Bill Drummond on recorded music

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OK, two things. One little snippet first. One of the weird things, I think: On my MP3 player I have Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, one of my all-time favourite tracks I never listen to. The other day, when I was walking down the street, I heard it coming out of a shop and I just: “That is fantastic!”
Now, I love hearing accidental music, when I’m not expecting it, and that’s maybe what some people find offensive. They only hear music when they decide that they want to hear it but I often like it best when I just hear a snippet of it, or is in the background … [?] … “what’s that track?” That’s when it can excite me. That’s one thing I wanted to say.

The other thing: Now that we theoretically can listen to any piece of music from the entire history of recorded music, almost wherever, whenever, while doing whatever we want, that’s fundamentally changing our relationship with music and what we want from music and… And… And I don’t know what that’s gonna lead to! But it’s gonna lead somewhere pretty exciting.
It almost feels like recorded music was very much a 20th century thing. How we’ve all grown up thinking about music as this recorded thing. Of course we go along and see a band or an orchestra but it is the albums that define the careers of a musician. I don’t think that’s gonna carry on being the same, that’s gonna work in a different way.

I started it as a privat thing. I set up a website, not… not… and I wasn’t gonna go and PR it. But it instantly, almost overnight was attricting tens of thousands of people to it! So it obviously touched to a nerv. So it wasn’t me going out pushing myself, and I’ve kept myself out of the sight. If you go to nomusicday.com you don’t say “HEY, this is the wacky world of Bill Drummond!” or anything. It’s just a standalone thing.

I want to create a way of working where most of what I do doesn’t involve me. People would come across it and have no knowledge of who I am or what I used to do in the past, and that usually gives it a strength. With this – BBC Radio Scotland embracing No Music Day – I hade to enter the frame, I had to put myself up.

We’re all aware that ticket sales for gigs have been going up and up and up over the last five or six years, and I’m sure that’s because recorded music has lost its flavour.

Transcript from an interview with Bill Drummond on BBC Radio Scotland on November 21, which I ripped partially, as the readers of No Music Day’s blog post (in Swedish) here at Copyriot might have noticed.

Tomorrow I’ll bring these fascinating questions with me to a seminar about “how to create mechanisms that make people affected, surprised and blown away by music”. Yes, the event statement is extremely bright! Hosted by our lovely friends at Hybris recordings.