"The human spirit, when it's allowed to become made manifest through art, invariably is gonna create greatness." "You know, so it almost doesn't matter what the medium is." "It doesn't matter what the financials are." "It doesn't matter what the delivery vehicles are." "When humans make stuff, we tend to make interesting things." "So if you give a human a hammer and a piece of wood, they're gonna make something interesting." "If you give a human a computer and broadband access, they're gonna make something interesting." "In the olden days of 30, 40, 50 years ago, people didn't make things." "You know, like, so, people would go to photography exhibits." "People would go buy records, and there were professional artists, and now everybody's a photographer." "Everybody's a filmmaker." "Everybody's a writer." "Everybody's a musician." "See, before, you could sell a record for $10 or $16.98 as a Cd because there was still this inherent mystery about how it was done, who did it, and how can I do that thing?" "Well, now that mystery has dissolved itself because I can make it." "Anybody can make it." "They know the secrets now." "I think that this is an incredibly fertile time for artists." "There's no cap on creativity." "The technological advances have given the artists an open door to creating as much as their capacity will allow." "Anybody can go out and make a movie." "Anybody who has $1,500 can buy a camera." "Even if you don't, there are so many ways to make a movie." "There are so many ways to distribute your film on the Internet, on the -- you know, there's a million different platforms." "So that's all really good for people who want to express themselves, but it also makes it a lot harder to kind of break through all of the noise." "I don't think a young Fassbinder, a young Wenders, a young Hitchcock, a young Scorsese -- they wouldn't make it in this business." "Slap up their early stuff on Facebook, on YouTube -- it would get lost." "It would get lost in the ocean of garbage." "You remember, in 2007, time magazine gave the award of best person of the year to you, ourselves, you and I." "It's -- it's global masturbation." "Used to be you didn't become an artist to become rich." "You became an artist 'cause you had an idea to share, 'cause you had an emotion to share, and that's where we're heading again." "And we're gonna see more people do more art in more ways than ever before." "Almost everybody I meet in the world of art, music, literature, creative expression, everybody's equally excited and afraid." "You know, no one really knows where their next paycheck is coming from, but they're really excited at their ability to create work and communicate directly with an audience." "My name is ólafur Arnalds." "I am from Iceland." "I play..." "I play " " I cross over classical music into pop music." "Trying to make classical music popular, I guess." "Well, I started making the music maybe early 2006, recording my first album." "Then I think only three, four months after I actually put some of the music online, I was playing for shows." "And they were already sold out, so it happened very fast." "There was not some years of preparation." "It was just a few months." "I see myself as..." "Maybe a neoclassical composer." "I don't know." "I'm just a musician." "I guess that's the word for it." "It creates some -- quite a contrast when you're mixing these two different worlds together." "But still, it's just sound frequencies." "There's -- you know, theoretically, there's no actual difference between a sound coming from a computer or a sound coming from a piano." "If they're both coming out from the same speaker, it's just sound waves." "I do think a lot of the classical scene is very divided from the rest of the world, and I would like to see this divide broken down." "I would like to..." "See classical music as just another genre with, you know, just like pop or rock or dance music." "We're all kind of in the same category, and then there's classical on the other side." "When I started making records..." "You really had to have a piece of hardware for almost every task." "If you wanted to E.Q. A vocal or you wanted to limit the variation in dynamic response of a given instrument, if you wanted to give it an echo or a delay, you wanted to make it feel as though it came from a cave, each of those things had to have its own specific box." "So, you'd have a drum machine that was old and would only talk to your sequencer with a weird midi din sync converter." "So just making electronic music, getting everything to even just generate sounds was difficult." "I remember when we were doing -- back in the day, we were doing "louder than a bomb," for example, and we needed to make a mute of all of, like, about -- about 10 tracks needed" "to all mute at once, and we didn't have any automation on our board." "So, we had to, like -- we had to listen to the song come down, and then as it gets to a certain point, everybody has to go like, "okay, one, two, three."" "And everybody had to be on sync, and then you got to release in sync." "So that -- you know, those are the kinds of dynamics that we had to do back in the days vis-à-vis to what you can do today." "A big difference is that at that time, you had to be, like, around 30, 35, know people, and have a little bit of money to be able to record stuff, whereas now you can just do it on your" "own computer and the Internet, and anyone can record music now." "When we started, one of the reasons that we were able to kind of get going was because you could just use a home computer to make multi-track recordings and, you know, play a bit of guitar and then play some more guitar on top of it and" "then sing on top of it, and it was easy to do." "It's software, you know?" "So now any kid can use a cracked version or buy a version of reason or logic or ableton and in about five minutes, do what took six months or years, 20 years ago." "There's a lot of different aspects of being a colorist." "But, basically, what you do is adjust the look of footage, basically -- the brightness, the contrast, the color, the saturation, you know, things like that." "You give -- you give the footage a look." "When I started out doing this, it was a matter of taking a roll of film, putting it up on the scanner, and adjusting the light level out of the