Wednesday night’s CC Salon San Francisco concerned the future of music.

James Polanco spoke about Fake Science’s CC licensed podcasts and emphasized that Fake Science is not a record label, but a digital distributor with a far lower cost structure — and lower costs for both artists and patrons. Fake Science has a great slogan: Be a Patron of the Arts, Not a Consumer.

However, business is tangential to the future of music: how it is made and what it sounds like.

Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze each gave deep, highly compressed thoughts on the future of music that I will not attempt to summarize here. Watch for future articles and blog posts from them. One point they seemed to agree on is that though the constraints have changed (e.g., decline in mechanical reproduction, album-length works and album-length attention spans), new constraints are just as interesting. Gonze suggested that a new generation of “blog musicians” will slowly build up a body of small, inexpensive works.

Bob Ostertag speaks.

Minus Kelvin giving a shout out to Victor Stone and ccMixter.

Photos by Ryan Junell licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The next CC Salon San Francisco is May 10, featuring Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley, Tiffany Schlain of the Webby Awards, and Abram Stern and Michael Dale of Metavid. Be there then or be cube.

Posted 16 April 2006