The Future Of Music Pt. 1

by Ram Samudrala

I've seen the future and it will be... A battle between the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Before I explain what I mean, I will be the first to admit that all this is rather pretentious. Attempting to predict the future of a complex dynamic system is, by definition, impossible. However, I believe that we can influence the direction the system evolves and I hope that what I write becomes more of a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than anything else. With that disclaimer, let's move on: A battle between the Cathedral and the Bazaar A couple of years ago, Eric S. Raymond wrote an article titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was not about music, but about software; how the "Bazaar" model (i.e., thousands of developers spread over the Internet writing software because of inherent factors, such as love for solving problems and/or coolness) is superior to a "Cathedral" model (where a small group of developers control the development of a piece of software). Raymond likens the development model of Linux, the one computer operating system to emerge as a credible threat to Microsoft's monopoly, to a Bazaar, and the Free Software Foundation's major efforts (and other commercial developments, including Microsoft) to building Cathedrals. I think this analogy is erroneous because the Free Software Foundation is as integral a part of the bazaar as the Linux development "team". The crux of Raymond's points lies not in whether the Cathedral or the Bazaar model is the better choice, but how the Bazaar model is in accordance with the theory of complex adaptive systems, and how, this approach, in general, is a long-term model for tremendous progress in terms of innovation and creativity. There exists a similar analogy in spirit with regards to music, but different in practice because the "goal" of music is not utility. I have chosen to use Raymond's terms but have modified their definitions slightly to adjust for the differences in the two endeavours. The trackers, the home recorders, and the MP3ers are all part of the Bazaar. The major distributors and the distribution mechanisms comprise the Cathedral, siphoning the creative worth of musicians for monetary profit while remaining distant and unreachable from the creative and consumer bases. Today, like with software, thousands of musicians are creating and distributing music over the Internet, primarily because of inherent reasons, such as a love for music or creative ego, rather than any intention of making profit. As a result, a lot of this music is freely copied and distributed, and forms a key component of the Bazaar model. Creativity in the Bazaar occurs in a bottom-up environment (there are no restrictions; it doesn't even have to "work") as opposed to a top-down environment in the Cathedral (the major labels impose "rules" such as "has to sell well" on any creative output). Chaos and complexity So why should this bottom-up creation and distribution model work? It works because the individual agents in the system (artists, listeners, distributors) are not constrained by top-down rules, i.e., they have freedom. The freedoms are diverse and not necessarily explicit, including the freedom from commercial interests and the freedoms to modify, stand on the shoulders of giants, and improve. This diverse set of freedoms enables a work under scrutiny to evolve, following a non-deterministic exponential trajectory, i.e., in a chaotic manner. This results in an immense amount of creativity: not only is a given work built upon which it is built upon which it is built ... but this development also occurs in parallel and each time the output is different (it deviates from another trajectory or path exponentially)! In other words, if someone distributes a song to many people, then it is likely that more than one person will use it as a starting point for a new-derivative work. Each of the people who create these works will do something very different (given the subjective nature of music) and distribute these modified works. Now more people are going to have access to this work which they will use as a starting base and the cycle will go on. The time evolution of the work follows a "non-linear" path or trajectory, and the differences (however you measure it) between any two paths grows exponentially over time. The non-linearity in the system results in non-determinism: each time this song creation process is repeated, what will happen will be extremely different from what happened before (thus the increased amount of total creativity). It is almost as if the work has a life of its own (the term for this is "emergence"). This evolution of this emergence has tremendous implications for issues regarding creativity, intellectual property, and censorship in music, and, ultimately, the future of the Cathedral. Next Issue: The Bazaar vs. the Cathedral