Transcription
[Music] [Music] The human spirit, when it's allowed to become made manifest through art, invariably is going to create greatness. You know, so it almost doesn't matter what the medium is. It doesn't matter what the financials are. It doesn't matter what the delivery vehicles are. When humans make stuff, we tend to make interesting things. So if you give a human a hammer and a piece of wood, they're going to make something interesting. If you give a human a computer and broadband access, they're going to make something interesting.
[Music] In the olden days of 30, 40, 50 years ago, people didn't make things, you know? Like, so people would go to photography exhibits, people would go buy records, and there were professional artists. And now everybody's a photographer, everybody's a filmmaker, everybody's a writer, everybody's a musician. See, before you could sell a record for $10 or $6.98 as a CD because there was still this inherent mystery about how it was done, who did it, and how can I do that thing? Well, now that mystery has dissolved itself because I can make it. Anybody can make it. They, they know the secrets.
[Music] Now, I think that this is an incredible, fertile time for artists. There's no cap on creativity. The technological advances have given the artists an open door to creating as much as their capacity will.
[Music] [Laughter] [Music] Allow. Anybody can go out and make a movie. Anybody who has $1,500 can buy a camera. Even if you don't, there's so many ways to make a movie. There's so many ways to distribute your film on the internet, on the, you know, there's a million different platforms. So that's all really good for people who want to express themselves. But it also makes it a lot harder to kind of break through all of the noise. I don't think a young Fassbender, a young vendor, a young Hitchcock, a young Scorsese, they wouldn't make it in this business. Slap up their early stuff on Facebook, on YouTube, it would get lost. It would get lost in the ocean of garbage. You're remember in 2007, Time Magazine gave the award of Best Person of the Year to you ourselves, you and I. It's, it's, it's global masturbation. Used to be, you didn't become an artist to become rich. You became an artist 'cause you had an idea to share, 'cause you had an emotion to share. And that's where we're heading again. And we're going to see more people do more art in more ways than ever before. Almost everybody I meet in the world of art, music, literature, creative expression, everybody's equally excited and afraid. You know, no one really knows where their next paycheck is coming from, but they're really excited at their ability to create work and communicate directly with.
[Music] [Music] Moment. My name is Oliver Arnold. I am from Iceland. I'm, I play, uh, I play, um, crossover classical music into pop music, trying to make classical music popular, I guess. Well, I started making the music maybe early 2006, was recording my first album. Um, then I, I think only three, four months after I actually put some of the music online, I was playing the first shows and they were already sold out. So, so it happened very fast. It was, it was not some years of preparation. It was just a few months. I, I see myself as, um, maybe a neoclassical composer, or I don't know. I'm just a musician, I guess that's the word for it. It creates some quite a contrast when you're, you're mixing these two different worlds together, but still, it's just sound frequencies. Um, there's, you know, theoretically, there's no actual difference between a sound coming from a computer or sound coming from a piano. If they're both coming out from the same speaker, it's just sound waves. I do think a lot of the classical scene is very divided from the rest of the world, and I would like to see this divide broken down. I would like to see classical music as just another genre with, you know, just like pop or rock or dance music, who are all kind of in the same category, and then there's classical on the other side.
[Music] When I started making records, you really had to have a piece of hardware for almost every task. So if you wanted to EQ a vocal, or you wanted to limit the variation and dynamic response of a given instrument, if you wanted to give it an echo or a delay, you wanted to make it feel as though it came from a cave. Each of those things had to have its own specific box. You, so you'd have a drum machine that was old and would only talk to your sequencer with a weird MIDI sync converter. So just making electronic music, getting everything to even just generate sounds was difficult. I remember when we was doing back in the days, we was doing, um, Loud Than a Bomb, for example, and and we needed to make a, a mute of all of like about, about 10 tracks needed to all mute at once, and we didn't have any automation on our board. So we had to, like, we had to, we had to listen to the song come down, and then as it gets to a certain point, everybody has to go, like, "Okay, one, two, three." And we, everybody had to be on sync. And then you got a release on, on, on, in sync. So that, you know, those are the kinds of dynamics that we had to do back in the days as a visa-vis to what you can do.
[Music] Today, a big difference is that at that time, you had to be like around 30, 35 people and have a little bit of money to be able to record stuff. Whereas now, you can just do it on your own computer, and, and anyone can record music now.
[Music] When we started, one of the reasons that we were able to kind of get going was because you could just use a home computer to make multirack recordings and, you know, play a bit of guitar and then play some more guitar on top of it, and then sing on top of it. And it was easy to do. It's software, you know? So now any kid can use a cracked version or buy a version of Reason or Logic or Ableton, and in about five minutes, do what took six months or years, 20 years.
[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] ago.