scanner to make pictures." "And it really isn't that much different except now we're working with things like, you know, files and sequences instead of a roll of film." "The red is probably the newest generation, I would say, of a digital motion-picture camera." "And the most revolutionary thing about it, I think, from a lot of people's perspective is the fact that they knocked the zeros off the price tag to the point where a lot of people have access to" "making very high-quality motion-picture images." "That's the biggest thing." "I mean, you can always buy a cheaper camera, but I don't think that there's ever been a camera at that price range that has generated the kind of images that it does, and that's, I" "think, the most revolutionary part about it." "So, we're at red studios, which is somewhat historic." "This is one of five sound stages that you're looking at here." "They're shooting a big red project in here right now." "There's a shoot going on here, a shoot going on here." "And this stage here we took over as a working lab." "So we have a full 4k theater in here and a place to test cameras, test work flow, demonstrate all the different logic." "We're actually building some sets in here today for some -- for some testing that we're gonna do." "In the early days of this whole red rebellion, as we were building the camera, there were a lot of people that never thought this would happen, that were just kind of laughing at us, chuckling at us." "A lot of people called it a scam." "They called it vaporware." "They called it a waste of time and energy." ""Don't spend time with these crazy red guys 'cause they're never gonna do anything that's actually gonna happen."" "And that's all part of that rebellion, is refusing to believe all those people that said, "you can't do this."" "The red as a tool and what it means from a filmmaking standpoint, from a moviemaking standpoint is pretty interesting because it means a lot more movies that may have not had a chance to be made will be made," "which means that you're going to have a lot more options for cinema." "You're gonna have a lot more creativity rising to the top." "I never thought about filmmaking as a job that I could have." "I loved movies, I loved writing, but it didn't ever occur to me that that was something that I could do with my life, and I think the moment that it did occur to me was when I started" "seeing, like, the movies that were at south by southwest in 2005, like, these movies people were calling mumblecore movies that are small digital stories, you know, made by people my age about people my age." "And suddenly, I understood, like, this is a different world, and it's possible for anybody to make a movie now." "Guess who got a job?" "I'm a hostess at Clandestino." "They hung up." "I'm a man in the house, okay?" "That's invaluable." "There seems to be a lot more younger people that have access to a lot more tools than there used to be." "It used to be more the established guys could do this 'cause it was very expensive to do it." "Now it's -- the budget's " " I mean, you can do things -- you can actually produce a movie probably a lot cheaper." "Whether it's gonna be as good as a high-budget movie, I mean, that's debatable, but there is a way to make movies very cheaply now." "There's a way to edit them very cheaply, to shoot them very cheaply, you know, distribute them very cheaply." "So it -- it -- there's a lot more young people who are able to do that." "Jimi Hendrix -- if the electric guitar had not existed, this lad, this 17-year-old boy, wherever he was, called" "Jimi Hendrix would have never imagined." "He wouldn't have gone, "okay, this is a sign." "I've got to go invent an electric guitar."" "The electric guitar got invented very pragmatically for pragmatic reasons." "The rhythm guitars in the big-band -- in the big-band era of the 1930s needed to be slightly louder, so somebody came up with, "okay, we can come up with this technology to make this thing louder."" "So the technology -- the point I'm trying to make is, technology always comes first." "Then the artist comes along -- Jimi Hendrix." ""Oh, wow, you can -- oh, and if you do this, it goes, 'wah!" "' oh, that sounds good." "I want to do stuff with that."" "So the artist always comes after the technology." "The artist never -- the artist didn't invent oil paint." "The artist didn't invent the moving camera." "It wasn't their vision." "That technology is usually invented for some other reason, and then the artist comes along and abuses it and changes it and -- and so, in that sense, technology's great." "One of my main purpose with doing music is to inspire people in any way possible." "And one way of inspiring someone is, they feel like creating art when they do this." "And -- and I thought, "why should this always be one way?"" "Like, I make music, and then people listen to it, and I got sent a lot of art back." "All the time, people send me videos." "They do music videos to the song." "They make a painting or take photos and name them with a title of a special song for me or something." "And I thought, "we could also work this in both directions." "Why can't the fans also just inspire me?" "And we can work together and make an interesting collaboration -- a huge collaboration with a lot of people."" "So, I did " " I did this project where I encouraged people to -- to submit -- to do art to the songs and submit it to me and -- and be involved with the project and maybe inspire what I was" "doing, and in the end, we would use some of the pictures for the artwork for the release." "And from that project, we " " I got a lot of, like, videos that people did." "Some of them were stop-motion with some dolls but a lot of really cool stuff, and one video especially struck my -- struck my mind." "It was an Argentinean guy I've never met in my whole life put just a very simple visual, kind of a sound visualization that moves." "It's just colors, and they move with the music." "One color is the violin, and one color is the piano." "And -- and I sent him an E-mail and said, "hey, this is ólafur here, and I saw your video." "I would really like to promote your video."" "Used it as the official video to the song just like we did with other people's art and the album artwork, and he, of course, was just excited about that, and..." "And