The most subtle and pernicious robbery has taken place right under our noses, under the disguise of 'progress': The Great Music Robbery. However Willy Wonka-ish it sounds, the facts add up. What is it and why should you care?
'In Silicon Valley, Facebook and Youtube are plotting a new chapter in the future of music streaming, having signed blanket licensing deals with 3 of the world's biggest record labels. 8000 miles away in Sheffield, a group of computer programmers are coding electronic beeps and loops as part of the city's underground 'algorave' scene. Elsewhere, Stormzy is sitting with his manager and the CMO of Adiddas to discus the grime artist's latest social media campaign. Spotify's founder Daniel Ek is polishing his Cannes Lion after winning Media Brand of the Year. This is Music 2018.' The Social Chain
So why am I not celebrating or desiring Music 2018?
Real music is essential for humans to thrive. By real music, I mean raw vibrational natural frequency rhythms and tones. We are rhythmic creatures. It is our language, it is written in our DNA. Regardless of race, religion or age, we are affected only by vibration. It is the stimulus of our health, brains, psyche. We are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, 60% water ; we are not binary. We are not built like robots but we are trying to follow a robot's instructions. And if you doubt the effect of high frequencies on the human, try microwaving water. Cool it and feed one plant tap water, the other the cooled microwaved water. See what happens to the microwaved-watered-plant. And that's what high frequencies are doing to us. Every day.
Digitisation is not only depriving us of music; it is actually poisoning us with high frequencies while making sure we still keep paying money for our prescription of the 'idea' of music. Music 2018 is modeled straight after the pharmaceutical industry to make the most money for the few at the cost of the many.
The science of modulating brainwave frequencies with music and sound has been studied and developed for decades. Every atom in the uni-verse (translation: ONE SONG) and cell in your living body is vibrating constantly and this vibration can be directed and enhanced through the power of sound frequencies in the form of words and music. The ancients, mystics and so-called mad musical geniuses like George Harrison, Bobby Gillespie, Paul McCartney, Bowie all knew this. Press and corporations dismissed their statements as hippie-talk or too many drugs for a reason. But they actually knew what they were talking about.
There's this movie called 'The Weeping Camel' which is basically about a camel who is dying of grief after its bairn is still-born. The community try everything to get her up and going but nothing works til a musician sits and listens to her for a few days. Then he starts playing in the same key, modulating to the same rhythms as the camel's wails. The camel stops wailing, listens. Finally, the camel is calm, gets up, starts eating. Her grief is over. The rhythms and frequencies, the sympathy and empathy raised her. As far as I know, camels don't talk or use dictionaries so it's not based on composition or information. This is anecdotal evidence, obviously, but significant nonetheless.
And this is the essence and power of the blues - the root of rock 'n' roll. But it's also testament to the truth of what music is to us and why some people would want to take it from us.
DNA is not fixed. It will find a variety of expressions depending on both physical and emotional environments. Cellular biologist Bruce Lipton's research showed that thought itself - belief, emotion and perception - is what determines how genes express themselves.
And words are sound - not just information. It's why little children love/remember nursery rhymes, why rap is a multi-million dollar industry, how poetry and cadence and nonsense often heals us and makes us more wise than a PhD is social science or astrophysics. Why Bob Marley could make universal songs. One word brings up so many feelings and images which then call on a cascade of chemistry that literally alters the most basic physiologic responses: bleeding, autoimmunity, blood pressure, peristalsis, inflammation.
As fetuses, we vibrate with our environments long before birth. Music therapy is well-documented in how it heals and helps. Sound literally mends bones, softens and soothes broken hearts, gives an instant boost in auto-immunity. Frequency and sonic vibrational healing has been researched heavily and ultrasound is used to heal folk of gallstones, to break down hard masses in the body. Every frequency range has a specific effect. For example, 1.0 Hz impacts growth (as it affects the pituitary gland), 111 Hz increases beta endorphins and stimulates cell regeneration. Even simple things like a cat's purr and birdsong affect us positively. A child given unlimited access to real vibrational music will thrive better than one raised on internet education.
We don't need science to tell us music is good for us but we do need science to back up the fact that real live vibrational music has been stolen from us.
Our increase in mental and physical disease, in international conflict is a direct result of digitisation. If social media is supposed to connect us, how come we are the most disconnected we have ever been despite articulate compositions?
Because we thrive on vibes - not information.
I can know it but if I don't feel it, I cannot live it. The 'it' does not exist. It's a lie. It's worthless.
We feel music in our hearts in the same way that we hear words in our cells. There's a digital generation 'growing up' without ever feeling that electricity rush down their spine and their gut contract whe a new tune, sound is played to them.
We know music like we know love - NOT by the number of XXXs and emojis - but in our bones, in the beating of our hearts, the tapping of our feet, the warmth running up and down our spine, in our pelvis and gut. We know it before we can articulate what it is.
So WHY would anyone want to steal real music from us?