[Applause] [Music] There's a lot of different aspects of being a colorist. But basically, what you do is adjust the look of footage, basically. Uh, the brightness, the contrast, the color, the saturation, you know, things like that. You give, you give the footage a look. When I started out doing this, it was a matter of taking a roll of film, putting it up on a scanner, and, uh, adjusting the light level out of the scanner to make pictures. And it really isn't that much different, except now we're working with things like, you know, files and sequences instead of a roll of film. The RED is probably the newest generation, I would say, of, uh, a digital motion picture camera. And the most revolutionary thing about it, I think, from a lot of people's perspective, is the fact that they knocked the zeros off the price tag to the point where a lot of people have access to making very high-quality motion picture images. That's, that's the biggest thing. I mean, you can always buy a cheaper camera, but I don't think there's ever been a camera at that price range that has generated the kind of images that it does. And that's, I think, the most revolutionary part about it. So we're at, uh, RED Studios, which is, uh, somewhat historic. Uh, this is one of five sound stages that you're looking at here. They're shooting a big RED project in here right now. There's shooting going on here, shooting going on here, and, uh, this stage here, we took over as a working lab. So we have a full 4K theater in here and a place to test cameras, test workflow, demonstrate, uh, all the different logic. We're actually building some sets in here today for some, for some testing that we're going to do. In the early days of this whole RED rebellion, as we were building the camera, there were a lot of people that never thought this would happen, that were just kind of laughing at us, chuckling at us. A lot of people called it a scam, they called it vaporware, they called it a waste of time and energy. Don't spend time with these crazy RED guys because they're never going to do anything that's actually going to happen. And that's all part of that rebellion is is refusing to believe all those people that said you can't do this. The RED, as a, as a tool, and what it means from a, from a filmmaking standpoint, from a movie-making standpoint, is pretty interesting because it means a lot more movies that may have not had a chance to be made will be made. Which means that you're going to have a lot more options for cinema. You're going to have a lot more creativity rising to the top. I never thought about filmmaking as a job that I could have. I loved movies, I loved writing, but it didn't ever occur to me that that was something that I could do with my life. And I think the moment that it did occur to me was when I started seeing, like, the movies that were at South by Southwest in 2005, like these movies people were calling Mumblecore movies, that are small digital stories about, you know, made by people my age, about people my age. And suddenly I understood, like, this is a different world, and it's possible for anybody to make a movie now. Guess who got a job? I'm a hostess at Clandestino. They hung up. I'm a man in the house. Okay. That's invaluable. There seems to be a lot more younger people that have access to a lot more tools than they used to be. And it used to be more the established guys could do this because it was very expensive to do it. Now it's the budgets. I mean, you can do things. You can actually produce a movie probably a lot cheaper. Whether it's going to be as good as a high-budget movie, I mean, that that's debatable. But there is a way to make movies very cheaply now. There's a way to edit them very cheaply, to shoot them very cheaply, you know, distribute them very cheaply. So it, it, it, uh, there's a lot more young people who are able to do that. Jimmy Hendrix, if the electric guitar had not existed on this land, this 17-year-old boy, wherever he was called Jimmy Hendrix, in the, would have never imagined. He wouldn't have gone, "Okay, this is the sound of one." I've got to go invent an electric guitar. The, the electric guitar got invented very pragmatically for pragmatic reasons. The rhythm guitars in the big band, in the big band era of the 1930s, needed to be slightly louder. So somebody came up with, "Okay, we can come up with this technology to make this thing louder." So the technology, the point I'm trying to make here is, technology always comes first. Then the artist comes along. Jimmy Hendrix, "Oh, well, oh, you can, oh, and if you do this." He goes, "Wow, oh yeah, that sounds good. I want to do stuff with that." So the artist always comes after the technology. The artist never, you know, the artist didn't invent oil paint. The artist didn't invent the C, the, the moving camera. It wasn't their vision that, that, that technology is usually invented for some other reason, and then the artist comes along and abuses it and changes it and, and, um, so in that sense, technology is great. One of my main purposes with doing music is to inspire people in any way possible. And one way of inspiring someone is they feel like creating art when they do this. And I thought, why should this always be one way? Like, I make music and then people listen to it. And I got sent a lot of art back all the time. People send me videos, they do music videos to the song, they make a painting or take photos and name them with a title of a special song for me or something. And I thought, we could also work this in both directions. Why can't the fans also just inspire me and we can work together and make an interesting collaboration, a huge collaboration with a lot of people? Um, so I did, I did this project where I encouraged people, people to submit, to do art to the songs and submit it to me and and be involved with the project and maybe inspire what I was doing. And in the end, we would use some of the pictures for the artwork for the release. And from that project, we, um, I got a lot of, like, videos that people did. Some of them were stop motion with some dolls, or a lot of really cool stuff. And one video especially struck my, struck my mind. It was, um, an Argentinian guy I've never met in my whole life. He put up a, just a very simple visual, kind of a sound visualization. It moves. It's just colors, and they move with the music. One color is the violin, and one color is the piano. And, and I sent him an email and said, "Hey, this is Oliver here, and I saw your video, and we would really like to promote your video, use it as the official video to the song." Just like we did with other people's art in the album artwork. And he, of course, was just excited about that. And, and in the end, this was the most successful video definitely I've ever done. It was, and this video alone can account for a lot of my success in the last year.
