Kevin Kelly

15 years ago, Kevin Kelly (Editor of Wired magazine) and Brian Eno (ambient music guru and super-producer) published a list of “unthinkable futures” – probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking – in the Summer, 1993  issue of Whole Earth Review.

Their intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be.

According to Kelly:

Improbability is still a strong bias to overcome. Much that is happening today would have been dismissed as unbelievably bad science fiction only 15 years ago. The US with secret prisons torturing Muslims? Street sweepers in India with their own cell phones? Obesity a contagious disease? A trusted encyclopedia written by anyone? Yeah, right, give me a break.

They’re interesting to ponder, and probably more so today than when they were published. And anything that Eno writes is generally worth considering.

My favorite – “A new profession, meme-inspector, comes into being.”

Would that be bloggers? Read more…

Ambient electronic musician Robert Rich has penned a great response to a piece by Wired’s Kevin Kelly that suggested that musicians should strive for 1000 true fans:

I agree strongly with your basic thesis, that artists can survive on the cusp of the long tail by nurturing the help of dedicated fans; but perhaps I can modulate your welcome optimism with a light dose of realism, tempered by some personal reflections.

I have operated on a premise similar to yours for almost 30 years now, before the internet made the idea more feasible. I wanted to make the sort of uncompromising quiet introspective music that moved me deeply when I first heard others do it back in the mid ’70’s. Because of the lingering aftermath of the popularization of psychedelic culture, certain memes leaked out from the avant garde into pop culture, and publishers from the old model were willing to try marketing experimental art-forms to the mainstream. Thus, into the mind of a suburban adolescent growing up in Silicon Valley, merged the unlikely combination of European space-music, minimalism, baroque, world music and industrial/punk, most of which received the benefits of worldwide distribution and marketing – even though we all considered it “underground” at the time.

That means, I grew up as a benefactor of the old system, before demographic marketing analysis helped to cripple the spread of radical thought across subcultural boundaries. I realized from this leakage of experimental culture into the mainstream, that I wanted to be an artist like the ones that moved me deeply. I wanted to speak my personal truth, regardless of the cost. I wanted to serve the role of a modern shaman, while embracing the complexities and ironies of our modern world.

When one sets a course like this, one quickly ponders the financial realities of obscurity. I remember telling myself when I was about 15, “If I can move one person deeply, that’s better than entertaining thousands of people but leaving nothing meaningful behind.” That’s the long tail talking. I suppose when you multiply this idea by a thousand, you have your thesis.

Please check out Robert’s site and read the full piece – raising awareness of this is important for anyone interested in electronic music.

The reality is that serious electronic music is a niche that needs to be nurtured. Obviously, one way is for artists like Rich to cultivate their relationships with their “superfans” – but musicians need to experiment with new ways of making money, too.

These are very exciting times for electronic music – but they are also challenging ones for artists that have spent years building careers, just to find that the ground they built upon is shifting.

via Techmeme