— 19 February 2004
Does this Mean that Justin and Britney will Finally go Away?
When Apple released its iLife ‘04 suite containing a music creation program called Garageband in early January, they successfully tapped into a longstanding and deep cultural current. In his keynote address, Jobs cited a Gallup poll asserting approximately half of all US households include at least one member who actively plays a musical instrument. While that number seems high to me, it is historically resonate, if not currently accurate.
Music making in the home has long been part of American households – often linked to religious practices as much as entertainment. All you need to do is browse the Smithsonian and Folkways catalogs to get a sense of how deeply-seated music making has been historically in the US. Moreover, since the pre and post- war mass marketing of musical instruments -- largely due to Silvertone and Airline guitars and amplifiers available through Sears-Roebuck -- being in a band, at least for adolescent males, has seemed like a rite of passage to adulthood. In the 1970s and 80s suburban garages everywhere rumbled with teenage angst and alienation. As a result music production and consumption became decentralized, at least for a time. Now that most media has gone irreversibly digital, we have the modern equivalent of the Wurlitzer organ or cheap Peavy guitar in software form and embedded in vast social networks to boot. Garageband is remarkable on several levels; it is intuitive, it is free on Macs, and it is powerful (even if the core audio drivers in OS X are still only 16 bit). The embrace of Garageband by musical novices, as well as professionals, seems to be rapidly gaining speed. Since January there has been a proliferation of Garageband plug-ins, add-ons, and websites for sharing tunes such as Macband and The GarageDoor. In a short period of time, Garageband has helped unleash an impressive amount of this generation’s creative energy. Garageband’s rapid adoption represents another incremental but striking shift in the migration of technology from the sphere of productivity and passive consumption to the sphere of creativity and non-corporate media production.
© 2008 Cheskin Added Value