The current decade will be gone (RIP), blown up into pieces, obliterated into past memorabila in just a few months from now.
I was thinking how things have been for music these last 9 years.
Every decade has a unique character in its general musical tendencies. The Zeros Decade wonderfully applied its name qualities on music itself. A lot of bands came back from the dead to remind us why they disbanded in the first place (not all of them, hopefully), experimentation experimented on itself resulting in a reproduction of its own source of inspiration... There came to be a fatigue in the evolution of music. Everything seems to have already be combined with everything else. Only in these last couple of years have new things appeared around, with terms like "procedural compotition" and new electronic instruments such as the Yamaha Tenorion.
At least that's how I feel about the last decade.
But still, the last decade has also been very, very special.
Another quality of the Zero's name that applied itself onto music is this of a Zero Point. The 00s, while prehatching it, became the Big Bang for a whole new universe, called "The Internet". While evolution in music in terms of inspiration and originality was set back, its very relation to the known world is radically changing, and it will not be very far in the future (probably the next decade) that we begin to see its effect on sound itself.
There is a term going around, "open source", that derives from free software (software that can be freely redistributed and altered, resulting in an evergoing evolution of the software). The free software and the open source philosophy is beggining to be applied on other things as well. Music is one of them. Global, "unofficial" and "uncorporated" cooperation is something being applied on software at the moment, making it hard for companies like Microsoft to keep up. A couple of automobile companies are trying to do the same with their automobiles. Medical departments are trying to do the same. It's been reported. And it's also happening in music. And it will happen in many other things. The world will gradually switch to the "open source" model, not because it's the New Thing, but mostly because it works better for everyone on the long run.
It's intriguing to ponder on what the open source philosophy can make of music and the music industry as we know it. We can only wait... and listen.