[Music] In the creative world, uh, you know, it used to be that we knew where to go to get art, where to go to get entertainment. It was very, they were in boxes. And sometimes the boxes were the TV boxes, sometimes they were building boxes, or the front page of a newspaper, which is a nice little box. So that's, that's fantastic. But of course, there's a price to pay to that old way of doing things as well, which is somebody else is making your decisions. Though they, they are also human beings. It's a very limited, necessarily range of tastes and opinions and ideas. Um, and, uh, traditionally, unfortunately, fairly typically, it's been representative of particular empowered groups or self-empowered groups or groups empowered on the backs of others. So, as they say, it's, you know, typically white guys who tell us what's going to go into the museum or the front page of the newspaper. At least traditionally, art has been around for a really long time. Music has been around for a really long time. Painting and sculpture and plays have been around for a really long time. But it's only in the last 50 years that there's been an industry. They call it the music industry, the movie industry. That's new. The old production systems brought certain value to the process. Um, in, in the time of Adams, you needed capital to record the music or the film. You needed, um, uh, more money and expertise to market it through the relative handful of channels that we had, the TV stations and the newspapers and the rest of it. Um, and because they were so, these means were so expensive, very, very few artists could be brought through them. Um, after about permission marketing, I really felt uncomfortable about writing again. I was sort of done. And Malcolm Gladwell sent me a copy of The Tipping Point to write a blurb for on the back. And I read it, and it unlocked something in my head that I didn't know was there. And it only took me 10 or 12 days to write a whole book that he had started in my head, a book called Unleashing the Idea. And I finished the book, and I looked at it, and it's all about how ideas spread. And I said, "Now, what am I going to do with it?" Because it says, "Ideas that are free spread faster, and ideas that spread win." So I went to my publisher. Now, I just had a New York Times bestseller a year earlier, and I said, "Here's my next book. You can publish it, but I need it to come out right away, and I want to give it away online for free." And my publisher's boss said, "Great, we'd love to publish it, but you can't give it away for free. We're going to have it out in a year." So I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and I just posted the ebook online. And the first day, 3,000 people downloaded it, which is not a lot. But then it was 6,000, and then it was 12,000, and then it was a million. And now, if you count Pongo, it's 5 million with just me, a laptop, and the internet, 5 million people. So people said, "Well, how do you make any money doing that?" And I said, "Well, first of all, I wasn't trying to make money. I was trying to make a point, and I did make a point. Ideas spread, win." But then the interesting thing happened. People started emailing me saying, "I like this, but I don't want to read it on the screen." So we quickly self-published an edition, which isn't difficult at all. You call one person, and they print the book for you. We put it on Amazon for $40. This is in, you know, the year 2000 or something, $40, which is insane for a 200-page hardcover. And it went to number five on their bestseller list. And then someone translated it into Japanese, and it went to number four. And it got translated into all these languages. I made more money from the book I gave away than the book I had sold. And the lesson there for me is not that this is a good way to make money, but the lesson is this changes everything. The industry is [Music] dead. I'm totally up for the democratization of anything. The more democracy, the better. Whether, and the internet has been one of the great things for democracy. Uh, and the fact that we can have, we can all create tracks and get them up has, has, you know, I initially thought this is fantastic. You know, everybody would not initially, it is fantastic, but it's pushed things along. So everybody that used to think, "Oh yeah, now I can make, can make these tracks that sound fantastic in my bedroom as if I'd spent, you know, a whole month in an expensive studio." I can be just doing it here. But it's changed everything. It's changed that now becomes irrelevant. That, that now that we can all do that, it, it, it, it's moved things along. And I like things moving along. Ten years ago, you would, you would only assume that if you go to a concert, there's a performer on the stage and has an audience of 10,000 people, that they're performing to. What's happened with the media sphere that we're in, or media atmosphere that we are now, is that you go to this concert, there's 10,000 people there. The difference is that, uh, everyone, uh, believes that they are the artist and everyone else is the the audience. Uh, the problem with that, of course, is that everyone else thinks the same. When you fall into the track of confusing artist and the audience, when you believe that the audience knows more than the artist, is more authoritative, is more creative, is more talented, then art ends. Then you have something else. You have cacophony. You have simply an apology for radical democratization, and it's wrong to confuse democratization in cultural or political terms with the creation of art, which is by definition, for better or worse, an elitist business.
In our post-industrial age, because of atomization, loneliness, because of the breakup of community, the way to somehow reify or deify ourselves is through the creative act. You go out there into the world. Everyone thinks they have a novel in them. Everyone thinks they can make a movie. Everyone thinks that they can write a song. That's why so many kids go into bands. That's why everyone sits down and tries to write a great book. That's why everyone now is buying camcorders and throwing their stuff up on.