in the end, this was the most successful video definitely I've ever done." "And this video alone can account for a lot of my success in the last year." "In the creative world, it used to be that we knew where to go to get art, where to go to get entertainment." "It was very -- they were in boxes, and sometimes the boxes were the TV boxes." "Sometimes they were building boxes or the front page of a newspaper, which is a nice little box." "So that's fantastic." "But, of course, there's a price to pay to that old way of doing things, as well, which is somebody else is making your decisions, though they are also human beings." "It's a very limited, necessarily, range of tastes and opinions and ideas." "And traditionally, unfortunately, fairly typically, it's been representative of particular empowered groups -- self-empowered groups, groups empowered on the backs of others." "So, as they say, it's typically white guys that tell us what's gonna go into the museum or the front page of the newspaper, at least traditionally." "Art has been around for a really long time." "Music has been around for a really long time." "Painting and sculpture and plays have been around for a really long time, but it's only in the last 50 years that there's been an industry." "They call it the music industry, the movie industry." "That's new." "The old production systems brought certain value to the process." "In the time of atoms, you needed capital to record the music or the film." "You needed..." "More money and expertise to market it through the relative handful of channels that we had -- the TV stations and the newspapers and the rest of it." "And because these means were so expensive, very, very few artists could be brought through them." "After permission marketing, I really felt uncomfortable about writing again." "I was sort of done." "And Malcolm Gladwell sent me a copy of " to write a blurb for on the back." "And I read it." "And it unlocked something in my head that I didn't know was there." "It only took me 10 or 12 days to write a whole book that he had started in my head -- a book called "unleashing the ideavirus."" "And I finished the book, and I looked at it, and it's all about how ideas spread." "And I said, "now what am I gonna do with it?" "Because it says ideas that are free spread faster, and ideas that spread win."" "So, I went to my publisher, and I had just had a New York times best seller a year earlier, and I said, "here's my next book." "You can publish it, but I need it to come out right away." "And I want to give it away online for free."" "And my publisher's boss said, "great, we'd love to publish it, but you can't give it away for free." "We can have it out in a year."" "So I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and I just posted the ebook online." "And the first day, 3,000 people downloaded it, which is not a lot." "But then it was 6,000, and then it was 12,000, and then it was a million." "And now if you count pass along, it's five million..." "With just me, a laptop, and the Internet -- five million people." "So, people said, "well, how do you make any money doing that?"" "And I said, "well, first of all, I wasn't trying to make money." "I was trying to make a point." And I did make a point." "Ideas that spread win." "But then an interesting thing happened." "People started e-mailing me, saying, "I like this, but I don't want to read it on the screen."" "So we quickly self-published an edition, which isn't difficult at all." "You call one person, and they print the book for you." "We put it on Amazon for $40." "This is in, you know, the year 2000 or something -- $40, which is insane for a 200-page hardcover." "And it went to number five on their best-seller list, and then someone translated it into Japanese, and it went to number four." "And it got translated into all these languages." "I made more money from the book I gave away than the book I had sold." "And the lesson there for me is not that this is a good way to make money, but the lesson is, this changes everything." "The industry's dead." "I'm totally up for the democratization of any -- of anything." "The more democracy, the better." "Whether -- and the Internet has been one of the great things for democracy." "And the fact that we can have -- we can all create tracks and get them up has " " I initially thought, "this is fantastic." "You know, everybody..."" "Well, no, initially, it is fantastic, but it's pushed things along." "So, everybody that used to think, "oh, yeah, now I can make these tracks that sound fantastic in my bedroom," as if" "I'd spent, you know, a whole month in an expensive studio." "I can be just doing it here." "But it's changed everything." "It's changed -- that now becomes irrelevant." "That -- now that we can all do that, it's moved things along, and I like things moving along." "10 years ago, you would -- you would only assume that if you go to a concert, there's a performer onstage and has an audience of 10,000 people that they're performing to." "What's happened with the media sphere that we're in or media atmosphere that we are in now is that you go to this concert." "There's 10,000 people there." "The difference is that everyone believes that they are the artist and everyone else is the audience." "The problem with that, of course, is that everyone else thinks the same." "When you fall into the trap of confusing the artist and the audience, when you believe that the audience knows more than the artist, is more authoritative, is more creative, is more talented, then art ends, and you have something else." "You have cacophony." "You have simply an apology for radical democratization, and it's wrong to confuse democratization in cultural or political terms with the creation of art, which is by definition, for better or worse, an elitist business." "In our post-industrial age, because of atomization, loneliness, because of the breakup of community, the way to somehow reify or deify ourselves is through the creative act." "You go out there into the world." "Everyone thinks they have a novel in them." "Everyone thinks they can make a movie." "Everyone thinks that they can write a song." "That's why so many kids go into bands." "That's why everyone sits down and tries to write a great book." "That's why everyone now is buying camcorders and