The sharing culture that motivates Creative Commons is one that I find easy to jump on board with. I love the fact that our world is changing and becoming a more collaborative, creative, expressive free place and believe that this movement will help positively change our society and the world that we live in. Having said so I also have some concerns about the implications this movement should be having on the way that we teach, particularly in music education. Our culture is changing but music education, for the most part, stays static in its traditional approaches to teaching music. Just like the music industry, we are resistant to change and just as the music industry is now finally facing some times of crisis, it will only be a matter of time before music as an art faces a similar demise.
Reports like, The Musictank Report (supported by Beyond the Soundbytes) and Steve Albini’s paper, The Problem With Music, make it very clear that the music industry is beginning to face the days where independent artists are taking charge of their own music in terms of creating, performing and productivity. Up until now music producers and companies were the select few deciding who was worthy of production and an audience, and music consumers chose music from that diminished offering. Our music world is finally changing; you don’t need to be signed to have an audience these days and as a result people influenced by a new sharing culture are making decisions regarding who should be the best-selling artists, who should be listened to and who receives the dollars they spend on music.
I’ve been influenced by a podcast by Paul Draper of Griffith University in Australia, Music 2.0 How Participatory Culture is Reclaiming Knowledge, Power and Value Systems From the Inside Out. It is a lengthy, academic podcast, but well worth the time. Draper, together with many other authors and academics, points to the fact that our new sharing culture community of world audiences and artists are now taking over from the music industry. Artists get to make up their own minds, as does the audience. He describes our new sharing culture world as a participatory culture that is “reclaiming knowledge, power and value systems from the inside out.” According to Draper a participatory culture is one that provides:
- Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement;
- Strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others;
- Some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices;
- A culture where members believe that their contributions matter;
- And, where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
My worries with regard to the education that we are giving students in music are that although teachers in other areas are committing to teaching skills necessary in evaluating quality sources and content, few music teachers are teaching the skills involved in evaluating quality content in the arts. Although evaluation is one of the music standards in the MENC’s National Standards, this standard in our curriculum is often not given the attention that other areas like performance are given and most often in performance driven curriculum this standard is applied mostly to the evaluation of a performing groups’ performance rather than the material on the web.
As musicians and artists now have the opportunity to put their work “out there,” a greater quantity, diversity and freedom of expression in artistic work can be found from musicians all over the world on the internet. An artistic system that includes a greater quantity of works also demands that audiences have expertise in evaluating music and artistic content. Students need to develop their skills in evaluating quality music and developing their own individual discerning taste in music. Without taking the time to develop these skills in music courses, music teachers are encouraging a younger generation of students not to use “ways of knowing” to consume music, but to rely on others’ ranking systems instead. Most viewed videos, social networking, and tagging are all fabulous initial methods for weeding through artistic works presented on the internet, but these methods do not guarantee the delivery of quality music. Music educators need to help students develop skills in further evaluating music content by developing a generation of thinking, critical listeners. 
When I asked my music students how they determine what music is good, which youtube videos to watch, or which iTunes application or music to follow– they most always told me something about a ranking system – most viewed, most popular and of course the works that are free of charge. Blindly accepting a community’s value in music content and what deserves an audience will not further the advancement of creative, quality music. Unconditionally accepting a community’s rankings of a musical performance or work achieves only the transfer of power from music company/industry/producer to our participatory sharing culture. The shift of power is potentially limiting to the advancement of the arts UNLESS that participatory sharing culture also develops their knowledge and skills in music and its evaluation. A community empowered with music knowledge, skills and the ability to have a discerning individual taste in music, would be informed by both creativity, as people “putting stuff out there,” and evaluation as audience members. Empowered with music knowledge, skills and the ability to have a discerning individual taste in music, our participatory sharing cultured community will encourage and demand advancement in the arts leading to not only a greater quantity of diverse, freely –expressed music, but leading to a greater quality of those works that will in turn influence future creativity in music content.
The future of the arts is dependent on change to our most traditional music education system. We should be embracing any technologies that further knowledge and skill in music, including open courses offered via the internet. We need to do a better job in music education in getting students to question, think and discern in music. We need to embrace the New Bloom’s Taxonomy especially with regard to listening to music. We need to understand that our unwillingness to make change and our denial of web 2.0 influences on music, will only diminish the advancement of the arts and disadvantage our future participatory sharing community’s ability to choose and create quality music content. We have done a fantastic job embracing the traditions of music and the arts, we don’t need to abandon those traditions, but we do need to begin investing in the future.
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