[Music] [Music] YouTube. It's, it's a lot more people are making music, and music is definitely democratized now to where anyone can make an album. You know, any single person with the most minimal software can make a record, pre, you know, put, you know, put a record on the internet, let the entire world know they exist. Uh, the problem is everyone's doing that. Should everyone be able to be a successful musician? Should everyone be able to have a fan base, have people buying their music, make their living from music? No, absolutely not. There are talented people, there are not talented people. That's a reality. It's an unfortunate reality. It's a reality that many people don't like because most people don't have talent. So for a serious young filmmaker, these are very, very depressing times. When you leave everything to the crowd, when everything becomes democratized, where everything is determined by number of clicks, you're by definition undermining the seriousness of the artistic endeavor.
It's, it's that idea of gray goo, you know, this, this idea that like if you have little bitty like bio-machines that can replicate themselves, there's nothing to stop the world from being covered in gray goo. You know, these little things are going to replicate themselves until there's nothing left of the world except for these little bitty machines. Art and culture potentially might succumb to that same principle, where if everybody's a musician and everybody's making mediocre music, eventually the world is just covered with mediocrity. You know, and people start to become comfortable with mediocrity. And that to me is the danger. There's no evidence that we're on the verge of, of a, a great new glittering cultural age. If there's any evidence, as I've argued in my book and and everything else I say, we may well be on the verge of a new dark age in cultural terms, a new collapse of Constantinople, where the creative world is destroyed, where all we have is cacophony and self-opinion, where we have a crisis of democratized culture. Right now is a time of hype and backlash, and it's a constant stream of hype and backlash. And it's so funny that I can look at bands that people were talking about like two years ago, like they were the next big thing, and everyone, it seemed like everyone was talking about it, and where the [ __ ] are they? Who cares? Who cares, you know, where are they? These embarrassing movements and subgenres that we thought were the next big thing, and we're just a bunch of critics and bloggers jerking off on each other, you know, because it's so easy to, to do that in the internet age. It's so easy to, to go in and out and discover new things right away. Um, you know, I think it's going to look a little, a little embarrassing. It's going, you know, we're going to, we're going to be a little ashamed of.
[Music] [Music] Ourselves.
[Music] [Music] Call.
[Music] [Music] It. We're here in Manchester because, um, I'm playing a concert here with the full orchestra. And, uh, the conductor, Andre de Ritter, he contacted me, um, had me come here to do the show with him. And, but what we'll be doing is that, uh, I have rearranged the whole new, new album for a full orchestra. And, uh, will be premiering that. In a way, I would say this is a pretty important concert for me, actually. First of all, because it's the first time I've arranged anything for full orchestra. And, uh, to show people, well, to hopefully show people that I can do that is very important for me. Royal Northern College of Music, uh, in Manchester, I think is one of the, the best music colleges in, in the UK. And it's regarded as, in certain departments, as the best in the country, even. Um, they're very young musicians. And when, when Oliver arrived and met the orchestra, he was quite, really, really surprised and said to me, "Oh, these are kids." Um, and then he was even more surprised when he heard them play, because, because they're already very, very, very good and mature musicians, making a very fine sound. Well, the basic idea behind the whole evening, really, was something that we tend to do at the end of each year. We try and either go somewhere else outside of the building, into a place where there's not normally music. We've been to museums, we've been to art galleries. Last year, we went to a huge rail station, and we try and take music into a place that it doesn't normally exist. Well, this is a concert hall, and it does have music all the time. So we decided to kind of turn the whole thing on its head, and perhaps take music, collect music, put music together that actually wouldn't normally be presented in that kind of space, or certainly within what one might think a conservatoire orchestra would.
[Music] Do. I'm just thinking, you know, there, I'm not a classical dude, you know? And I, I made these arrangements almost knowing nothing about what I was doing. I had never arranged for an orchestra before this. And all of a sudden, I'm like the biggest name in the show. And and there's like a Stravinsky piece just being played right before me. And I was just thinking, you know, people are probably going to have very high expectations and think I'm some sort of a genius or something since I'm so young and playing this huge gig. And then they may be come and to see that I, I do everything wrong. But, but it, I think it sounds good, and that's what matters. And I, I hope that people realize that it's not about elitism and rules. It's just about about doing something nice. You know, I was recently on a panel for a big advertising week in New York. I was on a panel called "A Shortage of Digital Talent." And all of these big ad executives were talking about how there's a shortage of digital talent out there. There are fewer people than ever before. I disagree. I think there are more, but they don't want to work in small little cubes and agencies on Madison Avenue. They want to work on their own terms. They want to work with their own hardware and software. They want to work on projects that they're motivated and passionate about. We're at a time when artists have the power, and, and I'm often puzzled that they don't recognize exactly how much power they have. There is no record company without the artist. There is no venue to fill without the artist. There is no t-shirt to sell without the artist. The creative world was always, uh, it was always segmented by who you knew and who happened to know somebody that you know. There was too much happening by circumstance. And that's what's unique and new about now is that incredible talent can work on their own, can represent themselves, can develop their own careers. They don't have to work at an agency anymore. They can really build their own enterprise, their own.
