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The Elevator Diaries

Their eyes barely look up from their portable digital devices as they step through the opening doors, and quickly register that the other person or persons in the elevator are too old to be of relevance. They don't even glance down at the SXSW nametag. Instead, their index finger punches the "close doors" command on the elevator.

Three times, they punch that command.

Every single young (that is, under 35) member of the music industry at SXSW with whom I shared an elevator did this.

And they violate the traditional spacial requirements of humans in elevators by standing right on top of the control panel instead of moving to their theoretical half or third or quarter of the available space. They are in control. They are in a hurry. They are plugged in to the unseen world.

I am not.

The doors will shut at about the same time whether they punch the button at all, and punching it three times makes absolutely no difference.

But they are in a hurry. Even though, in fact, they are spending their time productively with their portable digital assistant, they are accustomed to devices bending to their will, better meeting their needs.

And it is becoming their world. It is their world.

Most years the generational transformation at SXSW is marked by music, by the rise and fall of electronic dance music or elephantine metal or whatever. Not this year. This year the transformation is strikingly NOT about music, but about the culture of the music business.

In the ephemeral, transitory path of the online world, it seems necessary to be plugged in constantly so as to know which potential co-branding partner is in ascent, and which is in decline, and what on the horizon would give one leverage to deal with and against either. Everything changes all the time.

Not my world.

And yet it seems in many ways preferable to the hustler's culture it replaces. For years I watched people climb the label food chain, working nowhere long enough to do anything but become attached peripherally to some act or album that did unexpectedly well before taking that perceived competence to another label. This tribe changed jobs every 18 months or less, promoted all the way, despite having actually done little or nothing at any one of those jobs.

I don't guess the hustler has entirely left the field, but my sense is that the brave new world values competence far more than labels once did or could. You either understand the technology and how to market it, or you don't. In the long run it may be even good. In the short run, I hope the elevators don't break under the strain.

And I wonder how many of those ventures will exist next year.

And then there's the music itself, in which the new lottery is "Grey's Anatomy" and the search is for the Darwinian mediocrity necessary to write songs which are simple and memorable and uninteresting enough to play well for twenty seconds behind a scene of fevered groping or the tears after.

Ah, well. That, at least, will pass one of these days.

For our part, we had a lot of meetings. With actual people. Some of which may turn into things we can talk about down the road, and much of which, inevitably, will prove to be vapor trails not worth chasing after.

But if, as I suspect, this was my last SXSW, at least I ate well!

Posted by grant on March 17, 2008 9:58 AM | Permalink