Music

Protocols serve to regulate and control processes - in advance, presently or retrospectively. The topic "UN\FOLLOW Protocol" questions their structures, interfaces and scope for action with regard to music culture, the music industry and cultural policy.

Protocols specify how I want to do something or how we agree together to organize something. In this sense, 'as soon as possible' can be a protocol to build up time pressure, or to postpone something. Based on what Holly Herndon/Mat Dryhurst call the <Protocol era> [1], the concept of the "protocol" seems suited to examining and discussing questions of structure and agency within the framework of the #rp20 Music topic.

Instead of accepting and working with technological and organizational conditions, we would like to analyze their protocol and question to what extent it matches our ideas and wishes. We are asking: What structures does the protocol interface with? Who determines what it looks like? How exactly is it defined? Do we have to and do we want to follow it? Do we want to change it collectively, and how would that be possible?

Taking the perspective of the protocol, we are interested to examine structures, interfaces, and scope for agency – always in terms of music culture, economy, and cultural policy. Which questions and aspects are you interested in?

:\Copyright: Is copyright in its current form an adequate contemporary protocol for the protection and remuneration of music?

:\Distribution & Infrastructures: How is the streaming protocol currently organized and what does it mean for music culture?

:\DIY & Community: Do artists have to markt themselves simply because it is possible or because today's business protocol requires it?

:\ Musical Collaborations & Terms of Use: Is the protocol on collaboration with groups of people who are structurally disadvantaged different from the protocol for people we meet at eye level?

:\Rhythm & Algorithm: Recommendation algorithms are protocols that mostly operate with historical data. But don't we limit ourselves and our creativity when we make decisions for our future music consumption based on historical data?

:\Protocol & Access: Which protocol really runs the doors of trendy clubs?

Music: <UN\FOLLOW Protocol> is curated by Andrea Goetzke and Eric Eitel and presented by Music Pool Berlin.

  1. [1] Listen to Holly Herndon's Album "Proto"
  2. Read more via Mat Dryhurst: Protocols: Duty, Despair and Decentralisation transcript