Pitchfork's "The Decade..."

Pitchfork.com is doing a pretty interesting review of the past decade in music...even though it is not over. Regardless, the stuff I have read so far did a really good job of helping me place all that has happened to music in the last ten years.

The staff listed their picks for the top 500 tracks and 200 albums among the other articles. I have not gone through all their picks yet so I am not in a position to say whether or not they did a good job, but they do have this thing where you can listen to the tracks/albums and purchase them (at a discount price, supposedly). I am impressed.

While you're at the site try to check out an article by Eric Harvey called "The Social History of the MP3" from last month. Despite all of the confusion surrounding the music industry, Harvey does a good job describing how it is developing by using the MP3 as a conduit for they way people listen to and access music.

One thing he said seems to directly coincide with something I have been trying to understand, i.e. the relationship between artist and audience. Toward the end of the article, Harvey writes:

"If the networked public sphere shaped by mp3s could collaboratively re-imagine itself not as an audience or a market but as members of a civil society, who feel that they deserve a stake in its own culture, then the rules going forward, and our appreciation of music's social and affective values, might emerge like mp3s themselves: from the bottom up."

I feel like this is the type of musical revolution we need. The major record labels are taking a hard hit from the new developments in the music industry, but this certainly is not going to put an end to music. It simply calls for a change (a long overdue change in my opinion). The change Harvey seems to be calling for, I agree with entirely. The idea of having "a civil society," or an artistic community, would be a thousand times better than the label-customer relationship we have had in the past.

The only question that remains is how to make this happen.