[Music] Brand. We are seeing a new breed of artists who are very independent and who are often self-managed artists who have these careers that they're dictating, and they're dictating based on their fans and where they want to creatively move through music, film, artwork,
[Music] Etc.
[Music] Machine.
[Music] To.
[Music] C.
[Music] [Music] A.
[Music] [Music] S.
[Music] [Music] For.
[Music] [Music] Here.
[Music] Sum it up simply, I think the easiest way to to understand Shallow is, we're, we're like a traditional production company for the most part. Um, but we've come at it from a very untraditional sort of way. The traditional model says there's a director, there's a post house, there's an editorial company, there's advertising agency, there's, there's all these, and each of them has their their own stake in what they're making. And there's sort of always this fight against it. By sort of harnessing all those things and saying, like, well, nowadays, the guys who direct and and are sometimes the guys who design, the guys who direct are also sometimes the dudes who edit. Um, you know, are there, you know, lots of are that sort of blended model, really changes the whole, um, landscape. And it also sort of says that like anybody can do anything. If a designer comes at directing something, they might have a different approach than a traditional, you know, director might have. And so it sort of comes out with a different product. So it's not, it's not just about whether something is better or worse, it's about something can be different because people are coming out from a different.
[Music] Perspective.
[Music] All of, almost the entirety of our shop sort of like comes from skateboarding. It's a funny kind of thing because we're all sort of like, we're all, uh, we've all sort of started from coming, seeing the world through that lens a little bit. We were the first people to like make videos and publish them ourselves. They were like, you know, and do them reoccurring and just keep making them and making them and making them. As soon as there was like, you know, a VHS camera that came out that you could just go and film and you could duplicate it and send it to people, that's where skateboarding started. There is an an essence in that world of, "Make it happen. Do it yourself. Who cares what the man says? Who cares what the world says? If you, you, you just go out in the streets and you skate." There's not, it's not like you're waiting for an organized team to set up a baseball game. It's like you just do it. They're looking at edits. What having the ability to sort of, uh, to do more of it, of the work ourselves, gives us is the ability to be more free, more visceral, more alchemic with with the way that the components come together. It's, it has a lot less of it has to be extremely pre-planned, and a lot more of it can be entirely improvisational. Um, like very much like of the moment and reflective of the moment. Most of it comes out of the sort of grassroots, like learn it yourself, do it yourself. Majority of our, of the people here, including ourselves, are self-taught. I mean, we have, we are educated, we've been, you know, we've gone to school, but not necessarily film school or design school. It's like, it's always just been something that's been the fruit of our labors, like on a, in a personal sense, where you just, you know, that kind of make it happen. I sort of, I sort of think also, there's no formal training for what's going on in the professional world right now, you know, in terms of like the filmmaking industry. It's, it's, you, you'll learn specific tools, but not necessarily anything that's going to prepare you for the, the base sense of of the values that you have to have in order to really make it or to enjoy yourself. My name's Adam Watson, and I am studying cinematography here, um, and also writing. So I'm kind of a jack of all trades. Um, right now, I'm working on a project that I'm, um, both directing and DPing, um, sort of a music video. Yeah, you learn a ton. Um, if you can get work without going to film school, great. I mean, more power to you. Um, I don't hear a lot of stories about the Robert Rodriguez and the Quentin Tarantinos who just sort of went out there and made a movie on their own and, you know, became overnight successes. The Oscar winners are nominees, look at the 10 of them and see how many didn't go to film school. Yeah, yeah. Like that car going away in the distance, you know what I mean? Even five years ago, some of the students who we would get wouldn't even know the concept of speaking editorially, wouldn't even know the concept of matching action. Uh, if my hand is down here in a wide shot, what's it like if it's here in the closeup? Now, I think that there's no need to match action all the time, but that's at least a concept that they've been experimenting with from fourth grade because they've been able to put images together and see what happens when it jumps from one place to another. They come to the school having made a lot of movies themselves where they did everything. They directed, they shot, they edited, they may have written the music, they may have acted in it. And so they could keep their vision up in here and not have to explain it, not have to describe it in lots of ways to collaborators. So at the core of what I teach here at SC, and what many of our faculty do teach, is how to understand what your story is to the degree so you can then describe that to other people so you can help them to join in in your storytelling. Do you want to start just shy of the ground floor? Our students need to be comfortable with the pace at which things change. We can't teach today's technology because in five years, that will be gone. We need to be able to teach them is how to tell effective stories using images and to be comfortable with how the technology is changing every single year. One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital revolution on the creative process is how it separated, to an extent, knowledge of craft and creativity. You know, so like to be a good photographer, you had to know how to develop your own film and how to print your own film, and you had to understand the way the camera worked. And now that doesn't matter. You know, same thing with music, like to be a great musician, you had to really know how to play your instrument, or you had to really know how all the technology worked. And now you have to know how to turn on a computer. Bonnie Raitt made that record in a cabin. You know, do I think that makes it any less of a great record? That record was amazing. I listen to it all the time. How would it have sounded if 20 people made it? That might have been, I would like to hear that record. And I, I, I, I, I don't know if you would have made the same one or the same personal experience. That's an interesting record to look at because the songs that he wrote are so, a guy in a cabin going through it, you know? So, you know, it's hard to say. I mean, maybe the, maybe the personalization of of the recording studio has led for some interesting art. There's certainly things I miss about it.
