MY VIEW: Music Remixes in the Networked World

I'm finding the world of remixing to be a much-needed shot in the arm of music evolution. Sure, people have been sampling (ripping off) music artists' work for about 20 years, but this is the legitimization of it. The artist surrenders the colour palate of his musical canvas and allows the fans and critics a chance to have a go. I find that in the remixes, rather than demolish the intentions of the song writer, the outcome can revalidate the brilliance of the artist.

We have experienced this before with the period of "Unplugged" when the musical artist would rearrange typically an up-tempo rock song into something softer. Quite often it opened up a whole new view of the song (See: Bryan Adams' MTV Unplugged version of I'm Ready.)

But remixes is a whole new bag. The song is stripped back to the core, pre-mixdown tracks, and packaged for download. It's like a chef walking into your kitchen and giving you the precise ingredients to their favourite dish saying, "make of it what you can." Using an application like Apple's Garage Band, you can import the individual tracks and start mixing your own favourite dish.

No surprise, my own, personal, musical genius, ,Peter Gabriel, is one of the leaders in this space. He's offering up a series of remix packages from artists that have spent time in his Real World studios. He's even run a contest for the best remix of 'Shock the Monkey'. (Being a hobbiest studio engineer, I was fascinated to hear the individual tracks of this song recorded in '81. On Peter's primary vocal track you can make out the bed tracks that are bleeding from his headphones, before the noise gate clamps down at the end of the phrases.) The contests specifically leverage social networking, as peers are invited to vote on their top 10, and comment on each remix, with Gabriel and staff reviewing them all. The Shock The Monkey contest generated 738 remixes!

Web 2.0 is enabling a direct musical relationship with artists. It is showing courage on the part of the composer to expose his or her work to public scrutiny and infact, re-interpretation of the creative material. It's also binding a village of the musically inclined as ideas and interpretations are shared. This represents a more sophisticated level of community involvement than video or photo-sharing; it's a significant shift in the way we involve ourselves in music.