The Problem Afflicting The Social Music Sphere

When it comes to the social side of Web 2.0 – you know, the MySpaces, the Facebooks – I’m lost. I do very well understand why such places exist, I simply cannot for the life of me grasp why they’ve become so popular, and, furthermore, managed to remain so. Baffling, really. When I consider all the time misspent maintaining relations with “friends” lists, most of whose contacts hold no real allegiance to one another anyhow, I wonder how such holes of (mostly) nothingness can manage to remain so damn entertaining.

Then again, they do offer one the regular item to write about, and thus keep quite a few bloggers employed, so perhaps I shouldn’t rag too harshly on them.

Anywho, the social sphere of the Web, regardless of one’s feelings about it, good or bad, is expanding. Fast. One of the sectors of this relatively-young-but-still-very-much-booming market involves music – and only music. Places like MOG, iLike, and Last.fm (currently the poster child of the group, what with its high-profile acquisition by CBS), dominate a genre of the social Web all about the audible and nothing to do without.

And I have to say, I do look more kindly upon this particularly market. Call it a musical bias. (There are three things in this world I harbor especial passion for: the written word, music, and photography.) If something has the blues, the rock, the folk, even some lyrically exceptional hip-hop, I tend to give that something a good word.

However, I can’t find it in myself to give wholehearted backing to those music-based sites and services mentioned above. Even Apple’s My iTunes, a new supplement delivered by those over at Infinite Loop (of whom I am a self-professed fan) doesn’t quite do it for me.

The reservations I have with the supply of social music creations stem from my devotion to the concept of music as it was originally intended. Music is no doubt an inherently social medium of communication. Song is universal. Its language is global. But the social music sphere that comprises Last.fm, iLike, and so forth, seems to place music in a set of tightly controlled boxes. Boxes that come with unnecessary restrictions passed onto the new digital space by the kings of copyright. They give one the impression that the sharing of music is taking place, but that is not the case at all. Those controlling the distribution of content to said sites and services keep track of where that content travels and who listens to it and how they listen to it, whether in sample form or complete. I find this very, very strange.

The sharing of recorded music has been a practice, though looked down upon by big media from the start, essential to the growth of the music industry. Back in the day, new sounds spread via the invention called the mixed tape. In the past decade or so, it was the CD that took those artists in the realm of the unknown and pushed them into the world of the known and, for some, the well-known. Today, it’s done via the Internet, only now we contend with DRM, a restriction placed on top of already established copyright laws. Many consumers remain woefully ignorant of it, and so as they continue to purchase DRM-laced content. As long as they do so, the invention will live.

The problem the music industry has is that it’s stubborn. It’s stubbornness has led to the rampant spread of illegal file sharing, and it stubbornness has ensured that the transition to viable replacements for tangible media outlets in the form of digital storefronts has been a slow one – not to mention one that’s had (and still does have) a great share of consumer frustration where things like compatibility and fair pricing are concerned. Thus, it’s coming up with diminishing quarterly results. (CD sales are shrinking at a faster rate than entirely digital sales are growing.)

The industry claims illegal file sharing is to blame. What the industry refuses to acknowledge is that the industry itself is to blame for illegal file sharing.

As long as music fans in the digital era allow the industry to continue to use its denial card at the table – the rules and regulations it has managed to work into the structures of today’s social media space provide it the leverage to do exactly that – music fans will continue to do the bidding of the music execs. If I’m not mistaken, it should be the other way around.

Don’t get me wrong, the concept of social music sharing on the Web is quite wonderful indeed, only at present the current makeup of those services of popular acclaim shows a bad layer beneath the surface, and one that very much needs eliminating.