[Music] Though.
[Music] Younger musicians, and some older ones, I've seen, they're guilty of this too, rely too much on the technology. They give a substandard, a subpar performance, and they expect the technology to compensate for it. "Oh, you can fix that. I know you have a tool that does that. You can tune that. You can edit this to death. You can adjust this. You can adjust that." They know, unfortunately, the tools that are available to us. And yes, we can, we can, it's time-consuming, but we can, we can fix just about anything. After you finish fixing it, there is no performance anymore. There's, there's nothing there. The craft is not no longer necessary. Uh, the craft of writing, or the craft of, uh, of making art, or the craft of of the musician is gone. I think about 10 years ago, if I had worked with a drummer, and that drummer couldn't play that particular part with musicality or precision, then then we would work through the process until he could or she could, or we would hire somebody else. Now, if a drummer can't articulate a part with precision or musicality, I'm expected to edit it until it has those qualities. You know what I mean? If you listen to a Motown record, for example, those records are all played by amazing musicians. And now much of what you hear, I shouldn't say for all records, but for pop records, the records that I made, make the records that I'm hired to make, those records are generally, you know, mechanically edited to, you know, um, some might, some people might consider a sterile precision, you know, a confusing precision. I personally find perfection in art and music to be really off-putting. You know, like I like listening to Billie Holiday because there's vulnerability. You know, I love listening to Nick Drake because of that vulnerability and the imperfection. I get really almost intimidated and bored by perfect digital art. You know, and I think some engineers and some producers and some people who work on the production side of making digital art or music just focus on creating perfection without vulnerability and beauty and humanity. To me, the most important thing is to see work that's honest and interesting and complicated, be it a 45-minute movie or a feature or a bunch of little two-minute clips that one person puts on YouTube. And I think that that, it's really easy to get so worked up about all this technology without thinking about like where everything is artistically, and whether that's interesting. Because that's really, to me, the foundation. It all hinges on, which is nobody's going to care about how you distribute your movie or what you shot it on if it's not, if it doesn't have an idea beyond just, "I'm a modern person using modern technology." Do you think it's important for musicians at a conservatoire, like the RNCM, to be able to adapt to different playing styles? Do you think that's, that's part of what they should be learning, particularly for modern music? Yes, if, if they want to do that in the future, they have to, they have to be able to adapt to to anything, really, unless they want to get stuck within, uh, just one kind of music. And tell me what it's like working with musicians who are obviously at a very high standard, but more or less classically trained, so maybe from a slightly different tradition from some of the musicians you might normally work with. Can you just tell me about that? I think, I think it just took a little while for them to get this, you know. Um, at first, they maybe got the the individual parts sent by the orchestra manager and looked at them and thought, "Oh, this is really easy. I don't really need to rehearse this. Just a few notes." You know? And then came to rehearsal, and it wasn't really the feeling that was there because they didn't really understand what was happening. But only on that, after we had the first full run-through of the whole piece, after that, they all of a sudden got it. You know, they understand, "Hey, okay, this guy is just not doing what we're used to, and we have to adapt to that." And and then they really did. When they got a chance to understand the story and the feelings within the piece, they started playing it beautifully. And, um, they started playing it without constantly thinking about their classical training and just thinking about their feelings and just an expression of that. I definitely don't feel like a part of the classical world. Uh, I've never considered myself a classical musician in that way. And I know that the people within that world, they split into sides on how they look at what I do and what people, other people doing the same thing I'm doing. Well, I would say that the classical contemporary music scene is quite a closed circle. And that's a shame, I think. But the problem is, they, they, they have quite a, they have a problem with music that's just trying to be beautiful and and and use language that may have been used before, but but it's used in this context in a different way, I think. And then you get very, very often, you get a very, um, aggressive, um, reaction by these people against this music, and they, they think, you know, it's, it's, it's not worth, uh, the money and the effort. The classical world says, you know, you're not classical enough to be included in what we're doing. And we get this from, for example, radio. I'm, I'm too classical for the pop radio stations, and I'm too pop for the classical radio stations. I'm nowhere, basically. I've experienced that even with friends of mine who I thought were open with, you know, like, like pop music as well as classical music, but maybe they're just uncomfortable with this because they can't quite, you know, categorize it, which, which drawer it should go into, and therefore it makes them feel uncomfortable.
