When the bassist for Duran Duran, a band that has sold over 100 million records during its career, starts to talk about the music industry, you can assume that he speaks with a certain amount of authority and with a certain amount of experience. In a speech that he gave at the University of California to mark the 40th anniversary of the first message sent via the internet, he talked about how the internet was stifling new talent and having an adverse effect on music.
While I have the utmost respect for Mr. Taylor’s years of experience in the industry, I can’t help but come to a different conclusion than him when it comes to the influence of the internet on music. Taylor talks about his youth saying, “I hated being a teenager, until I discovered just how powerful music was. It helped me find an identity and find myself.”
It’s a familiar story to many, and it’s certainly one that I identify with, despite the twenty-year gap in age between Taylor and myself. Taylor speaks of his experience with Roxy Music and seeing them on the television in 1972 and how that experience captivated him: “The way they looked and sounded stunned me, and a generation of mes,” he said. “But we had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube. The only way I could get close to that experience was to own the song … I had to go on a quest of sorts to get it, but my need was such that I did it.”
A familiar story, but it’s one that is familiar because it’s old, a dinosaur of a story in fact. That’s not to say it isn’t valid one, of course, and it’s going to have resonance with a lot of people, but all the same, it’s a story whose time has past. Taylor is well-aware of this of course, as his comment about Roxy Music was prefaced with: “The speed and growth of new technology, which has been so heralded and so much fuss has been made of, has actually served to disguise how little real growth is taking place at the artistic level.”
Now this is where I part ways with Mr Taylor, because, with no disrespect meant to Mr Taylor, or to his band, but his attitudes represents the way the music industry was and not the way it is. What Mr Taylor calls the “various backwaters of older music,” is, to me, just a different avenue for growth. Older and more obscure music is much more freely available now, and so rather than have every rock band cite Zeppelin or Sabbath as their inspiration, you can find bands inspired by music from countries that they’ve never been to, or by genres that died out long before they were born.
Taylor is looking at our always-on, always-connected society as someone who didn’t grow up with it, and if you’re an outsider looking in, it’s can be a fairly daunting place. But for those who grew up in it, it seems entirely normal, and what Taylor sees as the dilution of creativity and durability by the likes of Twitter and Youtube, is just part of everyday life to today’s teens.
Taylor admits that he is still buying that first Roxy Music album, but also says that had he had discovered the band now and been able to watch that fateful TV clip over again online, as well as access all kinds of other content about the band “the bubble of [his] obsession would have burst a long, long time ago,” which raises the question of whether or not the limited exposure to content was actually beneficial to music as a whole, or simply insulated and artificially inflated the life span of bands, groups and artists.
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