The big flip in publishing industry

November 18, 2016 Soumya Radhakrishnan

This blog post by Clay Shirky, dated sometime in 2003, still holds true. It talks about the big flip that has happened in the publishing industry and how the effects are different in writing and music.

Firstly, digitization provided a landscape where both the amateurs and professionals can participate and compete in the same ground.

However, in the case of music, even though digitization has provided us amateur production and distribution, the finding and publicizing aspects of new music are still controlled by professionals a.k.a ‘gatekeepers'.

In other domains such as writing, the case is quite the opposite, and that’s because the gap between amateurs and professionals is not as wide and evident as that in music. The difference could also, be because of the lack of proper attribution systems in music. In the case of writing, we can always credit the sources by inserting a hyperlink or by listing out the references whereas, in music, it's difficult to articulate the sources that have fed a piece of work.

The curious thing about this state of affairs is that in other domains, we now use amateur input for finding and publicizing. In strong contrast to writing and photos, almost all the music available on the internet is there because it was chosen by professionals. Like writers, most musicians who work for fame and fortune get neither, but unlike writers, the internet has not offered wide distribution to people making music for the love of the thing. There are distinct differences here, of course, as music is unlike writing in several important ways. Writing tools are free or cheap, while analog and digital instruments can be expensive, and writing can be done solo, while music-making is usually done by a group, making coordination much more complicated. Furthermore, bad music is far more painful to listen to than bad writing is to read so the difference between amateur and professional music may be far more extreme. Most new music is bad, and the users know it. Life is too short to listen to stuff you hate. It is still hard to find and publicize good new music.

That said, applying the tools of filtering and publicizing that have been both accessible and useful in other domains could change the musical landscape.