[Music] [Music] I think for me, that moment when I realized everything had changed was when a friend of mine who worked at BMI told me this story. It's about, I guess, seven or eight years ago, maybe even nine years ago. They had a focus group where they brought a bunch of kids into a room and played the music. And then on the way out, they had a bunch of CDs on a table. And they said to the kids, "Oh, as you're leaving, feel free to grab some CDs." The 20 kids, who about 16, 17 years old, as they left, not one of them took a CD. I'm Hillary Rosen. I was the, uh, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. '98 sales were, uh, good. We were, uh, sales were increasing. We were, uh, uh, CDs hadn't yet plateaued. Um, CD sales were still increasing. So, found Napster with my partner, Sean Fanning. And we were both high school students when we came up with the idea. We'd never even met in person when we founded the company. We'd only communicated over the internet. The, the vision behind Napster in the very early stages was just to come up with a system that made sharing of MP3s so easy that, you know, a housewife or grandmother in Iowa could do it. I think the first time that I used Napster, I noticed what it let you do, that you could access all this music very quickly. And I immediately felt like it just changed something in the way that I, in the way that I think about media or music. It just felt like that will never be the same. I, I had had dial-up internet at my house, and then I came to college and I had a T1 connection for the first time, the Ethernet, and it was just crazy. I, I went nuts and I filled up my laptop within two weeks. And then looking at this progress bar which said I downloaded one MP3, I can't remember which MP3 I downloaded, I downloaded one MP3 in the progress bar saying like, "2 hours remaining." And I thought that was the most amazing thing. I remember talking to a company executive who hadn't, hadn't really tried it. And, you know, I think he was going somewhere. I'm like, "Don't go anywhere. Go to your computer right now and follow my instructions." People were astounded, just much like, you know, the music fan who happened on Napster was. Uh, people were infuriated. You know, I think that their range sort of ran the gamut of emotions from, uh, excited, thrilled, to just completely outraged. We were the wake-up call for the record companies. We were, we were sort of, we were the first time that they were forced to recognize what was happening with content distribution on the internet. When I was younger, I thought about that and I was like, "Whoa, I want to be someone who does, who makes something that can change the way people interact with media so much." That was the most exciting bit to me about Napster and how in just one second, it changed your mind about something. Music today is, is sort of streamed to us. I mean, no people don't really buy. Obviously, people buy records. People don't really sit at home with the record and they listen to track one through to track 15. We might go on Facebook, we'll get a track. We'll go on MySpace, we'll get another track. Somebody will send one, um, in an email. Music is this sort of stream of noise.
[Music] I remember when I was a kid, I went out and bought a record. And, you know, it was this moment of pure concentration and and joy of listening to every little bit and looking through the vinyl and watching the the vinyl turn around with a needle in the groove. I mean, it's the sort of a full kind of concentration. Now, I always do something else while I listen to music, pretty much always. It becomes like you're just processing data, almost. If you do it all through a computer screen, you're actually, you're denying yourself the pleasure of just listening to music. And you're making it just like another task, like checking your emails or updating your Twitter or whatever. You know, like, "Now I'm doing this. Now I'm doing this. Now I'm going to listen to music." I don't think we value it any less. I think that we listen more personally, on personal, you know, of course, there were Walkmans and whatnot in the 80s, but I mean, you can't really go outside without seeing, you know, a million iPods. You sort of hear it here and there.
Perhaps it's more, it's, it's more kind of, um, a way of listening is a bit more, more distracted, I'd say. There is a psychology, I think, that that, uh, that that it that's changed. I mean, it was, it, you know, if you're going to see a movie and go to a theater, it's, you have to really think about it. You, you have to get out of the house, you have to leave, and you have to make that decision. It's a big decision. Whereas if you're in, in front of your computer at your house, you've got 2,000 movies, you can try one, you can stop at Midway, you can try another. You know, they cost $3. I realized the other night that I was watching a movie and reading a book at the same time. That's like sacrilegious, like that's crazy. Or, or more often, watching a movie and checking my email, and or watching a TV show and doing my work. I mean, we live in an incredibly attention deficit culture. And even if you just see the way the television's edited now, which is just like, blam, blam, blam, like, great. Like if I watch a reality show or something on MTV, like the way it's like a moment of footage cut together with a flashback, cut together with a graph. It's not about like a really, uh, a strong desire to consume art. And that's what a creator is up against, which is they're kind of having to trick people into watching what they [Music] make.
