EMI announced today that they will begin selling non-DRM MP3s in the iTunes store, starting this May. This is a step forward that as recently as two days ago I was claiming would take six months or more. I see this as an admission that centralized control (as exemplified by DRM) is no longer necessarily the best route for industry to take. DRM is insisted upon by the major record labels as a tool to prevent what they see as inappropriate uses of recorded works - sharing over P2P networks, multiple copies, recontextualization, etc. Yet the cultural perception of a recorded work changed when suddenly these works became non-scarce and increasingly ingrained into an experience of social interaction.

I don't mean to down play the economic shift that occurs when the cost of distribution and promotion plummeted, undercutting what the major record labels had grounded their business models on. This alters how any player in the industry has to interact within it, but not enough attention is focused on how digitization tweaked the interactive experience of recorded works in such a way that is completely in accordance with wider cultural, subjective, and economic shifts in a post-Fordist world.

The move to digitization in the music industry, and the correlative decrease in scarcity that comes with the ability to quickly and efficiently copy a digital file, can be read as a shift in importance from poiesis to praxis in the music industry along the terms that Virno describes in A Grammar of the Multitude. The production of the recorded work as a physical commodity (poiesis) is no longer holds the central role for a song that it once did. Increasingly - and for some artists, almost completely - the purpose of the recorded work is an affective one, a form of praxis designed to lure the listener into the experience of the music/musician.

In an interview with Virno, Branden W. Joseph poses John Cage as a comparison the Virno's use of Glenn Gould in the role of the musician as commodity-producing laborer. This is a particularly limpid comparison because Cage relies so heavily on what Virno refers to as virtuosity - direct affective production. A John Cage recording is far from a commodity in the sense of a Glenn Gould recording - it exists merely as an affective and often incomplete surrogate for the creator himself. It takes the role of praxis-at-a-distance, rather than the poiesis embodied by Gould, who refused to perform live. This is not happening solely in music, economies are increasingly reliant on affective labor and virtuosity rather than the physical production of commodities. In truth, as a profession, musical production was an entirely affective one until recording devices became prevalent - introducing scarcity and poiesis over praxis.

EMI is acknowledging that the freedom to copy, share, and recontextualize has pushed the music industry into affective production. Allowing a digital file this freedom de-commoditizes what really hasn't been a commodity for years. The entities that focus on the production of the experience over the production of the commodity will ultimately be the ones that survive these steps into a post-Fordist world.

Disclosure: I work for Lime Wire, a company increasingly involved in this space. What I write here has absolutely no official relationship with the company and should not be attributed to anyone but me, independent of my other associations.