throwing their stuff up on YouTube." "It's a lot more people are making music, and music is definitely democratized now to where anyone can make an album, you know?" "Any single person with the most minimal software can make a record, you know, you know, put a record on the Internet, let the entire world know they exist." "The problem is, everyone's doing that." "Should everyone be able to be a successful musician?" "Should everyone be able to have a fan base, have people buying their music, make their living from music?" "No, absolutely not." "There are talented people." "There are not talented people." "That's a reality." "It's an unfortunate reality." "It's a reality that many people don't like because most people don't have talent." "So, for a serious, young filmmaker, these are very, very depressing times." "When you leave everything to the crowd, when everything becomes democratized, where everything is determined by a number of clicks, you're, by definition, undermining the seriousness of the artistic endeavor." "It's that idea of grey goo, you know, this idea that, like, if you have little, bitty, like, bio machines that can replicate themselves, there's nothing to stop the world from being covered in grey goo." "You know, these little things are gonna replicate themselves until there's nothing left of the world except for these little, bitty machines." "Art and culture potentially might succumb to that same principle, where if everybody's a musician and everybody's making mediocre music, eventually the world is just covered with mediocrity, you know, and people start to become comfortable with mediocrity." "And that, to me, is the danger." "There's no evidence that we're on the verge of a great, new, glittering cultural age." "If there's any evidence, as I've argued in my book and everything else I say, we may well be on the verge of a new dark age in cultural terms, a new collapse of Constantinople, where the" "creative world is destroyed, where all we have is cacophony and self-opinion, where we have a crisis of democratized culture." "Right now is a time of hype and backlash, and it's a constant stream of hype and backlash." "And it's so funny that I can look at bands, at people we're talking about like two years ago, like, they were the next big thing, and everyone on my team, like, everyone was talking" "about it, and where the fuck are they?" "Who cares?" "Who cares?" "You know, where are they?" "There are these embarrassing movements and sub-genres that we thought were the next big thing and were just a bunch of critics and bloggers jerking off on each other, you know, 'cause it's so easy to do that in the Internet age." "It's so easy to go in and out and discover new things right away." "You know, I think it's gonna look a little embarrassing." "You know, we're gonna be a little ashamed of ourselves." "We're here in Manchester because I'm playing a concert here with a full orchestra." "And the conductor," "André de Ridder, he contacted me, had me come here to do the show with him." "And what we'll be doing is that I have rearranged the whole new album for a full orchestra, and we'll be premiering that in a way." "I would say this is a pretty important concert for me, actually." "First of all, because it's the first time I've arranged anything for a full orchestra, and to show people -- well, to hopefully show people that I can do that is very important for me." "Royal northern college of music in Manchester, I think, is one of the best music colleges in the U.K., and it's regarded as -- certain departments as the best in the country, even." "They're very young musicians, and when ólafur arrived and met the orchestra, he was quite really, really surprised and said to me, "oh, these are kids."" "And then he was even more surprised when he heard them play because -- because they're already very, very, very good and mature musicians making very fine sound." "Well, the basic idea behind the whole evening really was something that we tend to do at the end of each year." "We try and either go somewhere else outside of the building into a place where there's not normally music." "We've been to museums." "We've been to art galleries." "Last year, we went to a huge rail station." "And we try and take music into a place that it doesn't normally exist." "Well, this is a concert hall, and it does have music all the time." "So we decided to kind of turn the whole thing on its head and perhaps take music, collect music, put music together that actually wouldn't normally be presented in that kind of space or certainly within what one might think a conservatoire orchestra would do." "I'm just thinking, you know, I'm more a classical dude, you know?" "I made this arrangement almost knowing nothing about what I was doing." "I had never arranged for an orchestra before this, and all of a sudden, I'm, like, the biggest name in the show, and there's, like, a Stravinsky piece that's being played right before me." "And I was just thinking, you know, people are probably gonna have very high expectations and think I'm some sort of a genius or something since I'm so young and playing this huge gig, and they maybe come and see that I do everything wrong." "But -- but I think it sounds good, and that's what matters, and I hope the people realize that it's not about elitism and rules." "It's about..." "About doing something nice, you know?" "I was recently on a panel for a big advertising week in New York." "I was on a panel called "a shortage of digital talent."" "And all of these big ad executives were talking about how there's a shortage of digital talent out there." "There are fewer people than ever before." "I disagree." "I think there are more, but they don't want to work in small, little cubes and agencies on Madison Avenue." "They want to work on their own terms." "They want to work with their own hardware and software." "They want to work on projects that they're motivated and passionate about." "We're at a time when artists have the power, and I'm often puzzled that they don't recognize exactly how much power they have." "There's no record company without the artist." "There's no venue to fill without the artist." "There's no t-shirt to sell without the artist." "The creative world was always -- it was always segmented by who you knew and who happened to