The use of music can impact awareness, sales and behaviour as it can trick the brain's expectations. Processing music involves nearly every region in the brain, including the areas responsible for memory and emotion. For evolutionary reasons, the brain encodes emotional memories more deeply. Memories formed with a resonant musical component are more likely to be remembered and acted upon - especially when a melody takes an unexpected turn.
Most songs build anticipation by violating our expectations of rhythm. This 'mini-trauma' leaves a literal groove on the brain. The trick is to keep building tension through the rhythm or melody of a song. Ad agencies also tend to know the emotions they are trying to affect in order to get the audience to act. They will be led by data which quantifies how many people from various demographic splits react to certain tempos, beats and styles of music. They are also trying to build a deep, emotional connection between the sound and the product they are promoting. Think of the Coke ads, the MacDonald ads. The Vodafone ad. Yeah, you know the ones. You know it like it was an experience you had, a memory. But it wasn't. Ever.
Brand partnerships are now an important facet of the music industry. Brands allow artists to grow a profile outside of music because streaming doesn't lead to instant chart impact anymore.
Digital streaming doesn't give you that same immediate volume and impact that the old skool release model allowed because the music isn't real - it's just the 'idea', the fake memory. And you can't take the truth to the youth. Beats knows it. The marketing days of music via digitisation are numbered and the digital corporations know it. A new way of commodifying music has to be found.
The three major record companies (Universal Music Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Warner Music Group) are working with the digital corporations to create a fixed income for themselves with minimum input. Artists who are signed to big labels are now giving up their sounds for digitisation in perpetuum. This is no longer a 'deal' regarding music ownership; it is a licensing deal and a remortgaging of intellectual property.
These licensing deals will enable users to create videos that feature licensed music soundtracks - without violating copyright. It also means that everyone from Stormzy to Fleetwood Mac will be paid royalties should their track be used in a piece of User Generated Content. Brands will still have to pay of course.
This is a way for Facebook to combat its slowing user growth, win over younger audiences and increase the amount of time users spend on its platform.
And the point of this longer form content is, of course, to increase ad placement inventory. Facebook becomes a free-to-use music library. Spotify integration with IG and Messenger.
They glean data from audience listening habits to build new algorithms and pre-select songs. If someone adds a Beyonce song to a video and listens to that song all the time, you can be sure they're a Beyonce fan. The corporations then target that person with download ads. Thus, music is reduced to 'the idea' of music, jingles for brands. There is no vibrational worth left to it. Consumers are paying a subscription for a dose of the 'idea of music' without any of its benefits - which drives them to seek out 'new music'. But, regardless of the artist's hype, compositional or vocal skills, none of this will ever be owned or experienced by the consumer.
So how did we let the intelligence of a real music system be destroyed, gentrified and then commodified by Western imperialism?
It is no accident that the best rock 'n'roll of the '60's came directly after the influx of blues (The Beatles, Rolling Stones) and the 90's came directly after rave and the political shutdown of the greatest spontaneous musical movement in the UK . Pulp, Primal Scream, The Stone Roses, , Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, Oasis, Blur, The La's all had their foundations in the full immersion of sound systems, riffs, echoes, had their skeletons and central nervous systems formed by the only real justice system common people in the UK have ever known - raw music.
By the mid 90's, music (and its creators and audiences) had become too powerful, the limits were indeed boundless. It needed to be monetized and controlled by the elite - but how? There was a broad consensus about how to shift the emphasis from the FEELINGS you got from the music to the worship of the band itself, the commodification of the music. How to make it into a commercial product not a shared visceral experience. There is a reason why all the really smart musicians buy up all the documentary footage, masters etc. of their lives and work as soon as possible - like Paul McCartney and Dick Clarke. There is a reason why Suge Knight was so megalomaniacal over Deathrow masters. And it's not just to do with money.
Dr. Leonard Horowitz, the revolutionary scientist, doctor and pharmaceutical whistleblower states: 'The current music you hear everywhere is not spiritually uplifting optimally. It is dissonantly degrading naturally because it is man's manipulation of God's pure perfection expressed throughout nature musically. In other words, the modern musical tuning with A equal to 440 Hz is a planned distortion and political deprivation of Divine intention to freely and naturally administer spiritual sustenance to humanity.'
Standardization of A = 4440Hz coincided with a concerted effort by the Rockefeller Foundation to move music from a visual, alchemical, Pythagorean realism which could be considered bio-energetic or life enhancing to one which was bio-informative or 'patterning', algorithms based on propagating an artificial matrix for a predetermined social effect.
Professor James Tobias researched the Rockefeller Foundation archives and 'documented investigations leading to 'psychological warfare applications of acoustic vibrations...'
The Rockefeller's careful project management and co-ordination contributed to the materialistic versus the metaphysical industrialisation of music in the media.
Dr. Horowitz: 'Music bioenergetically affects your body chemistry, psychoneuroimmunology and health. Your body is now vibrating musically, audibly and subliminally, according to an institutionally imposed frequency in harmony with aggression and in dissonance rather than vibrating in harmony with Love.'
