On Disintermediated Culture, Education, and Craft

Consumer technologies and web 2.0 networks bring liberating potentials to music-making while simultaneously challenging recent conceptions of professional practice. These effects are felt strongly in Western tertiary education institutions, now increasingly held accountable to a central responsibility for an expanded role in the cultural and commercial innovation environment. This article examines this convergence in order to better understand the imperatives for the education of next generation professional musicians. It does so by arguing an interdisciplinary approach to span preconceived assumptions about music genres, technology and specialised curricula. A wider investigation of ‘music 2.0’ is positioned as an endpoint for the article and as an invitation for further collaborative research in this field. 1 Explanations and Observations ‘Disintermediation’ is a term borrowed from the banking industry used to describe the security investment practices of ‘cutting out the middleman’ (Wikipedia 2008), but now more widely understood in terms of globalized commerce since the turn of millennia and rise of the internet. Theoretically, this allows for reduced production costs, increased profits and greater specialisation in niche ‘long tail’ markets (Anderson, 2006). Recent advances in personal technology networks have propelled this further in that not only can the middleman be removed, but also the ‘top-man’, that is, the corporate entities themselves. ‘Prod-user’ culture (Lessig 2001) now interacts directly in user-led web 2.0 networks (O’Reilly 2005) where value systems have blurred and twentieth century industrial revenue systems and authority are challenged. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the music recording industry which became the canary in the coalmine for copyright law (Carroll 2005) via a furore around the illegal file sharing of MP3s – a container technology as Jonathan Sterne (2006) puts it, “perfectly designed for promiscuity” (p.836) but as more relevant to this discussion: as a “cultural artifact [sic]” (p.828) and signifier of the times. To place this in a context, many readers of this article will be centrally involved in aspects of music education: as a student, a teacher, some in positions of leadership or hybrid professional practice. Ideas of music-making will vary enormously according to departmental boundaries, learning environments and funding arrangements, together with our own life experiences, working dynamics and subdisciplinary assumptions about performance, composition, production, dissemination and audiences (Draper 2005). Yet in one way or another, part of our work focuses on the skills and attributes of graduates who seek to engage in a landscape where traditional notions of career, specialisation and production chain are dramatically transforming before our eyes. It would be fair to say there is much that niggles in the mind about professional practice, values and craft. Some commentators have offered ‘music 2.0’ as a way of describing these changes, yet to date this has been largely discussed in terms of web 2.0 commercialization models (for example, Eckstein 2007, Leonhard 2007, Music 2.