Silence

 

 

 

 

In a recent Contrabanda I talked about Caetano Veloso and his silences, incidentally calling John Cage a “smart guy.” That noun deserves an explanation.

 

You will remember 4’33” by Cage, a composition where the performer sits in front of the piano, opens the keyboard by lifting the cover up, starts a stopwatch and, until the end of the time set by the ‘score’, stays in front of the keyboard doing nothing.

 

People shouted at a stroke of genius. I too; but I also think that was the day the capitalism of music platforms and Spotify were invented. I’m afraid I have to explain myself.

 

Starting from Gary Gereffi, professor of economics at Duke, who pushed the analysis of the “value chain” into a global and totally interrelated context, such as the current one, defining the “Global Value Chain” as the sum of the added values ??inserted by each of the economic actors involved in the production, and other steps contributing to the retail price of a certain good.

 

No need for details on the GVC. Suffice to say economy, seen in this way, becomes a Herzog-ian world of natural chaos and violence, a Darwinian struggle for survival where the winner gets it all but needs capital, critical mass and clout. Studying the GVC Gereffi found in fact some “supply chain leaders" swallowing 90% of all of the profit from the chain.

 

Gereffi observed, also, some unflattering similarities between the coffee and cocaine markets. Namely, that both concentrated value in the transformation phases, which require investments in capital and organization, and sales, which  for coffee require significant advertising budgets while cocaine requires "human resources", the dealers, downstream in the chain, bearing significant risks but without any strategic relevance.

 

To put it in another way, if a brand creates a multi-year relationship with its customers, through heavy advertising spending, the material qualities tend to lose importance compared to the immaterial aspect.

 

In some cases, however, the key players (chain leaders) can limit access to the consumer, for example with exclusive distribution agreements or simply because they are the largest in their sector and eat up all the small ones with 'murderous' low-price strategies, like Lidl. In short, communicating with today's volatile consumer and keeping him satisfied is difficult, expensive and therefore has a very important economic value. In practice, globalization has increased concentration. Thanks to Technology.

 

Coming to music, each artist creates his own brand, some with craftsmanship, some with science. But in the music market there are a few Billion brands, as there are a million mini-brands. And these remain mini because we don't know how to find them: you don't even know the names of those you might like!

 

Shazam came to help, amazing invention (and a bit stupid: it reads the bits and bytes but doesn't understand the song.) But it supposes that some DJ (say, an 'expert') chooses some music then you listen to it and ask Shazam, while at a bar or shopping, to know whose song was that.

 

Enter Big Data & streaming systems: from now on "the expert DJ" becomes the algorithm of the machine. Which deducts from our choices and sets the tool for a sort of digital democracy (or: "survival of the most played") where we find - choosen by "people who's listened to your tune" - similar artists. In a game of successive approximations, it creates traffic for the platform and a certain added value, with its defects - first and foremost its passivity for the user.

 

The "customer" indeed pays a little money and enters in a mirror room, where he/she sees his/her reflection as an unpaid worker of the Platform, human input for the system. And platforms love marketing fees and targeted campaigns, which increases concentration and the control of our choices.

 

With 4’33” John Cage imposed an unheard-of violence on the pianist. It was the final violence against the entire union class of orchestra members and musicians. An order to submit, to cancel all virtuosity. No Paganini. Indeed, nothing at all. Suddenly, thousands of years of music were erased.

 

Just as today some tend to define a woman as an “individual who menstruates” or “who breastfeeds” (and everything else is a great nebula of genders that we would never have imagined or imagined) so 4’33” extended the quality of “musician” well beyond the tenacious technical study of the instrument, the previous criterion of distinction.

 

The well-played piece, or even just structured, became a little box of many other styles: anyone was allowed to land in recorded music and have the confidence to be able to make a name for themselves. Obviously PROVIDED THAT it was put, so to speak, “in prime time”, under our noses and promoted. For this reason, platform capitalism has received a great deal of help from Cage, the Jackson Pollock of modern music.

 

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