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44.100 kHz-8.9 dBIn a time and society where everything can be categorized and commercialized, digital forms of music
have slipped into a liminal area. The chaos in attempts to price digital music has had a profound cultural
influence on live performance, the way people listen to music and the way artists approach making music.
For musicians, the inability for recorded music to be reliably sold or bought in a digital world has
shifted the monetary emphasis back to performance. Ironically, this resembles a time before recorded music
existed at all, where performance was the only dissemination and presentation of music. However, thischange is occurring at a time where the availability of recording software and technology is widespread.
Garageband is automatically installed in mac computers and there are many varieties of basic andprofessional music software available through the internet. For anyone with access to a computer and aninternet connection, music is no longer limited by the constraints of live performance, yielding an increase inmusic that is created through the process of recording and engaging with the medium of electronic software.
The act of creating music through the act of experimenting or working with the medium of recording itself is
not new, but the growing popularity and regularity of this music process and the amount of resulting music
made this way is new.
The financial imperative to perform live (rather than sell recordings) and the growing popularity ofprocess based electronic music are increasing at the same time, converging in a confrontation withtraditional forms of live musical performance. The type of live music that an audience traditionally expects
from a show works very well if the music was written by playing live in the first place. For these types ofartists and bands, a recording tends towards a documentation of the live act. For artists that compose
through recording, inversely the live performance is a presentation or a translation from the music’s originalformat. Similar to the process of writing a book, once the pages are written the author is irrelevant to thebook. A reading of the book is more of a presentation of a finalized object than a live, dynamic performance.
There are many different types of electronic music and many ways for it to be performed andpresented; including ways that are successfully dynamic and alive. However, when this new type of music
attempts to conform to old standards of performance, the audience views it as inauthentic, fake, deceitfuland lazy; such as when a vocalist lip syncs over prerecorded tracks, instrumentalists play along torecordings or when an artist performs only using a laptop. The financial pressure on concerts and playing
live has obstructed a type of experimentation and creativity that has inversely blossomed in newcontemporary electronic music. Contemporary artists that don’t create their music live should not attempt toimitate a traditional live music performance and equally, audiences should not expect a traditional liveperformance. New electronic music performances are the most successful when both the artist andaudience embrace the qualities that are specific to its medium.
For the consumer, the ability to have access to unlimited music for free has made the presence ofmusic ubiquitous and almost inescapable. With a foundation of the necessary software and hardware,streaming, downloading and sharing music is easy and buying music is inexpensive. There are very few
risks or consequences to owning and collecting music; digital accumulation or hoarding becomes a hobby
concerned with quantity over quality. Everyone and anyone becomes a “music collector” and music
becomes a default backdrop to everything and anything. Once saved for specific occasions, music hasreached a state where it is present at all times and circumstances. Music, relentlessly, becomes asoundtrack for social events, entertainment, shopping, jogging, driving, taking the subway, cooking, making
love, working, walking, dancing, worshipping, drinking, smoking, sleeping, drawing, waiting, televisionshows, partying, relaxing, tasks, cleaning, the gym (the elliptical, the stationary bike, lifting, the treadmill, thestairmaster) biking, celebrating, meditating, advertising, clubbing, dining, “surfing the web,” thinking,conversing.. Music becomes less of an activity in itself and more commonly a continuous soundtrack,
whether from a computer, headphones or external speakers. Music is treated less as a valuable or coveted
object and more like the cheap and insignificant couple of megabytes that it is.
The time, money, thought and process that goes into the production of music becomes irrelevant inthe medium of the mp3. Whether thousands of dollars of musical equipment or just one laptop running
garageband, whether it was created over three years or in an afternoon, its final format is equalized in adigital file. Among digital audio files, there is an entire hierarchy of uncompressed, lossless and lossy audio
formats. Individually, each file can be quantified and identified by varying characteristics, including size inmegabytes, bit rate in kilobits per second, sample rate in kilohertz, volume in decibels, time in minutes andseconds and a waveform. The most efficient way to distinguish between them, especially for pricing
purposes, is by format, size in megabytes and length in minutes or seconds.
In the itunes store you can download an mp3 for .99$ and an album can range, but starts at $9.99.
Amoeba recently digitized their rare record collection and is pricing music based on individual track format –an mp3 is 78¢, an mp4 is 80¢ and a wav is $1.50. Amazon prices range with the format, popularity andseller. Additionally, there are independent sites and owners that charge whatever they want, averaging
around seven dollars an album.
If pricing is an expression of the physical object, the labor involved and its cultural value, it’s not
absurd to price digital music files based on their technical characteristics. The pricing of digital music basedon technical qualities seems absurd and arbitrary because its price seems like the median between twootherwise reasonable prices. On one side of the spectrum, a closer inspection of the composition, work,time, cost and maybe even brilliance that produced some music makes 99¢ seem offensive to the artist. On
the other side of the spectrum, paying any amount at all for a digital file seems offensive to the consumer, as
it can easily be streamed or downloaded for free.
No matter how cheap digital music can be priced it will always feel unjustified to a certain generation,
as if free mp3s are an entitlement. In an effort to cut down on the amount of trash in cities, there have been
attempts to install “pay as you throw” systems where each bag of trash is charged a small fee. The intention