The invention of the technology to record music, de-bind the music of the 20th century. It all wanted to be recorded. It all wanted to be out there and sold. And that narrowed what music could be. We're entering a period where time, place, and occasion are going to be far more important elements of, of what music, how music is made, and how we jointly experience it. As people are able to now sort of download freely all the, uh, the music that an artist has produced, it doesn't really necessarily identify you as a fan, you know, because the guy next door is also downloaded it. It didn't cost anything. Therefore, you're not really identifying yourself as a fan of the act. But to go and see them live is a commitment, which identifies you as more of a fan. And so I think that the live side has probably benefited from the fact that it gives the true fan the opportunity to buy into the act and show that they are committed because you like, say, it's part of, of what's known as, as a person's self. Perhaps the experience is valued more, the exper, that the actual experience of, of seeing, of seeing a one-off, of seeing a, a situation where, which happens only that night. Um, because, because recorded music feels cheaper now because you can get a track for 79p and you don't really need to buy the whole album, you can just buy the track that you really [Music] like. [Music] [Applause]
I think the live show is what's going to keep music dangerous. Um, no one's going to get surprised by an MP3. No one's going to get surprised by a record. They're always coming, you know, you're not getting excited to wait in line on a Tuesday release day to go buy your favorite record. That record is going to show up one day and you're going to play it, you know. But a live show, who knows what's going to happen? Anything can happen, you know. And it happens once. When you have a CD or an MP3, you have a very flat bit of music. It's like that. And then when you have it live, it's like that. Do you know what I'm saying? And I, I think people miss that, miss being able to just, like, they're, you know, they, they, they can escape inside the music. People say there is no magic, but you know what is, you know that feeling when you see somebody live and you totally, like, you go out of your mind, you connect, and you treasure that memory, and you have, you know, I have certain memories to like Leonard Cohen live, and I will treasure them forever because like what happened, you know, I got like goosebumps. We humans, we evolve, but we're finally animals. So we like to dance and interact and, and, and have fun, or, or learn, or, you know, that's what we are possessed about. It's great for, like, the music environment and for kids and for people to just be able to like experience music for real. I love that. I love that that that's a part of the music industry again, or at least, you know, a part of my world again, which it wasn't really when I was a kid. I was more a club kid, um, and like live music was more like for [Music] rockers. I think a lot of musicians are now increasingly compelled to figure out how to stand on stage and connect with an audience, whereas before the connection was playing the one hit single that the audience might have heard on the radio. And now the connection has to be a lot more genuine, and I think a lot more human in a way. You can listen to LCD Soundsystem record, and then you see LCD Soundsystem. There's nothing comparable to see them live, is it? It's a completely different experience on how the artist approaches the audience, being the audience, one or two people or 15,000 [Music] people.
Your thank you. Second, who goes first? I go first. Yeah. Who goes first? Off everything. When do I go off? I, I bring you to the front and then don't trust me. Should I really? [Music] [Music] [Music]
When we look back at the history of every other industry that got built in the 1920s and 30s, we say, we wish we were there then because, wow, wouldn't it have been cool what we could have done? This is even bigger than that. And most people are ignoring it, saying, oh, there's a recession, blah. This is the best shot you've ever got. I, I think as an artist, you, you have to accept the unexpected. I think that right now, we, we're, we're not in a world where we can determine or we can predetermine what we think things are going to be. We don't, we don't, we're, we're all operating in the dark. We have no clue of what's going to happen. And that to me is, is what is what makes it all [Music] fun. I think that the music industry is changing, and there's not going to be like one new solution that replaces everything else. It's always, it's, you know, it's going to stay diverse and undefined for maybe forever. It's going to be really interesting to like look back in 10 years at this point and see if the film industry is kind of leveled out and if there's a kind of a way things are happening, and if this incredibly fast rate of change stops, or if this is sort of the reality from now on, which is that we're so technologically savvy that things are constantly shifting and there's not really stable ground. The problem with the revolution was that in sort of very simplistic Healian terms, we assume one world dies and automatically is replaced by the next. That's not how revolutionary periods work. That's not how the media world works. So we've destroyed the old world, but we still don't know what is going to replace it. We still don't even know if anything will replace it. It's quite conceivable that we will see the end of a cultural economy. It'll look like a pretty revolutionary time. I think, I think it's a little bit hard to see when you're in the middle of it. Always, and hindsight always, uh, being 2020, you look back and you say like, oh, wow, that was pretty, things were changing pretty radically. I think in 10 years, when I look back on this, I'm going to go, wow, I can't believe that, uh, we didn't edit in the cloud. That I, I can't believe that we lug big cameras around. You know, you have to remember, it's a very short, um, history to pop music. You know, and it's been going in earnest since like the mid-60s, really, in in the sort of form that we recognize it. So, so there's nothing to say that the, the older models, you know, had any real legitimacy. It's just that's just the way it's sort of turned [Music] out. [Music]
I think in 20 or 30 or 50 years, we're going to look back at now with sort of like an endear, like a wistful nostalgia. You know, sort of like the same way like we look back at cell phones 25 years ago, like, oh, they were cute, they're big and clunky, and they only worked in one part of the world. Um, or the way we look back at Vaudeville, the way we look back at any sort of like antiquated, outdated technology is like, it was clunky, it was naive, and it had its own charm, but we've moved on. [Music] [Music] [Music]