A look at the changing trends in the music inudstry as they relate to the evolution of both the recording and distribution process.
Many scholars throughout history have theorized about the reason why human beings have an odd passion for possession. Among them was Jean Baudrillard whose theory of collecting as a marginal system offered a perspective not through an economic lens, as many others have done, rather through a semiotic lens. The theory defines object and differentiates it from utensil. An object, Baudrillard says, is a reflex of a passion. It refers only to itself and has meaning only to the owner of the objec
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Many scholars throughout history have theorized about the reason why human beings have an odd passion for possession. Among them was Jean Baudrillard whose theory of collecting as a marginal system offered a perspective not through an economic lens, as many others have done, rather through a semiotic lens. The theory defines object and differentiates it from utensil. An object, Baudrillard says, is a reflex of a passion. It refers only to itself and has meaning only to the owner of the object. Possession of objects is a reflex of the greater (and greatest) passion of personal possession. That passion drives us to collect objects, and once serialized these collections take on meaning beyond themselves and refer to each other. Collections, in short, are "complex organizations of objects, each which refers to all the others." These collections give meaning to an individual's life and become part of the owner's identity. Collections become the individual's reality, and purpose for living. Completing a collection, acquiring what Baudrillard calls the "unique object," would have the effect of erasing the individual's reality. The unique object's absence "enables [the owner] merely to rehearse his death (and so exorcise it) by having an object represent it." He used examples of art collections and interior design to illustrate his point of how humans collect, and how those collections express a passion and carry meaning with them for the owner. In many ways this theory works to explain why the collection of physical objects maintain meaning and possession of those objects alone shape the owner's identity. It explains the seemingly ordinary passion of human possession; the things we own, to borrow language from novelist Chuck Palahniuk, end up owning us. If ownership and possession are synonymous, that an object cannot be truly possessed unless it is legitimately owned, this theory seems only to apply to analog objects, that is, those objects that have tangible properties, as opposed to digital objects, which exist only as they are encoded onto another object. The tensions that digitized objects present to Baurdillard's theory are many and varied, and are identifiable through close examination of the digital music phenomenon that started in the 1990's.
In the late 20th century advances in recording technologies met advances in communication technologies and produced an unprecedented shift in the way humans could produce, distribute and access music. With those changes came a change in the meaning humans gave to the music they possess. No longer could a person purchase an album and leave it in its shrink-wrap to keep it in pristine condition. With digital music and all the technological innovation that came with it, a person can carry, playback and redistribute their entire collection on a single disc. The songs themselves still carry the same meaning for many people, but the collection's meaning remains undetermined. Baudrillard had no concept of digital (at least not one that would account for the digital proliferation since the late 1990s) and therefore the question remaining is what to do with ownership of digital objects.
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