Essay

An interesting feature of the career of any successful modern jazz or creative musician is the huge reliance on the European market for work. I don't have any numbers to back up this claim but I know through conversations and anecdotal evidence that the ability to play in Europe regularly is an essential part of any musician's career who attempts to play this music as a full time occupation.

All of that travel of course comes at a cost, both financially and in energy expended in the course of traveling. It's interesting to note that the rise of this kind of musical travel coincided with the boom of cheap energy in the western world. Following this line of thought one step further, it's worth asking how these artists and that whole framework of travel will work as our all-you-can-eat hydrocarbon buffet starts to run dry, or at least fail to be restocked as quickly.

I've long observed that energy efficiency will be the hallmark of the great economies and nations of the third millennium and the 21st century. It's by no means an original thought, but it still seems to elude the future planning and thinking of many. While there are some established ways we can deal with issues of grid based energy, mostly through a patchwork approach, the issue of transportation energy is far from resolved.

How would our artists be effected if it was no longer practical for promoters in Europe to fly them over for gigs due to rising transportation costs? Or, even if they could continue to do so, if it cut into the artists' bottom line, essentially coming out of their paycheck?

While we can always hope for some kind of energy silver bullet, and science has the ability to surprise us with rapid innovation, hope is not a strategy. One has to wonder how artists will survive and how the entire structure of music tours will change if and when energy costs become truly prohibitive.

The charade of trading pieces of green paper for the tangibly valuable crude oil has already been severely eroded over the past decade as the value of the dollar fell and the number of pieces of paper we had to trade for a barrel of oil increased. Even if you don't buy into the severity of some peak oil theories, there's no doubt that we've reached something resembling peak cheap oil, where the energy and cost expended to recover oil goes up along with the price of the energy extracted.

Look at how resilient the price of oil has been in the face of one of the worst recessions since World War II. At the end of 1999 the price of a barrel of light crude cost around $26, and during the recession it barely reached $40. Already we've seen rebounds into the $70s, with an incredibly weak overall economic recovery. As soon as a real recovery takes hold, assuming it does, we'll see spikes back up into the mid to upper $100s and it very well may induce a double dip recession. Our economy is so built around cheap energy that it's incredibly sensitive to these spikes.

All of this speculation is important to consider for people who make a portion of their living traveling. Even if we make some kind of transition to a new energy source, it will no doubt be a rocky one. We will surely see more business done via videoconferencing, and while nothing can replace the experience of live music, I think artists need to think creatively about the future and ways to present their own music.

One of the most pervasive paradigms that has entered modern consciousness is the idea of garbage, disposability, and the act of throwing something "away." The ease with which most people toss things in the garbage is astounding, as amount of time thinking about the notion of throwing something "away" will reveal that away is always merely somewhere else. For someone or something, away is very much here, and in truth throwing something "away" is more about putting it out of sight and out of mind.

The ease with which we can throw things away, and the lack of consequences for doing so, increases the likelihood that we will do so. In a sense we become alienated or estranged from the repercussions and result of our habits.

Imagine with me if you will, a world where there was no garbage service and we had to deal with the consequences of everything we acquired and consumed. Pretty quickly everyone would begin composting, an activity that mainstream culture currently relegates to the hippies and the ecologically inclined, as a matter of necessity in dealing with food waste.

We'd certainly reuse items more, since the consequences of not doing so would be that we'd have to figure out where to put the "waste." Recycling would become more widespread as people realized that everything is recyclable in some sense.

Even more than that, we'd be become more careful about what we produced, as its production would become inexorably entwined with its eventual demise.

In the digital realm, it's even easier to dispose of something. There's no consequence to collecting and then disposing of massive amounts of digital debris. All you have to do is wipe out those pesky 1s and 0s, and you're back to where you started, with a clean slate.

Just as the notion of disposability in the tangible world leads us to create more waste, the ease with which we can both acquire and dispose of digital material creates an environment where the value of digital material is reduced.

The ease with which I can download and delete a piece of music does not reduce the value of the music contained therein, but it certainly reduces the value of the digital file that I pay for and download. It is immediately replaceable, with the reproduction costs relegated to a petty amount of processing power and bandwidth, as opposed to the physical reproduction cost of a CD or piece of vinyl, which then must be distributed physically.

Interestingly, it is more difficult to archive and maintain digital collections over the long run than it is if you collect most physical media. Backups beget backups, and as the digital mountains pile up there is an associated cost with maintaining their mere existence. When a computer crash can wipe out all of your collected data you have to make duplicates to ensure redundancy, so every time you acquire a digital file, you need to allocate twice its size for storage, one for use and one for backup.

At some point you come to realize that paper is a better backup than all those documents sitting on your computer. Hell, a carved stone tablet is a better backup than paper, given that it can withstand fires and all manner of destructive events.

Ease of disposibility encourages producers of digital debris to churn it out at a greater pace, throw more things against the wall to see what sticks. That's how you end up with 100,000 applications in Apple's "App Store," the majority useless time wasters that contribute little to collective knowledge or productivity.

Meanwhile, you have producers of creative endeavors such as music attempting to participate in this digital rat race which undervalues their production due to the medium of delivery. While it is certainly important and even necessary to throw their hats into the digital ring, it also seems that there's something to be said for in parallel creating some artificial scarcity through the production of limited edition LPs and other items of enduring value that aren't infinitely reproducible.

On the Internet businesses are increasingly turning to the tiered pricing model where they give something or some service away for free, and then have tiered levels of products that give their core constituencies exact, tailored solutions for associated prices. I think there's something to be said for creative producers taking a page out of this playbook and considering ways in which they can release certain work for free digitally and then produce items of enduring value that will appeal to the people most likely to pay for their products in the first place.

While it's also clear that any physical product is increasingly a loss-leader that hopefully begets performance opportunities that might help pay the bills, I believe there's a feedback cycle once true believers and fans exist that can help turn the physical product back into a positive feature of an artistic career.

More and more artists are doing it, and I think others would be wise to consider the same route. Old modes of thinking are not going to become viable again through sheer willpower, so the choice is theirs to either swim upstream or to figure out how to take advantage of the current.