know somebody that you know." "There was too much happening by circumstance, and that's what's unique and new about now, is that incredible talent can work on their own, can represent themselves, can develop their own careers." "They don't have to work at an agency anymore." "They can really build their own enterprise, their own brand." "We are seeing a new breed of artists who are very independent and who are often self-managed artists who have these careers that they're dictating and they're dictating based on their fans and where they want to creatively move through music," "film, artwork, et cetera." "To sum it up simply, I think, the easiest way to understand" "Shilo is, we're like a traditional production company for the most part." "But we've come at it from a very untraditional sort of way." "The traditional model says there's a director, there's a post house, there's an editorial company, there's an advertising agency, there's all these, and each of them has their own stake in what they're making, and there's sort of always this fight against it." "By sort of harnessing all those things and saying, like, "well, nowadays, the guys who direct are sometimes the guys who design." "The guys who direct are also sometimes the dudes who edit." "You know, are there lots of -- that sort of blended model really changes the whole landscape, and it also sort of says that, like, anybody can do anything." "If a designer comes at directing something, they might have a different approach than a traditional, you know, director might have, and so it sort of comes out with a different product." "So it's not just about whether something is better or worse." "It's about something can be different because people are coming at it from a different perspective." "Almost the entirety of our shop sort of, like, comes from skateboarding." "It's a funny kind of thing 'cause we're all sort of, like -- we're all -- we've all sort of started from coming, seeing the world through that lens a little bit." "We are the first people to, like, make videos and publish them ourselves." "They're like, you know, and do them reoccuringly and just keep making them and making them and making them." "As soon as there was, like, you know, a VHS camera that came out that you could just go and film and you could duplicate it and send it to people, that's where skateboarding started." "There is an essence in that world of make it happen." "Do it yourself." "Who cares what the man says?" "Who cares what the world says?" "You just go out in the streets, and you skate." "There's not -- it's not like you're waiting for an organized team to set up a baseball game." "It's, like, you just do it." "They're looking at edits." "What having the ability to sort of -- to do more of the work ourselves gives us is the ability to be more free, more visceral, more alchemic with the way that the components come together." "A lot less of it has to be extremely preplanned, and a lot more of it can be entirely improvisational, like, very much, like, of the moment and reflective of the moment." "Most of it comes out of this sort of grassroots, like, "learn it yourself," "do it yourself" mentality." "Majority of the people here, including ourselves, are self-taught." "I mean, we have -- we are educated." "We've been -- you know, we've gone to school but not necessarily film school or design school." "Like, it's always just been something that's been the fruit of our labors." "Like, in a personal sense, we just, you know, kind of make it happen." "I sort of think, also, there's no formal training for what's going on in the professional world right now." "You know, in terms of the filmmaking industry, it's -- you'll learn specific tools but not necessarily anything that's gonna prepare you for the base sense of the values that you have to have in order to really make it or to enjoy yourself." "My name's Adam Watson, and I am studying cinematography here and also writing, so I'm kind of a Jack-of-all-trades." "Right now, I'm working on a project that I'm both directing and D.P.Ing." "It's sort of a music video." "Yeah, you learn a ton." "If you can get work without going to film school, great." "I mean, more power to you." "I don't hear a lot of stories about the Robert Rodriguezes and the Quentin Tarantinos who just sort of went out there and made a movie on their own and, you know, became overnight successes." "The Oscar winners or nominees -- look at the 10 of them and see how many didn't go to film school." "Yeah." "Yeah, like, that car going away into the distance kind of." "You know what I mean?" "Even five years ago, some of the students who we would get wouldn't even know the concept of speaking editorially, wouldn't even know the concept of matching action." "If my hand is down here in a wide shot, what's it like if it's here in the close-up?" "Now, I think that there's no need to match action all the time, but that's at least a concept that they've been experimenting with from 4th grade because they've been able to put images together and see what happens when it jumps from one place to another." "Show people walking around back there." "Shoot." "They come to the school having made a lot of movies themselves, where they did everything." "They directed." "They shot." "They edited." "They may have written the music." "They may have acted in it." "And so they could keep their vision up in here and not have to explain it, not have to describe it in lots of ways to collaborators." "So, at the core of what I teach here at S.C. And what many of our faculty do teach is how to understand what your story is to the degree so you can then describe that to other people." "So you can help them to join in in your storytelling." "Do you want to start just shy of the ground floor?" "Our students need to be comfortable with the pace at which things change." "We can't teach today's technology because in five years, that will be gone." "What we need to be able to teach them is how to tell effective stories using images and to be comfortable with how the technology is changing every single year." "One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital revolution on the creative process is how it's separated, to an extent, knowledge of craft and creativity." "You know, like, to be a good photographer, you had to know how to