We can shuffle the trappings around all we want, but it doesn't address the core question

I'm having one of those mornings on which an attempt to do research for a particular article is leading me into all manner of side alleys of information, observation and consideration. That's the charm of the Internet, abut also the reason for its reputation as a supreme time-waster.

Let me start at the beginning. I'm a musician, and I have worked a great deal as a professional musician. I have focused on jazz for the past few years. The central thrust of my career, however, is writing. That's mostly manifested itself in arts journalism and business journalism. (I also do some general-interest and lifestyle-type work.)

I've written for a particular music website since the late 1990s, contributing a variety of article types - reviews, interviews, essays - as the site's identity has evolved over that time. I'm currently working on a piece for it that will profile an international music company that's about a year old. This company, whose principals are scattered among several continents, brings together aspiring, unsigned musical acts and industry professionals of various types - agents, promoters, those qualified to gauge talent and quality, producers and label heads - in a very systematic and efficient way.

There's a bit of a nailing-jello-to-the-wall quality to the research. Since change is the digital world's most prominent characteristic, no sooner do I learn about some model for the production and distribution of music than I find it's been superceded or folded into some other model.

I'll confess to having been overwhelmed by the proliferation of possible new paradigms for the music business since - well, since it became clear the old model - labels making a physical product and musical acts hiring management agencies to get them live-performance work and radio and television exposure - was dying. The scramble to fill the vacuum has been dizzying to observe.

Apparently I'm not alone. At events such as MIDEM or those organized by the Future of Music Coalition, there are endless panel discussions about platforms and content and concepts with which I'm even less familiar than - well, platforms and content. Everybody's trying to harness the pace of change and find a fixed point of reference that can provide effective and lucrative music-business-conducting for some reasonable length of time. In short, the question, "How are musicians and those who get their music out to listeners going to make a living at what they do?" is still the foremost topic of discussion in the industry, as it has been for about seventeen or eighteen years now.

Of course, there are the intellectual property questions and privacy questions that have arisen as the music world has become more digital. That's not the most interesting area of the whole matter for me, though.

I was watching a video of one of this year's MIDEM panel discussions and the moderator mentioned a book title I found so intriguing I had to open a new browser window to investigate it on Amazon. The book is called Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet Is Killing Our Culture. It's not new; it was published in 2007.

Perusing the summary and a few reviews for that led to an inquiry into the author, one Andrew Keen, a thinker I should have been aware of before now, given his areas of preoccupation. He has a blog which I have now put on my blogroll here, because it's clearly a site that merits frequent checking-in.

He raises questions and makes observations that I think are of primary importance in the sorting out of everything that's converging at the culture-and-technology nexus. One of his most interesting points for me is how the notion of "community" has, as it has morphed from something physical with a geographical location into something "virtual," trivialized and even threatened our individuality.

But, to get back to the matter of music, I think a plain truth about our culture's collective maturity level needs to be stated, and it's a plain truth that encompasses trends going back considerably further than the digital revolution.

Let me put it this way: The ubiquitous use of the term "band" to describe musical acts vying for viability in today's marketplace, and "fan" to describe consumers of music, reveals a myopia about expression and appreciation that bodes ill for the chances of us having anything of consequence to listen to.

I'm not saying that these terms have no place in the lexicon of the music world. It's just that, for instance, the term "fan" motivates a musical act to cultivate its brand, right down to a logo and carefully tailored persona. It connotes an arena full of waving arms and screams and lighters held high. Sports teams have fans. Fans are raucous. Fans come to see the object of their fealty as a means to bolster their own identities.

Did Charlie Parker, Arturo Toscanini, Rosemary Clooney or Hank Williams need to hawk tee shirts and bumper stickers?

There were bands in the nineteenth century, of course. Marching bands, city-park bands. Swing orchestras, beginning in the second quarter of the twentieth century, were referred to as "big bands." In fact, there's some irony to the fact that rock and roll ensembles were originally referred to as "combos" and then "groups." The preference for the term "band" actually dates to about the late 1960s. But since that time, "band" has come to conjure the image of a small ensemble playing loudly, generally without much melodic or rhythmic subtlety, as concerned with crafting a particular appearance that, while it might vary from one act to the next (indeed, usually will, since an act is keen to hone its brand) is always characterized by a studied informality, as it is its music.

And that's what is being produced and consumed in the brave new world of post-label music, and was produced and consumed for a good twenty-five years beforehand.

If the digital age has had its own distinct effect on this, it is that, per the all-about-me-and-what-I-have-to-say ethos of social networking, it has reinforced the narcissism and shallowness of the whole aesthetic enterprise in our time. Granted, music has always been about the conveyance of feelings, going back to the era of Gregorian chants or even further back to the rituals of tribes in the world's disparate corners. But there was nobility in those feelings. Now, what everybody has to express is ephemeral, disposable. Pick your genre - electronica, hip-hop, folk, reggae, whatever - and plug in your earbuds. Reinforce your notion of how the world ought to see you by fueling yourself with the self-congratulatory cadences of the "bands" of which you are a "fan."

I see that while MIDEM was going on this past week in Cannes, my newfound interesting thinker Keen spent his time in nearly Davos, Switzerland attending the World Economic Forum. The parallels are worth noting. In Davos, the panel discussions and breakout sessions were about how to come up with some real money to alleviate the economic crisis centered in Europe, but with outlying manifestations in such places as the United States. They dispersed without figuring out how to come up with it.

We need some real money. We need some art that has some real nobility and dignity to it. In a world awash in mobile devices, digital clouds, pitch-and-tempo-altering software and networks of every conceivable kind, we are in extremely short supply of some basic necessities.