| This is just thinly veiled communism with buzzwords, dislike of the rich because they're rich and identity politics complaining about how the music production is “white” without defining what makes music white or colonialist. >Francisco’s agenda is clear: democratization leads to consolidation, which leads to platformization, which leads to profits. No its not clear, its their fantasy projected. >Adobe, whose extortionate Creative Cloud suite includes Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, and Premiere Pro, has near-monopolistic control of visual and design culture, as well as the education institutions that teach art and design. It is now essentially a compulsory investment for the precarious creative worker in those fields; the means of cultural production are being rebranded as capital investments. What does this mean? It has a monopoly over design culture? So all art made with Adobe looks the same? You can tell if art was made with photoshop? You can tell what photos were edited by Lightroom? You didn't need to buy them before since now the means of cultural production are being rebranded as capital investments? >Musicians need more recourse to seize their means of production. The companies release plugins and cheaper software, what does this phrase even mean? Do they have a monopoly? Do they not have the ability to produce music now? Do free alternatives not exist? Why is the writer so bothered by this specific one? > According to Angela McRobbie, this centralized model has morphed into what is now described as the ‘creative industries,’ which privileges the economizing of individual self-expression, subjects it to the free market in lieu of government funding or patronage, and downplays the collective identities that help to create politically engaged art and culture. Who? Some random name that I never heard of? What does this mean? Products are cheaper and more accessible, so it’s economizing self expression? They want the government to pay musicians since that’s how all music was made before these plugins? You can’t make political art or culture since these tools are too white or colonialist and you can’t have creatives collaborate or have a collective identity? > Despite non-Western tuning systems being easy to implement in theory, they are not readily accessible for most software instruments, an issue that musician and researcher Khyam Allami has recently addressed with his transcultural generative music apps. They’re easy to implement, yet the people saying it’s easy can’t implement it themselves and they’re complaining about it while relying on a corporation to make it? How ridiculous is this? |
Several examples were given, referencing available music scales and tools for eliminating dialect and individual variation. They also gave citations for what they meant where they introduced this complaint. [1]
1. Philip Ewell, ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’ Music Theory Online, 26(2), 2020 <https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html>. ↑