I have been listening to my iTunes on shuffle.  This is a “vertical” quasi-random search through a field of musicality bounded by the granularity of “a song” and by the volumnity of my personal collection.  It is thus a relatively “noisy experience” cultivated only by the degree to which I have been careful to weed my personal iTunes library. 

Nonetheless it proves a quite effective co-party to thinking.  The possibility of converting this experience into a horizontal and cultivated or enriched experience is quite compelling.  If I could “play” a song that is of indefinite duration, is able to pull in fragments and references to other songs in a manner that is maximally sculpted to generate the right affect (given the potentials of the song and its conjunction in both time and space) and to deploy that in a manner that can be “branded” (e.g., by DJ or artist) to best match the engagement that I am trying to have – *this* would be intense.  And people would pay quite happily for this kind of experience.  

I am imaging an economy built on this “emergent” property of remix culture.  Ultimately, when people listen to music they rarely to the extreme listen to only one song.  Whether they are listening to background music in a restaurant, life music at a venue, dj’ed music at a club, their headphones at work or their stereo at home, they are engaging with a milieu of music defined by a temporal revealing and the complete integration of this revealed time of music is the “experience value” that really is felt.  The album is a very poor effort at this higher level effect – because its fixity (of musical selection and duration) means that it can only address a very small portion of the possible environments where the underlying music could be deployed.  The playlist kind of gets you there.  But it, too, lacks flexibility and even in an environment where people can share and compare playlists, the limits of your music collection and (frankly) your personal musicality, limit the potential of the playlist. 

This “higher order” economy should be more than adequate (particularly given the efficiencies we can discover in an effectively and fully deployed post-convergence environment) to generate all of the necessary elements.  That is, there should be enough money flowing through this system to adequately compensate both the “DJ” and the creators of the underlying music (as well as any necessary portions of the larger value chain).  One wrinkle that very much has to be worked-out is the issue of generating the maximum impression of the underlying music – so that it can convey the maximum intensity to the crafted environment.  Don’t Stop The Rock by the Chemical Brothers is playing right now.  This is good on just a musical level – but it is *better* because I know who they are, have a sense of what they are about and what their other music is – forging a much higher level of link-complexity in the overall experience.  At the *very* least, the “DJ”s have to be aware of what they are listening to/working with if simply to enable the ability to identify the components they want to integrate.

Jordan Greenhall