I argued in a previous post that listening to music was becoming less an aural experience and more a data processing task, thanks the the metadata available for manipulation through iTunes. Organizing is becoming a more primary pleasure experience than the responsiveness of our senses. Soon, we dream in spreadsheets.

Hal Foster, in his essay “Design and Crime”—itself a play on Loos’s landmark manifesto against art nouveau decorousness, “Ornament and Crime”—explores this idea about data processing as well, linking it to the elevation of design as a product in and of itself. With the “retooling of the economy around digitizing and computing,” products are “no longer thought of as objects to be produced so much as data to be maipulated—that is, to be designed and redesigned, consumed and reconsumed.” In other words orchestrating playlists and loading album cover jpegs is a personal amateur design task, something that takes back some of the way these issues are settled beforehand (the subject of this previous post). It adds life to product already purchased, potentially freeing one from having to make another purchase to get the little bump of engagement and pleasure.

Much of this relies, in the music world, on metadata controlled and supplied by Gracenote, who provides the information that allows your computer to fill in all the song titles and so on when you rip a CD to your hard drive. Their business model relies on the importance of metadata to our listening experience. But the company is not without competition. Detailed here is an open-source service looking to eradicate Gracenote and promote the idea that metadata is public domain information, a shared cultural resource that makes culture—the public debate and shared enthusiasms for things—possible. All that’s well and good, but as metadata becomes more valuable, as it comes to supplant music as it has seemingly started to, it’s likely that the incentives will be strong to brand the information, make it exploitable as a resource. Services may compete to enrich that data, jazz it up with animations (album “covers” will become little movies, perhaps) and lyrics and DVD-style extras that point out alternates or making-of historical details. And the song will be more or less forgotten at some point, presuming the celebrities involved with making it are exciting enough.

We should probably get used to this. This AdAge item details how Chevy is inviting customers to design their own ads and enter an American Idol-like contest, with the winning spot airing online. This seems an inevitable development following the dissemination of technology that makes it easy to make your own movies and music and so on. It’s only natural that companies would want to harness that latent creativity and lash it to advertising and consumer goods.

It follows too from the marketing blather that claims brands belong to their customers (No they don’t, they belong to the licensers and are exploited for maximum value for companies who own them). The customer does the hard work of shaping the brand, building its value, honing its appeal more dierectly to themselves (cutting out the expensive brand-managing middlemen), and the companies will reward them by taking advantage of that appeal more efficiently to sell more branded junk to them. Consumers get the specious thrill of associating with something transnational and huge, and the companies get profits. A fair trade, right?

Featured MySpace Artist
These Arms Are Snakes 

“Big News” [MP3]
more tracks [MySpace]

My Orchard
“A List of Things” [MP3]
“Something New” [MP3]

Pink Mountaintops
“New Drug Queens” [MP3]

Part Chimp
“30 Million People” [MP3]
“War Machine” [MP3]

Continuing where I left off in the previous post, regarding our rich inner lives. When we buy something, some piece of culture especially—choose a song to hear or a show to watch or a film to see or a magazine story to read—what we are getting is not only that thing but all the decisions that went into making that thing the way it is. What we pay for, in part, is the “freedom” to be out of the loop of those discussions. We pay to opt out of what once constituted the essence of public debate, we pay to acquire that debate in commodified form, already finalized. We possess it rather than experience it. We pay for editors and designers and marketers and executives and their many meetings to determine what form a thing must be in to be most sellable, most attractive to whatever niche has been targeted. We pay for the privilege of being that niche and having our tastes determined for us. We pay to avoid the burden of critical thought and get to relax with our choices instead. These choices then reflect the decisions that once determined our selfhood, choices we no longer have to make in detailed, nitty-gritty terms, hashing them out with our social peers, but instead can now make in broad strokes with a single shopping act.

Culture (if Habermas’s assertions are right) once consisted of the conversation. But now this critical debate has become a commodity itself; it is built in to the things that once prompted it and also it is packaged in a series of parallel entertainments—criticism coming to us in word-count-squeezed reviews, in news bites, as PR. It once demanded participation, but now has become a passive solitary activity; one is part of the zeitgeist through consumption rather than conversation with other people. Debate, which once built character, is now administered to us through what’s sold to us. And this becomes our only option for participating in public debate—since most of it has already taken place and produced our consumer goods and our culture, we can only register a belated assent as our contribution. (It’s either that, or claw your way to a job in one of the “glamor” industries.) Criticism is reduced to a fruitless ex post facto discussion of tastes and preferences, none of which make much substantive difference.

Featured MySpace Artist
Pink Mountaintops 

“New Drug Queens” [MP3]
“The Solo Sex” [MP3]
more tracks [MySpace]

Hudson Bell
“Atlantis Nights” [MP3]
“Slow Burn” [MP3]

Once We Were
“The Hearts Asks Pleasure First” [MP3]

Caroline
“Sunrise” [MP3]

Asobi Seksu
“I’m Happy But You Don’t Like Me” [MP3]