Here’s a tasty question for a Friday afternoon.
When you think about technology and music, what comes to mind? What value judgments, what ways of seeing the medium ten years down the road do you picture as a result? Is it good? Bad? Has technology enriched its essence or destroyed its soul?
Put another way, is technology even realizing its musical potential to begin with? Last year, that was a key question — one of an intellectual smorgasbord of them — put before panelists at the 2013 Virgin Disruptors debate. Everyone from Will.I.Am to Imogen Heap weighed in, taking the pulse of a trend.
It’s a trend, as Will.I.Am put it, that started with the gramophone and continues with the iPhone—a hundred evolutionary leaps later. But not necessarily one that’s doing what it could.
“Streaming services,” he pointed out, “are not done by artists.” Following that thought to the question of radio — the all-hallowed, supreme overlord of Making It — it’s a matter of digital tools being more important, he said, than saturation of the airwaves. “How you tag your content, paying attention to what you name your content is more important than a radio station playing it a billion times a day.”
Instead of looking for new guitars or guitarists or DJs, he asked, why not create new properties? Instead of trying to remake the wheel, why not change how and why it spins?
“You really want to disrupt? Disrupt,” he grinned, seeming a little mischievous.
Okay, maybe Virgin isn’t using those exact words, but that’s what kicks off today for 2014. And everything Will.I.Am said last year? That’s just one approach to “disrupting” as it’s understood through music. What about communications or medicine? Very notably, what about taking the next leap through space? Above all, it’s that all-important flip of the bird at convention that defines entrepreneurship, and Virgin Disrupters is tectonic with it.
Leave it to the people who brought us commercial space travel to open up a conversation around shattering convention to begin with. Seriously, just think for a second what it means for us to live in that world. Ten years ago, it was a design that won the Ansari XPrize, in turn leading to the X-Prize Foundation itself, that put the SpaceShip Two design at the vanguard of Virgin’s Galactic fleet. Ten years later, more than 650 tickets have been sold — an embryonic-level start, sure, but a reality.
Entrepreneurship isn’t just about starting a plumbing store, after all. It’s about the nuts-and-bolts grunt-work of realizing big ideas. Even the seemingly-unimaginable dreams of ten years ago, like commercial space travel.
And whether it’s new, bold approaches to beats or rocket boosters, it all starts with not just a conversation, but the kick-in-the-pants impetus to make it happen. Let’s do a little disrupting of our own.
