“ The disappearance of the object seems to be a fait accompli in recorded commercial music. Leaving aside the rare nostalgic, the format fetishist/fundamentalist, the minor industry of retro replicas, and also the no-industry of so-called underground experimental music, nobody cares anymore about the traditional physical carriers of audio when it comes to actually listening to music (whatever that might mean today).
Not only the shellac and vinyl records are gone; the “compact disc” – incarnation of the “digital music revolution” – is also gone. In pure techno-theological fashion, but well beyond the simple metaphor, one could think of the CD as the martyr who first brought the digital gospel and then sacrificed his body for the eternal salvation of the digital audio files dwelling in cloud-heaven today.
After a burgeoning century that saw a novel object-based music industry appear, rise and collapse, the process of digitization – so the story goes – has eventually dematerialized music, which now moves disembodied at lightning speed (or so they claim it does) among mythical servers, multiple personal devices and up and down “the cloud”.
The “broadcasting/streaming” dematerialization (both analog and digital; from classic radio to piped Muzak to online/“cloud” streaming) can be seen as a further degree of dematerialized ownership or accessibility. We do not even have the encoded information – whether analog or digital – but instead have (own, buy, get granted) the right to access it as a decoded physical perceptive manifestation (audible sound, in the case of music).
And somehow, with obvious telematic and portability twists of far-reaching consequences, we are thus back to the agelong situation of our hands (and our shelves) being empty of any imaginable materialized music. That is, back to an ethereal state of listening.” Francisco Lopez
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/87923/87924
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Le journal du peintre 2 