Artists:

It used to be hard to break into the music business. Now it's still difficult, but you have even more crap obscuring your path so that it's probably a lot harder to get noticed. It's like bands used to be trees in a forest, now they're leaves in a forest, if that makes any sense. The path to get in line to get discovered is probably easier, but there's a corresponding increase in the difficulty for those trying to discern the true talent. I can't tell you how many times I've gone on iTunes myself to investigate some band that is all the rage, only to find they are just another insipid group of wanks who overestimated their talent but were somehow able to get their music past the sleeping sentries of the digital music biz. It's just as rare as it used to be for a band to have any real meaning, but now I have to wade through so much detritus that I don't get that excited about the search anymore.

The Experience:

I know the new music biz model is quite lucrative for many new-media companies and even for many bands, but it has taken away our artifacts, and that is the thing I most resent.

No one gets together and shares their 'records' anymore. Talking about the art on the cover or arguing what the best tracks/sides are used to be valid social interactions. People used to know the titles and order of the songs on their favorite records (some of us still do). We just download piecemeal snippets of agreeable audio, and often don't even know the name of the track or who the artist is. Many times even musically fervent friends of mine have not been able to name the artist for the track that is playing when I ask them, without consulting the LCD on the iPod or car stereo. They just downloaded something that was linked from a link that they found when they linked to an artist they actually could name.

The experience that sharing music gave us was half the thrill of the music itself (even listening to Journey from a boombox on the hood of a Monte Carlo sitting in a clearing in the woods around a bonfire had great meaning -- oops, a little too autobiographical). We developed relationships with artists through their records being played in their entirety...repeatedly. The 'shuffle' setting has certainly diluted this by eliminating continuity. Now everyone has white earbuds in their ears and couldn't share what they were listening to if they wanted to.

I'm perhaps being a bit over-dramatic and cynical here. I know people still share music, but now it has to be part of your personality to want to actively share. It's not a naturally occurring thing so much anymore in my opinion. It's in many ways harder to share, too, due to where the music resides (counterintuitive to the whole-collection-in-your-pocket, I know), and our mosquito-like attention spans. Like most adventures in the virtual world, finding music online is such a lonely activity that perhaps it's influencing the social aspect of our music. Why thumb through a friend's collection of CDs with a beer in my hand when I can scroll through millions of songs in the comforting glow of my own LCD at home?

The Future:

And on top of that, without the artifacts, where will our personal collections be in 15 or even 10 years? No one will be pawing through a St. Vinnie DePaul thrift store and find a sweet gem of an MP3 to be really excited about. It will just be gone into the ether more than likely. My digital collection will probably not even be accessible for my son to explore when he's in his teens. Assuming our current catalogs of music migrate to whatever the new technology/encoding arises, it may be easy for him to explore the genres/artists of the past, but I wonder if it will have as much meaning as the first-run Johnny Cash record that I got from my dad, or the untitled and impossible to find first Jayhawks record that my brother gave me. How can there be real gems anymore when a keystroke can multiply its existence by exponential numbers? I can download the same song that 500,000 other people download in 10 seconds from iTunes or Limewire -- where's the quest in that? I still buy everything on CD unless it's something that is only available digitally, which by the way doesn't necessarily make it special in the least.

ND is what Rolling Stone used to be, and Spin never was. Today's Rolling Stone is doing its part to reduce the already transitory attention spans of music fans. Steve Jobs just said recently "no one reads anymore". That's not true, they just can't read more than one paragraph at a time about any one subject. ND was dedicated to introducing people to artists, encouraging them to start a personal relationship with them, and maybe that's just not what the masses want anymore. They want: 1) to know who are they dating 2) do they have tattoos 3) how did rehab go and 4) boxers or briefs. That's not to say that there aren't important things being said in the digital media about music, but again -- leaves in a forest.

And even if I find something important, I don't get the artifact. I have most of the NDs that were published, and I'll be keeping them forever. Perhaps that's how my son will learn about awesome music from my era. (I plan to keep my CDs/vinyl too, so there's that.) When I get a new computer, all the links to cool things written about music on my computer will be probably be lost. And they will probably be taken down from the servers anyway to make room for more recent content even if I did somehow retain the link. Heck, I may lose my entire digital collection someday through a glitch or obsolescence or carelessness.

Maybe ND's future is more of a hybrid with a net-based core. Look at Pitchfork. They're going gangbusters. They sponsor a huge music fest every year now. They're starting a 'TV' station online soon. Clearly they're doing well. I don't see a counterpart to them in the roots/alt-whatever/Americana category, though they cover a small bit of it. Another blog I like, catbirdseat.org, has evolved from a blog to also encompass a record label. Maybe ND can be all these things. Heck, put out an annual digest of the best written work with a CD like Oxford American does. I'm sure you're exploring all the options and I'm sure ND will do great in it's next incarnation. I just regret not being able to have the artifact anymore.