Waiting my turn at the bottom of the ladder while someone else prepares to fly. The instructor kept looking over and asking if I was ‘so stoked’ to be a human pendulum. You bet I was.
My favorite Hungarian words! Seen on the side of some scaffolding on Kiraly Utca.
On our walk from the flat to the office, Keelin passes the Opera on Budapest’s main drag, Andrassy. The street has a long, grand feel and a healthy collection of designer boutiques and tourist traps. Something akin to a hybrid of 5th Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan. Yet, warmer and more familiar.
After a day of travel, waiting for a cab at Ferihegy Airport in Budapest.
A straight shot of progress with a generous allowance for chaos. And a taste of otherworldliness. 2010 is epic.
Audio recordings (particularly vinyl and CDs) were covetable souvenirs of the lives and talents of music legends. You invested in one to get a share of ownership in your idol.
The digital incarnation of audio tracks, however, dropped the tactile feedback (glossy album jackets, holographic CD art, whispered secrets between lines of lyrics, fragility) that made albums treasurable. Unlike, say, direct mail or a local paper — music did actually have something to lose (other than sound quality) in its translation to a virtual format. Intimacy and that most monetizable of all things in the music industry — the sense of shared ownership in an artist’s life and work — haven’t traveled well with pixels. How do music marketers repackage that sense of realism?
The live show, or as Lefsetz calls it ‘the event,’ is the music industry’s future.
I remember thinking this when Napster came along and the volume of chatter about music’s monetization models was at an uproar. At that time, it seemed almost too simplistic and obvious that the way for music to move dollars in the digital future was to shift the pricing burden from recordings to performances, because no one, not a soul could copy what it feels like to go to a concert and distribute that as a zip file over a P2P network. (The ubiquity of digital cameras would later challenge that.)
Well it turns out that pesky music piracy problem wasn’t “solved” by a return to concerts, but by creating robust legal digital markets (iTunes, Amazon, etc). But in validating the digital medium with these new market spaces, we increased demand for something more experiential.
Re-enter the performance (and yet to be invented variations on digitizing it) as music’s saving grace. It pre-dates simple audio recordings and it will outlast and out-monetize them, too. Scale, cost, and audience distribution will not make this an easy task. But live bands that don’t suck, streaming products and technologies, digital mashups and rich video, and the addicting quality of mass humanity coming together to experience a rock god will ensure it succeeds.
[Photo from David Byrne’s double-header at Radio City Music Hall. Great example of an impactful show — stellar performer, artsy special effects, dance and choreography, unexpected surprises. But also, see Byrne’s appearance on The Colbert Report where even his wickedly forward thinking can’t quite justify why you’d want to buy his album, virtual or otherwise.]
Within the weekends, we are most ourselves.
My unassuming sidekick: the Canon SD630. It goes with me almost everywhere, lying in wait without a case or cover as it gets bashed by keys, coins, and other odd metal instruments that I plunge into my bag. There’s also a nasty fissure down the glass viewing screen — from when the camera strap slipped off my wrist during a desert hike and the camera hit rock bottom, literally. It’s a three year old brick of beat up amateur technology, but it gives me more opportunity for reflection and introspection than anything else ever has.