is to bring more awareness in how much waste is produced and encourage efforts towards developing
different habits to decrease waste volume. However, people have responded with outrage and hostility;
there have even been cases of uncontrollable fires as burning trash in the forest became a common practice
to avoid a meager price. For a specific generation, whether they grew up with the internet or adapted to it,
pricing mp3s feels as offensive as putting an explicit price tag on a given necessity, like volumes of water ortrash.
Mp3s, as isolated objects, are essentially free. Buying mp3s seems more like a choice or acting on awill to “do the right thing” than an accepted way of engaging in listening to music. As an alternative, mp3s
are available to stream, download and share, easily, for free. However, like trash or water, mp3s are notisolated objects. The “free” mp3 only exists in an infrastructure of software and hardware. Headphones,speakers, portable mp3 players, music player software, computers and the internet are not free.
If these technologies can be understood as an entity and a living organism, mp3s are conceived,developed, reproduced, multiplied, transmitted, received, shared and deleted within them. Mp3s are a typeof organism reliant on its surrounding technology as a body, vehicle, transmitter, conceiver, messenger andcreator. In the past, the power relationship between the music’s physical medium and its technology wasswitched: record players, tape players and cd players had no other function than playing records, tapes andcds. Without records, tapes or cds, their respective players are left purposeless and obsolete. Digital formsof music, on the other hand, are integrated in the same technology that mediates communications, business,
photos, videos, writing, drawing and everything else that a computer and the internet are capable of. Unlike
records, tapes and cds, if mp3s were to be made obsolete, their surrounding technology would largely gounchanged and unscathed, save for mp3 players and mp3 library software. The entire existence of digitalmusic is dependent on a larger and more powerful infrastructure of technology.
Mp3s are simultaneously the weakest and most powerful format for music – individually, they are
criticized for their low quality, compression and cheapness, but there isn’t really such thing as an individual
mp3. A single mp3 represents its potential to be millions of mp3s. A single mp3 is a single pixel in a larger
entity, with the capacity to extend and spread with varying densities around the world. A single mp3 is asingle dust molecule in a dust storm.
It’s generally regarded that mp3s have ruined music as we know it – compressed its quality,destroyed the “music industry,” the concept of the album and the material and physical joys of records, tapes
and cds. But all of these forms of music are relatively new in the history of music and its cultural role inhumankind – the mp3 has not “destroyed music” but has, and continues to, challenge music as a packaged
consumer object. This opportunity, the financial and technical accessibility to create, collect and share mp3s,
has expanded and changed the capacities of the artist, consumer and the body of the music itself.

Although a computer and internet connection enables anyone and everyone with the resources to bea music collector and/or musician, there is a difference between using and being used by technology. Thereis a difference, but not a clear boundary, between art that is the product of its medium and art that is theproduct of an artist manipulating a medium. I struggle to be an artist in a medium that I recognize as muchlarger and more powerful than myself, the mp3s I create and the people who might listen to them.

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