develop your own film and to print your own film." "And you had to understand the way the camera worked, and now that doesn't matter." "You know, it's the same thing with music." "Like, to be a great musician, you had to really know how to play your instrument or you had to really know how all the technology worked, and now you have to know how to turn on a computer." "Bon Iver made that record in a cabin, you know?" "Do I think that makes it any less of a great record?" "That record was amazing." "I listen to it all the time." "How would it have sounded if 20 people made it?" "It might have been..." "I would like to hear that record." "I don't know if you would have made the same one or the same personal experience." "That's an interesting record to look at because the songs that he wrote are so..." "A guy in a cabin going through it, you know?" "So, you know, it's hard to say." "I mean, maybe the -- maybe the personalization of the recording studio has led for some interesting art." "There are certainly things I miss about it, though." "Younger musicians and some older ones I've seen -- they're guilty of this, too -- rely too much on the technology." "They give a substandard, a subpar performance, and they expect the technology to compensate for it." "Oh, you can fix that." "I know." "You have a tool that does that." "You can tune that." "You can edit this to death." "You can adjust this." "You can adjust that." "They know, unfortunately, the tools that are available to us." "And, yes, we can." "We can." "It's time-consuming, but we can." "We can fix just about anything." "After you've finished fixing it, there is no performance anymore." "There's nothing there." "The craft is no longer necessary." "The craft of writing or the craft of -- of making art or the craft of the musician is gone." "I think about 10 years ago, if I had worked with a drummer and that drummer couldn't play that particular part with musicality or precision, then..." "Then we would work through the process until he could or she could or we would hire somebody else." "Now if a drummer can't articulate a part with precision or musicality, I'm expected to edit it until it has those qualities." "You know, I mean, if you listen to a Motown record, for example, those records are all played by amazing musicians, and now..." "Much of what you hear " " I shouldn't say for all records, but for pop records, the records that I made -- make, the records that I'm hired to make, those records are generally, you know, mechanically edited to, you know..." "Some might -- some people might consider a sterile precision, you know, a computerized precision." "I personally find perfection in art and music to be really off-putting." "You know, like, I like listening to Billie holiday 'cause there's vulnerability." "You know, I love listening to Nick Drake 'cause of that vulnerability and the imperfection." "I get really almost intimidated and bored by perfect digital art." "And I think some engineers and some producers and some people who work on the production side of making digital art or music just focus on creating perfection without vulnerability and beauty and humanity." "To me, the most important thing is to see work that's honest and interesting and complicated, be it a 45-minute movie or a feature or a bunch of little two-minute clips that one person puts on YouTube, and I think that -- that it's really" "easy to get so worked up about all this technology without thinking about, like, where everything is artistically and whether that's interesting because that's really, to me, the foundation it all hinges on, which is nobody's gonna care" "about how you distribute your movie or what you shot it on if it's not -- if it doesn't have an idea beyond just, I'm a modern person using modern technology." "Do you think it's important for musicians at a conservatoire like they are in C.M. To be able to adapt to different playing styles?" "Do you think that's part of what they should be learning from modern music?" "Yes, if -- if they want to do that in the future, they have to -- have to be able to adapt to anything, really, unless they want to get stuck within just one kind of music." "And tell me what it's like working with musicians who are obviously a very high standard but more or less are classically trained, so maybe from a slightly different tradition from some of the musicians you might normally work with." "Can you just tell me about that?" "I think " " I think it just took a little while for them to get this, you know?" "At first, they maybe got the individual parts sent by the orchestra manager and looked at them and thought, "oh, this is really easy." "I don't really need to rehearse this." "Just a few notes," you know?" "And then came to rehearsal, and they weren't really -- the feeling wasn't there because they didn't really understand what was happening." "But after we had the first full run-through of the whole piece, after that, they -- all of a sudden, they got it, you know?" "They understand, "hey, okay, this guy is just not doing what we're used to, and we have to adapt to that," and then they really did." "When they got a chance to understand the story and the feelings within the piece, they started playing it beautifully." "And they started playing it without constantly thinking about their classical training and just thinking about their feelings and just an expression of that." "I definitely don't feel like a part of the classical world." "I've never considered myself a classical musician in that way." "And I know that the people within that world, they split into sides on how they look at what I do and what people -- other people doing the same thing I'm doing." "Well, I would say that the classical contemporary music scene is quite a closed circle." "And that's a shame, I think, but the problem is, they -- they have quite a -- they have a problem with music that's just trying to be beautiful and use language that may have been used" "before but is used in this context in a different way, I think." "And then you get a very -- very often you get a very aggressive reaction by these people against this music, and they think, you know, it's not worth the money and the effort." "The classical world says, "you know, you're not classical enough to be included in what we're doing," and