Sitting in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan last week, Michael Cobden could hardly be blamed for tapping his toe. It was a glorious spring day, and he was playing hooky from his job as a restaurant manager on the Upper West Side. Like a lot of people in the park, Mr. Cobden was enjoying a bit of alfresco media, with a Mac G4 laptop and a set of headphones.Read the rest...
Except Mr. Cobden, 28, was not checking e-mail messages while listening to music, he was creating a pop song called "Bryant Park." In doing so, Mr. Cobden joined millions of people - trained musicians and amateurs alike -"Computers are the new garage."
who are using powerful laptop tools to produce music that in an earlier age might have wailed out of a garage. "An artist is an artist, even if he is using things he found or stole and arranging them in an artful fashion," he said. "There are many composers who never played an oboe, but they write the music and give it to an orchestra to play." For himself, Mr. Cobden tapped the Mac in front of him lovingly. "I have a computer," he said. (Hear the song he created here.)
"Computers are the new garage," said James Rotondi, the editor of Future Music, a new magazine packaged with enough free software to get any would-be Moby started. "A lot of people who are making music right now have never recorded to tape. The concept is completely foreign to them."
It seems to me that there are two things happening here:
More people will be creating content of all kinds since it's so easy to be in many forms of media. An example of this is Quantazelle (profiled in this post on CreateDigitalMusic), a "talented IDM, musician/producer; creator/editor of the electronic music zine Modsquare; owner of the jewelry company Zella (catalog); and founder, manager, and designer of the subvariant record label." She is the perfect example of a new kind of renaissance man.In addition to those who will quit their day jobs and dive into the deep end of the new media, there will be a lot of hobbyist-types who give away the content they create, in exchange for donations perhaps. I think this NYTimes piece is a confirmation of that idea.
1 comment:
The recording industry is definitely changing and certain groups are being left in the dust - just as in print publishing and the motion picture industry. The blacksmiths and honey dippers of our era are going to have to find new employment.
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