Page 32 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

32Phenomena like YouTube are the most visible signs of this social dimension at a time like the present when more music is produced, con- sumed, commented on and shared than ever.New technologies have changed how music in uences social organisation and the organisa- tion of experience; from blogs to chats to portals and social networking sites, these new “parallel music” spaces are meeting places that connect people and create networks of individuals. The fact that they are furthermore out of boundsto the majors means that we are likely to see a radical shift in the business model.Today the keys to digital music consumption have changed forever:• Access v. ownership: “From music as a product to music as a service.”• Capture v. collect: we don’t want to compile everything but discover and access new songs simply when we listen to them, as proven by the success of applications like Shazam. The key lies in being able to enjoy an in nite jukebox thanks to the growth of subscription models and Cloud Computing services.• Consolidation of the digital and streaming businesses.• Sharing: as well as enjoying easy access to music, people want to be able to share it with their friends in order to tap into the sociability a orded by social media services. This is proven by gures such as the fact that more than 60% of the videos viewed on YouTube are discovered through recom- mendations by contacts on various social networking platforms.• Changes in how popularity is achieved with the emergence of services like YouTube (have you heard of #youtubers?), which have helped young artists like Pablo Alborán and Justin Bieber, among many others, rise to stardom.Remix culture and its importance in musicWe have left behind the era when creativity was consumed but consumers were not perceivedas creators – a top-down culture. Even so, never before in the history of mankind had culture been so professionalised, or so concentrated in the hands of major industries, governments and international monopolies that prosecute people using restrictive legislation and antipiracy laws– users keen to consume and re-create, keen to contribute their creativity.However, never before in the history of mankind have we witnessed a period in which people have taken part in creating and re-creating culture as much as the present, thanks to the internet and the means technology providesfor fostering collaboration between people and access to countless cultural content. As Larry Lessig, a professor at Stanford University and the founder of Creative Commons points out, it isa “culture where people produce for the love of what they are doing and not for the money”. This is spurring the emergence of new phenomena such as remix culture and crowdsourcing, which are having a high impact both on culture, as in the case of music, and on the business world. Lessig stresses the importance of “the culture that your kids are producing all the time... Taking the songs of the day and the old songs and remixing them to make them something di erent. It’s how they understand access to this culture”.According to an interview with Vito Campanelli in the magazine Ñ:Individuals are forced to think in terms of post-production and remixing in order to cope with the overload of digital information they come up against every day. While culture has always evolved through variation, selection and repetition, we inhabit remix culture par excellence, especially bearing in mind the simplicity andTHE MUSIC MARKET GOES DIGITAL · ROBERTO CARRERASSmart culture. Analysis of digital trends