we get this from, for example, radio." "I'm too classical for the pop radio stations, and I'm too pop for the classical radio stations." "I'm nowhere, basically." "I've experienced that, even with friends of mine who I thought were open with, you know, like, pop music, as well as classical music, but maybe they're just uncomfortable with this because they can't quite, you know, categorize it, which" "drawer it should go into, and therefore it makes them feel uncomfortable, I think." "For me, that moment when I realized everything had changed was when a friend of mine who worked at DMI told me this story." "I guess seven or eight years ago, maybe even nine years ago, they had a focus group where they brought a bunch of kids into a room and played them music, and then on the way out," "they had a bunch of cds on a table, and they said to the kids, "oh, as you're leaving, feel free to grab some cds."" "The 20 kids were about 16, 17 years old." "As they left, not one of them took a Cd." "I'm Hilary Rosen." "I was the chairman and C.E.O. Of the recording industry association of America." "In '98, sales were good." "Sales were increasing." "We were..." "Cds hadn't yet plateaued." "Cd sales were still increasing." "So, I founded Napster with my partner, Shawn fanning, and we were both high-school students when we came up with the idea." "We'd never even met in person when we founded the company." "We'd only communicated over the Internet." "The vision behind Napster in the very early stages was just to come up with a system that made the sharing of mp3s so easy that a housewife or grandmother in Iowa could do it." "I think the first time that I used Napster, I noticed what it let you do -- that you could access all this music very quickly." "And I immediately felt like it just changed something in the way that I think about media or music." "It just felt like that'll never be the same." "I had had dial-up Internet at my house, and then I came to college, and I had a t1 connection for the first time -- the Ethernet -- and it was just crazy." "I went nuts, and I filled up my laptop within two weeks." "And then looking at this progress bar, which said I downloaded one mp3." "I can't remember which mp3." "I downloaded one mp3, and the progress bar saying like two hours remaining." "And I thought that was the most amazing thing." "I remember talking to a company executive who hadn't really tried it, and, you know, I think he was going somewhere." "I'm like, "don't go anywhere." "Go to your computer right now and follow my instructions."" "People were astounded, just -- much like, you know, the music fan who happened on Napster was." "People were infuriated." "You know, I think that the room sort of ran the gamut of emotions, from excited, thrilled, to just completely outraged." "We were the wake-up call for the record companies." "We were the first time that they were forced to recognize what was happening with content distribution on the Internet." "When I was younger, I thought about that, and I was like, "whoa." "I want to be someone who makes something that can change the way people interact with media so much."" "That was the most exciting bit to me about Napster and how in just one second, it changed your mind about something." "Music today is sort of streamed to us." "I mean, people don't really buy -- obviously, people buy records." "People don't really sit at home with the record and they listen to track 1 through to track 15." "We might go on Facebook." "We'll get a track." "We'll go on MySpace." "We'll get another track." "Somebody will send one in an e-mail." "Music is this sort of stream of noise." "I remember when I was a kid, I went out and bought a record, and, you know, it was this moment of pure concentration and joy of listening to every little bit and looking through the vinyl and watching the vinyl turn around with the needle in the groove." "I mean, it's a sort of a full kind of concentration." "Now I always do something else while I listen to music." "Pretty much always." "It becomes like you're just processing data almost." "If you do it all through a computer screen, you're actually denying yourself the pleasure of just listening to music." "And you're making it just like another task, like checking your e-mails or updating your Twitter or whatever, you know." "Like, "now I'm doing this." "Now I'm doing this." "Now I'm gonna listen to some music."" "I don't think we value it any less." "I think that we listen more personally on personal..." "Of course, there were walkmans and whatnots in the '80s, but, I mean, you can't really go outside without seeing a million iPods." "You sort of hear it here and there." "Perhaps it's more kind of..." "Our way of listening is a bit more distracted, I'd say." "There is a psychology, I think, that's changed." "I mean, if you're gonna see a movie and go to a theater, you have to really think about it." "You have to get out of the house, you have to leave, and you have to make that decision." "It's a big decision, whereas if you're in front of your computer at your house, you've got 2,000 movies." "And you can try one, you can stop it midway, you can try another." "They cost $3." "I realized the other night that I was watching a movie and reading a book at the same time." "That's, like, sacrilegious." "Like, that's crazy." "Or, more often, watching a movie and checking my e-mail or watching a TV show and doing my work." "I mean, we live in an incredibly attention-deficit culture, and even if you just see the way the television's edited now, which is just like blam, blam, blam." "Like if I watched a reality show or something on MTV, the way it's like a moment of footage cut together with a flashback, cut together with a graphic." "It's not about a really strong desire to consume art, and that's what a creator is up against, which is their kind of having to trick people into watching what they make." "The invention of the technology to record music defined the music of the 20th century." "It all wanted to be recorded." "It all wanted to be out there and sold." "And that narrowed what music could be." "We're entering a period where time, place, and occasion are gonna be far more important elements of how music is made and how we jointly experience it." "As people are able to now sort of download freely all the