stage 2

More stuff that's been left out of my stage 2 proposal...

1. ...also problematic is that both Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and Chris Anderson’s concept of the infinite marketplace (Anderson, 2006) only hold true if applied to a certain social group – the cultural bourgeoisie. Outside this group, consumers aren’t concerned with conferring social distinction and would rather tap into the hits-orientated market of the mega-corporations.

2. Is music criticism an inherently parasitic trade? George Bernard Shaw did not believe so. “I could make deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music,” he wrote about his own column on criticism in The Scottish Musical Monthly (Shaw, 1961), neatly summarising the odd dichotomy that often takes place when music critics practise their craft with skill: it no longer becomes necessary to hear the piece of music under discussion, the descriptive passage is enough.

3. What complicates discussion about web 2.0 is that now the bigger companies have begun to grasp the counterintuitive logic of statistical probabilities, it is no longer expansionary but starting to contract. The internet is becoming homogenised, as companies such as Google and Amazon tighten their grip on web 2.0 users, using time-honoured free market tactics – i.e. price the others out of the game by making your own product unbeatably cheaper and ubiquitous. In the case of web economics, this means that almost everything Google offers to the consumer is free – and it then takes full advantage of The Long Tail effect by opening up everywhere to advertising, knowing that a “very, very big number (the products in the Tail) multiplied by a relatively small number (the sales of each) is still equal to a very, very big number” (Anderson, 2006).

How To Become A Musical Critic

"It is not so easy to cite instances of writers who fail because, being critics, they have neither literary skill nor musical culture. A man cannot become an expert in criticism without practicing on art of some kind; and if that art is not music, then he naturally confines himself to the art he is accustomed to handle, writing about it if he has the necessary literary faculty, and if not, teaching it." (George Bernard Shaw, How To Become A Musical Critic, The Scottish Musical Monthly, December 1894, reprinted by Da Capo, 1978)

"I could make deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music." (same source)