It’s great to know that people are still moved by the art of music.

A while back I got moved by the thought that music is one of the few (and increasingly fewer) things in our time shifted and condensed world that has to happen “in time.” If you slow it down or speed it up, the meaning changes. Even books and films, which have a distinct beginning middle and end, have time compression that allow decades of plot to be covered in ten minutes, or detailed descriptions could leave you reading about a second for days. Time has become our play thing, but music forces us to pay attention to time and re-center ourselves on “real” time. You experience music exactly as it was written, performed and recorded, no matter when that all took place.

Many of us music fans over-think music to the point of abstracting it or forming fetishes for particular elements of music style, theory, genre, etc. But music doesn’t allow us to get too far away from ourselves. You think you’re too cool for pop until you find yourself tapping your toe to a corny song at the drug store, for example.

Music is insistent, irrepressible and beautiful. An expression, and as you said, an experience. It is the difference between the two that will keep us forever chasing the perfect piece of music because while there is always more you can find in a piece, we need to move on from static pieces back into the community to find new music if we want to continue the conversation and feel that rush of awe and beauty again.

This is a big conversation, and we could debate the other side as well (it certainly does matter when something was released, for example) but it’s worth reminding ourselves from time to time why and how we elementally and fundamentally love music.

- Greg

I listen to a make music to entertain people first and as art second. As a listener, I listen to music to be entertained. People wanna dance man!!!

While this is an interesting conversation to be sure, Musicians often lose sight of the fact that on some level they are in the music BUSINESS. It’s not the music “fun time” or the music “hang with your buddies.” As musicians we do ourselves a disservice by often not showing up on time and not playing to our audiences. While music is not a commodity, CD’s and concert tickets certainly are. Without CD and ticket sales we musicians have few avenues to make a living making music. Discounting the fact that musicians all hope to sell their music to the masses in one way or another is antithetical to what we are all trying to do (namely make a living in music)

Just my $0.02

Love ya brother,

Scott.