Leave Music Alone

            Andrew Keen’s book Cult of the Amateur highlights the problems concerning user-generated media and the lasting effects of it on people’s lives, reality, and culture.  Most of the content in this book can be supported by practically any web page on the Internet. Keen’s major issue with the cyber world is that anyone who has access to the web can release any information they want to the public. This information could be crude, violent, irrelevant, or simply fake and once its there, that information is there forever.  Much of the Internet is taken up by free websites, like facebook, twitter, blogs, wikipedia, etc.  The user-free websites do not have much censorship and people who are not experts are giving out their “expert” advice/opinions that actually lack any authentic value.  The result is that people are carrying around this potentially false information, thinking they know truth.

            In the section of the book called “Liquid Library,” Keen discusses how the Internet is also affecting music. He mentions how the music artist Beck made it possible for fans to create their personalized versions of his music by allowing them to design their own cover art, write their own lyrics, and create their own electronic mixes. Beck said, “There was something really inspiring about the variety and quality of the music that people gave back. In an ideal world, I’d find a way to let people truly interact with the records I put out-not just remix the songs, but maybe play them like a videogame.”  The Barenaked Ladies also gave their music out to fans to be altered too. They launched a contest where fans could download and remix songs from their latest album and re-edit them into new versions. Then the band would pick the best versions to be released on their CD. Keen puts it as “an expert chef who, instead of cooking a fine meal, provides the raw ingredients for the diner. Or the surgeon who, instead of performing the surgery, leaves the amateur in the operating chamber with some surgical instruments and a brief pep talk.” Why would successful musicians leave their songs to be remixed and re-edited by fans who are merely just amateur enthusiasts? Those aren’t the only two music artists who choose to have the fans launch their personalized song versions. The website I found to support this part of Keen’s argument is http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/25Ivyg/www.dothedaft.com/idaft/. Here you are given a sample of different parts of the music artist Daft Punk’s song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” You are also given the “backing beats” and can vary the pitch. In this website you can create your own song however you want, or simply make a sentence. Yes, this website is just for fun and there is no prize for making the best remix of the song, but it is still tampering with the expert’s musical talent. The expert, not the fan, should be in charge of producing the music, that is what they are paid to do.