XLII

The music-industrial complex is a complicated beast with many heads and is in a possibly permanent state of flux. We all know this. Lots of learned folks have lined up to shout from digital mountaintops that the "solution" is this or that, tit or tat - but music fans are still left wanting more for less money, musicians are still left longing for appropriate compensation in return for their offerings, and somewhere in between are all the various labels, execs, agents, etc. siphoning their cut of this insufficient dough.

A couple of relevant statistics I heard this week (thanks, Sound Opinions):
(1.) 40% less people are declaring "musician" as their profession now than in 1999.
(2.) Only 1% of digital tracks released are reaching the 1,000 sales mark (as of 2011).

Let out a sigh. We are the 99%.

So, this whole quandary has brought to the surface this question: what exactly is a song worth?

Do I have an answer for you? Douglas Adams's great supercomputer Deep Thought put it pretty well when confronted about its seven-and-a-half million years of calculating the answer to "life, the universe, and everything": Yes. But you're not going to like it.

Here it is. Ready your eager brain for imminent chair-slumping, head-shaking, vegetable-chucking disappointment.

The value of a song is completely and hopelessly unquantifiable.

This street performer in the Clark/Lake Blue Line subway stop was playing a particularly spirited rendition of 'All Along the Watchtower' the other night, when he peppered in Neil Young's famous line "it's better to burn out than to fade away" (from Crazy Horse's 'My My, Hey Hey - Out of the Blue'). It was evident that this guy was really having a moment with it, and my experience was a total contact high from that. After the song, I walked up and dropped all I had in my pockets - a couple dollar coins (yeah, I had some dollar coins, so what?) - into his case and said something tragically un-clever like, "You had me with that Neil Young line in there, man."

After playing through another tune that seemed a bit more in his wheelhouse, he then nodded to me and admirably attempted to get through all he was able to muster of Young's 'The Needle and the Damage Done'. I could see on his face that the gears had been turning after I'd made my meager donation. So he clearly only really knew a couple parts of a verse and the chorus, but he very smoothly improvised some melodies to fill out the song and give it a sense of completion. To give my evening a sense of completion. This may be a shameful understatement, but the attempt and this half-song certainly meant far more to me than my two dollar coins were worth. If I'd had a $10 bill in my pocket instead of those two coins, I surely would have spent it on this interaction before going to iTunes to shell it out on the re-mastered mp3s of Harvest.

This man was reaching out to a complete stranger in the only way he saw fit at that moment, as he recognized I had feebly attempted with him. To him, his song may have simply been a $2 gesture like mine, but it left me with a certain wealth, in the the form of a (partially-comprehended) life lesson: that the purpose of performing and expressing ourselves (I think) is chiefly in creating an actual and direct relationship with any individuals who will open themselves up for such a connection - and that those connections are so likely to occur outside of the conventional modes of musical patronage... but only when we open ourselves up to them.

We, strange individuals, connected. What we each gave and gained has nothing to do with what an mp3 or an LP or a guitar or a ticket to stand, iPhone in hand, at a concert might cost. It rests high above those quantifiable things, even if those things can often be a gateway drug to more "real" and spontaneous moments.

The Song exists completely outside of economics.