The next several weeks three small “indie” conferences are taking place here in Berlin. In the broadest sense they are all about the future of music culture and industry in the digital age: Club Transmediale, Audio Poverty and Dancing With Myself. All of them have an amazing live music/dj programme as well. If you are in Berlin, check them out.
The first one was Dancing With Myself at HAU Berlin. The theme weekend with the subtitel “Music, Money, and Community After Digitalization” provided a forum for discussion about a future that has already begun. Far from lamenting falling sales figures, and far from the usual themes dealt with at ordinary industry conferences, the conference tried to to examine the cultural and theoretical implications of the digitalization of music, through a plethora of lectures, discussion panels, concerts, performances and parties, as well as selected films.
I liked the conference concept a lot and was especially interested in the keynote by Jacques Attali a French economist who wrote 1977 the book ” Noise – The Political Economy of Music” (French titel: Bruits). A great book I never heard before with a lot of thoughts that are more prevailling than ever before… written 30 years ago.
Today I was visiting a few panels at the conference and without going in details, I was a little bit dissapointed about the “overall vibe” of most of the discussions. There was a lot of talking about “the state”, “culture policy” and what should happen that maybe everything is good again… how the state can fix all the problems.
I was wondering, why aren´t we thinking more like entrepreneurs…. seeing the chances….not looking back, talking about good old times and thinking about “fixing problems”…. why not instead behaving like someone who is the first day in the music business, accepting the status quo, seeing the chances of the democratization of music…
Call me naive, but where is the spirit of something like a revolution? The digitalization is not a dearth… the digitalization has so many positive aspects… let´s start using them.
Just a thought.
February 13, 2009 at 10:44 pm
[...] The Audio Poverty Festival – A weekend of discussions and lectures, concerts and parties, performances and experiments. The third and last of the three “indie” conferences here in Berlin at the beginning of this year, all dealing with music and culture in the digital age (see also Club Transmediale and Dancing With Myself). [...]