Internet is way more punk than punk rock

Dave Allen (ex Gang of four, Shriekback, also eMusic and Intel) interviewed by Rick Moody. Excerpt...

"I cre­ated a stir with this essay last year, The End of the Record­ing Album as the Orga­niz­ing Prin­ci­ple, a stir that was fueled by the teeth gnash­ing and howl­ing of musi­cians, pro­duc­ers and stu­dio engi­neers. So I fol­lowed it up with this—Dear Musi­cians, Please Be Bril­liant or Get Out of The Way, and the musi­cians’ response was even angrier. As I said: my job is not work, it’s fun.

In those two essays I was basi­cally attempt­ing to get musi­cians to under­stand that tech­nol­o­gists cre­ated the “con­tain­ers.” One exam­ple was that those tech­no­log­i­cal “con­tain­ers” were man­i­fested as vinyl albums, orig­i­nally spin­ning at 78rpm and then 33rpm. They were fol­lowed by the com­pact disc, which iron­i­cally is the tech­no­log­i­cal “con­tainer” of all those ones and zeroes, thebête noire of the record­ing indus­try.

My point was, the tech­nol­o­gists never con­sulted with us cre­atives, we musi­cians, they just foisted it upon us. The Inter­net today is an amaz­ing tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel that unshack­les the cre­ative musi­cian from those tech­no­log­i­cal “con­tain­ers” of the past, yet most musi­cians really can’t get their heads around that sim­ple fact. It’s the first time in his­tory that record­ing musi­cians can release their music with­out it being “contained.”

To wrap this one up I would say that the Inter­net is way more punk than punk rock."

Full interview here. Well worth a read. His concept about containers is spot on.