel the podcast went quite well, with satisfactory answers coming to questions posed both by an interviewer and a listener. From a technical point of view, the sound seems crisp and audible above a faint room noise, with no glaringly obvious pops and crackles. The aimed for feel, of a low-budget bedroom/pirate recording is captured in the narration at the beginning and end. The levels are consistent across the multiple takes, providing a seamless transition from one piece of audio to the next. The experiment of having the music panned hard left seems to work also. All in all, the project I believe is a success.
chrisnben [4:58]
References
Anderson, Chris (2004) ‘The Long Tail’ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html accessed Sept. 2008.
Boyd, Dana M. and Nicole B. Ellison (2007) ‘Social Network Sites Definition, History and Scholarship’ http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html accessed Sept. 2008.
Albini, Steve (1993) ‘Some of your Friends are Already This Fucked’ http://www.negativland.com/albini.html accessed Sept 2008.
Jenkins, Henry (2003) ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture’ http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/starwars.html accessed Sept 2008.
The music you hear on this recording is written and recorded by Ben Johnston and Chris Ardley, and is used with permission.
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I enjoyed the natural tone of the conversation in this podcast. Also, the presenter’s technique of addressing ‘Internet’ as though a person was excellent, not only for the quirkiness of the idea but for how it conjures up an image of a community of listeners formed as a whole.
The one fault with this project was the very noticeable difference in volume between the presenter and the interviewee, which could have been altered in the editing process. The comment in the exegesis that it was intended to sound like a bedroom/pirate recording was helpful, but I still found that I could hardly hear the presenter.
The concept of community as triggered by a common interest is an aspect of myspace familiar to many social networking sites, and the fact that myspace is nowadays largely used for music promotion and sharing means it is a specific example for this kind of community. The specificity of myspace does mean that we see a forum for communication with bands and fans – but as the interviewee points out, this isn’t really how it works out. Although people can comment on artist’s music there isn’t much dialogue or sharing on the site itself.
In terms of branching out to find an audience, local music scenes are like an earlier version of the myspace phenomenon. But the pool they provide is different to the internet, which can bridge geographical gaps, yet provide new spaces for community based on shared interests and experience.
Myspace is still more of a one-way transaction. The traditional record label structure does seem to have more of a two-way interaction, yet it is not participatory nor community oriented because the power still lies largely with the record label. So in removing hierarchy, a site such as myspace is participatory. Even though myspace doesn’t encourage much communication between producers and consumers, the site does provide an opportunity for everyone to discover music they might like because a musician’s page has links to other music they like, so there’s still an element of participatory culture. The web-like structure of the internet is an advantage here. But I wouldn’t say myspace is an exemplar of participatory culture and community, as the interview seems to suggest. On this note, I thought the presenter explored this possibility really well, and the questions were well thought out.
The music was also cool.