How Will We Listen To Music?

By Moby

Imagine that by 2025 music will be available on command, as will anything else that can be reproduced in the digital domain. Most of the recorded music in the world will exist on a variety of servers, and it will be possible to download instantly any piece of music to whatever portable playback device you might be using. If you're in your car and want to hear (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding, you'll be able to call it up instantaneously on a playback device that will make today's MP3 player look clunky. And if you want to hear only the intro, then you'll hear only the intro. If you want to hear the intro looped 300 times, then you'll be able to hear that too--virtually any permutation or variation you want.

With the spread of instantly accessible digital media, music will no longer be constrained by the time limits of a compact disc. Single pieces of music could be 75 minutes long, or six months long, or virtually infinite. With the sequencing technology that I have in my home studio now, I could start playing a piece of music that would still be playing five years from now. People in the future will be able to drive down the road and, through voice commands, take the drums from a Led Zeppelin song and put Billie Holiday's vocals on top of them and then play the whole thing backward and twice as fast but at the original pitch.

Which raises a crucial question: If we all become drive-time Puff Daddys, sampling and re-creating music according to our personal taste, are we the composer or the listener? If you create something that contains fragments of other songs but sounds nothing like any of those songs, have you in fact written a new song? This is a question that will keep music lawyers busy for a long time. Yet it's a development that will make the French deconstructionists happy. They've been saying for years that the act of reading completes the written work. By 2025, the distinction between listener and composer will be completely blurred.

Moby's latest album, Play, has been nominated for two Grammys