music the artist has produced, it doesn't really necessarily identify you as a fan, you know, because the guy next door has also downloaded it." "It didn't cost anything." "Therefore, you're not really identifying yourself as a fan of the act." "But to go and see them live is a commitment which identifies you as more of a fan." "And so I think that the live side has probably benefited from the fact that it gives the true fan the opportunity to buy into the act and show that they are committed, because, you know, it's part of what's known as a person's self." "Perhaps the experience is valued more -- the actual experience of seeing a one-off -- of seeing a situation which happens only that night." "Because recorded music feels cheaper now because you can get a track for 79 pence, and you don't really need to buy the whole album." "You can just buy the track that you really like." "I think the live show is what's gonna keep music dangerous." "No one's gonna get surprised by an mp3." "No one's gonna get surprised by a record." "They're always coming, you know." "You're not getting excited to wait in line on a Tuesday release day to go buy your favorite record." "That record's just gonna show up one day, and you're gonna play it, you know." "But a live show -- who knows what's gonna happen." "Anything can happen, you know, and it happens once." "When you have a Cd or mp3, you have a very flat bit of music." "It's like that, and then when you have it live, it's like that." "You know what I'm saying?" "And I think people miss that -- miss being able to just feel like they're -- you know, they can escape inside the music." "People say there is no magic, but, you know, what is...?" "You know that feeling when you see somebody live and you totally go out of your mind." "You connect, and you treasure that memory." "You know, I have certain memories to Leonard Cohen live, and I will treasure them forever, 'cause, like, what happened, you know, I got goose bumps." "We're humans." "We evolve, but we're finally animals, so we like to dance and interact and..." "And have fun or learn." "You know, that's what we are possessed about." "It's great for the music environment and for kids and for people to just be able to experience music for real." "I love that." "I love that that's a part of the music industry again, or at least, you know, a part of my world again, which it wasn't really when I was a kid." "I was more a club kid." "And live music was more for rockers." "I think a lot of musicians are now increasingly compelled to figure out how to stand onstage and connect with an audience." "Whereas before, the connection was playing the one hit single that the audience might have heard on the radio, and now the connection has to be a lot more genuine and, I think, a lot more human, in a way." "You can listen to an LCD soundsystem record, and then you see LCD soundsystem, and there's nothing comparable to see them live." "It's a completely different experience on how the artist approaches the audience -- meaning the audience one or two people or 15,000 people." "Thank you." "Please take your seats." "Second row on the left." "Take your seats." "Take your seats." "Come on, darling." "Okay?" "Who goes first?" "I go first." "Yeah." "Who goes first off?" "When do I go off?" "I bring you to the front, and then..." "Trust me." "Okay." "Should I really?" "When we look back at the history of every other industry that got built in the 1920s and '30s, we say we wish we were there then because, wow, wouldn't it have been cool what you could have done?" "This is even bigger than that, and most people are ignoring it, saying, "oh, there's a recession, blah, blah, blah."" "This is the best shot you've ever gotten." "I think as an artist, you have to accept the unexpected." "I think that right now, we're not in the world where we can determine or we can predetermine what we think things are going to be." "We're all operating in the dark." "We have no clue of what's going to happen, and that, to me, is what makes it all fun." "I think that the music industry's changing, and there's not gonna be, like, one new solution that replaces everything else." "It's always, it's, you know-- it's gonna stay diverse and undefined for maybe forever." "It's gonna be really interesting to look back in 10 years at this point and see if the film industry's kind of leveled out and if there's kind of a way things are happening and if this incredibly fast rate of change stops or if this is sort of the reality from now on," "which is that we're so technologically savvy that things are constantly shifting and there's not really stable ground." "The problem with the revolution was that, in sort of very simplistic egalitarian terms, we assume one world dies and automatically is replaced by the next." "That's not how revolutionary periods work." "That's not how the media world works." "So, we've destroyed the old world, but we still don't know what is gonna replace it." "We still don't even know if anything will replace it." "It's quite conceivable that we will see the end of a cultural economy." "It'll look like a pretty revolutionary time, I think." "I think it's a little bit hard to see it when you're in the moment always." "And hindsight always being 20/20, you look back, and you say, like, "oh, wow." "Things were changing pretty radically."" "I think in 10 years, when I look back on this, I'm gonna go," ""wow, I can't believe that we didn't edit in the cloud," that," ""I can't believe that we lugged big cameras around."" "You know, you have to remember, it's a very short history to pop music." "You know, it's only been going in earnest since like the mid-'60s, really, in the sort of form that we recognize it, so there's nothing to say that the older models had any real legitimacy." "It's just that's just the way it sort of turned out." "I think in 20 or 30 or 50 years, we're gonna look back at now with sort of a wistful nostalgia, you know, sort of like the same way, like, we look back at cellphones 25 years" "ago -- like, "oh, they were cute, they were big and clunky, and they only worked in one part of the world."" "Or the way we look back at vaudeville." "The way we look back at any sort of antiquated, outdated technology as like, it was clunky, it was naive, and it had its own charm, but we've moved on."