Tonight we had a cascading failure of a system in our home, which lead to me pulling my hair out, yelling and red faced with anger.
That system was our Sonos. It’s still not all right, but they are taking care of it. The exact cause of my anger is not the issue at hand, but more that the failure of a hugely complicated device lead to a cascading series of events, culminating with stringing a MacBook Pro to our bedroom speaker setup to provide white noise for our baby.
It used to be that things as complicated as whole house audio, wireless networking and hell, playing an MP3 were obtrusive enough of operations to never fully engrain themselves within the fabric of being that sometimes we call life.
It is therefore telling that these acts of herculean technical feats are on par with running water to the extent that disruption of the service is as unheard of, unfortunate and insanity inducing as my water or gas shutting off. I almost wager more so: the baby could sleep without water running, not without the white noise track on repeat.
My job is to find the new and the cool and figure out how it further connects a fan with their band. As such, its looking often for the technologies that come along that fit like a glove rather than like a straight jacket. My meter for good tech is along the lines of its intuitive sensibility toward making my life easier in some way. I’ve rarely been wrong in judging a product in this regard.
Things like the Sonos, Apple’s Wifi devices, and the coming iPad are the same way.
But herein lies a problem with the music business: we sit and wait for others to invent the intuitive too often. Wait for the innovation to fall on us rather than us lead it. Being innovative requires wielding the tools of innovation, not just speaking on panels with them.
Abstract this to content or media companies. These companies too often elevate themselves up propped up on the notion of content. If you can take anything from post-structuralism though as applied to the 21st century media landscape, its that the formative difference between content, the tools of content and the innovation by and through content are nil.
Content is innovation. It is a tool and a system toward being innovative. It is the catalyst for doing innovative things, provided you are willing and able to use the tools that enable that ability.
Going back to the Sonos. Or Apple.
The delineation between innovation and content doesn’t exist on these systems. It’s a fluid construct of movement from representation to action and back again.
This isn’t to say a music company should invent the next iPad. But it is to say that the devices and systems like the aforementioned are not merely partners, but a new canvas on which to further narrow that distance between what we create and what drives a fan to love that which we make.
