Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Dead-Dropped Music?

Artist Aram Bartholl is embedding usb drives into walls, buildings and curbs for public but anonymous data up- and downloads. Not surprisingly, the comments focus in on the risks of acquiring viruses or having your equipment sabotaged, making this media equivalent of anonymous sex or sharing used needles; sad how modern public life gets stuck with such risks. In any case, it's certainly one way to try to get your music out there via sound files and sound-playing applications.

2 comments:

jeff_harrington said...

That reminds me of a story David Starobin told me in 1982 when I was working at the record store, Sam Goody's on E. 46th Street, NYC. He came by, not to sell us his LP's, but just to drop them in our bins and said he was doing this all over town. Seems to have been a winning strategy!

Daniel Wolf said...

Jeff, that is a good example of one of the great untold stories in the concert music world, which is the degree to which one must self-finance and promote a career upfront. As I've written here far too often, cds are no longer end use commercial items in themselves but have become the calling cards for concerts, commissions, and teaching gigs.

Someday, someone will have to write the definitive history of promotion in new music - Cage's percussion music getting a Life magazine spread, Steve Reich's collectors' item concert announcements, etc.