A at 440Hz suppresses spirituality, intuition and creativity. It's not down to compositional skills - it's frequency and vibration based on a tuning system.
Even just ten years ago, there was no need for dating apps or Tindr, there was no chronic singleton issue. I mean, you went out, to a club, a pub or a festival and you hooked up. It was that easy. Now that cannot happen. Everything is cerebral. Everything is conflict.
Digitisation has brought artists closer to their audiences and made lots of people very rich....and lots of other people very poor. Technology in itself is a great thing. BUT the ideology behind this new music appropriation is more suspect. What exactly is it and what are the real psychological, physical, mental and financial impacts of changing music and the way we receive it for the whole of the planet?
More worrying, why is no one even thinking about critiquing it? No scientist, no psychologist? No politician? Certainly no businessman.
I always kind of envied or rather marveled at kids who could just listen to download,. I was amazed at people who would PAY to go to a club where digital music was played from a USB, was incredulous at how folk could be excited and act satisfied by the mere memory or idea of music. For me, I have always needed the real, actual thing, the vibration down my backbone. I needed a beat, a melody that affected my neurons and synapses, my hormones. I am not from the digital age. I am not binary. I don't take orders from robots.
So that's my bias. I admit it. On the other hand, more artists, greater accessibility to studios, the democracy of it all. Maybe it's just the times, technology moving on, carrying music inevitably along in its wake. Better just get with it.
I had moved out of journalism and the record industry in 1997 and trained as a high school teacher. i was with young people twelve hours a day, five days a week and then some. when I was a boarding school teacher, it was more like eighteen hours, six days a week. Not even parents get that sort of exposure to young minds! I taught in England, Scotland and California. I probably had a more diverse and in depth knowledge of how western youth was changing both cognitively and emotionally.
I couldnt' work it out. Despite having an ever-broader library of music and knowledge about music, more technology, they were getting less curious, they hated thinking, loved copying, were super anxious, super depressed, weren't copping off, snogging and the rest. Instead, they were having mental breakdowns.
I kept waiting for the chord change in songs, the bittersweet but it never came - just this durrrrrrr nothing in my head and DJs waxing rhetoric about each same song's merits when they were all just a noise to me, even if they were recorded in the 1990's. It was bothering me. Bothering me a lot. Music was my passion. I need it to feel right.
'Those who manipulate the orgazined habits and opinions of the masses constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country,' wrote Edward Bernays. The more healthy you are, the more sensitive you become to unpleasing sounds or tones that are dissonant noise.
In a matter of months, let alone years, music as some of us once knew it will have disappeared entirely on our watch. In its place, will be a variety of brand-embedded jingles 'licensed' out in perpetuum i.e. you're always paying for something you never actually own.
At most, the 'idea' of music will be rented out to you in a specific format in a specific frequency controlled by invisible corporations. Now our brains, health, spirits and finances are totally in their hands. The basic blueprint, the ability to 'tune into the uni-verse (uni = one, verse= song) will be lost. Instead, we will be programmed by algorithms to follow a sequence of noise and frequencies that cause discord to our bodies, minds, spirits and communities. Oh the 'idea' of the song is a sweet melody by a pretty girl/hot hip hop star but the reality is a barrage or waves deconstructing our very DNA.
Music, real raw music, is the language of the uni-verse. One song. Golden ration frequencies. You can't break the mould that made you.
But what what these elites can and have done is:
- surreptitiously pass laws to standardize a destabiizing frequency (432 and lower frequency to the American 440 Hz courtesy of Rockefeller and Joseph Goebbels) in 1939, without the consent of the British and French musical institutes
2. Gentrify and then commodify brilliant music
3. Change the format, receptors and platforms for music from communal and competitive to fragmented and conflicting via digital and algorithms and destroying sound systems
4. gradually remove the concept of 'owning' a piece of recorded music and instead organise a legitimate buy out/take-over of artists' work whereby audience's purchase 'licenses' to listen to 'musical' ideas via digital platforms.
This is the final take-over of music. If we lost music, especially in the UK, we are screwed.
Music IS our politics.
Music IS our freedom.
We now recognize that our thoughts do determine our reality, and that our thought vibrations do ultimately affect the matrix of our world's ever expanding creation. Maybe now Primal Scream sounds more prescient than crazy when Bobby Gillespie states:
'We've got this theory. It's not even a theory. I think music is magic...magical in the true sense of the word. Certain pieces of music make me feel strong, protected. It raises...it raises my soul...it protects me from bad feelings. Music protects us in such a powerful way, it makes you aware of possibilities. To a lot of people, I think music's a commodity, not spiritual...whereas to us it's a holy thing and none of us are even religious.' Bobby Gillespie, NME, Sept 28 1991.
Music as literature will never work, music as political propaganda will never work, music as information will never work, music as an algorithm will never work. Music is vibrational, raw and free as the air we breathe. To commodify its creation, reception and documentation to the extent it currently has been is tantamount to mortgaging oxygen. It's time for a new ethical ideology and technology about how we create, receive and preserve our best creations....for everyone.