WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
CD-Roms, the international music industry and early Australian initiatives
PHILIP HAYWARD AND GERALDINE ORROCK
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This is it - the first CD-Rom Christmas. There really is something for every age and taste. And right now certain discs have become so utterly desirable that they are the most chic presents this year..... What a difference a year makes. Last December CD-Rom discs were largely a niche product appealing to specialists. But now that half of PCs sold to home users come with a CD-Rom drive, the discs are the most fashionable software items you can buy. Sydney Morning Herald 6/9/94 |
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In the image of the society happily unified by consumption, real division is only suspended until the next non-accomplishment in consumption. Every single product represents the hope for a dazzling shortcut to the promised land of total consumption and is ceremoniously presented as the decisive entity. But... the objects which promise unique powers can be recommended to the devotion of the masses only if they're produced in quantities large enough for mass consumption... But the object which was prestigious in the spectacle becomes vulgar as soon as it is taken home by the consumer - and by all its other consumers. It reveals its essential poverty... But by then another object already carries the justification of the system and demands to be acknowledged. Guy Debord: 69 1 |
This article analyses the exploration and development of the CD-Rom format by the western music industry during 1993-4. The article is divided into four sections. The opening section discusses the exploitation of various playback formats by the music industry and analyses their significance to the contemporary dynamic of that industry. The second analyses the production context and 'content' of the first commercially successful music CD-Rom, Xplora I, and outlines its significance as an industrial product. The third provides a case study of Australian CD-Rom production in the period 1993-94, addressing the manner in which the music CD-Rom served as an early 'test-bed' - for CD-Rom production in Australia. In doing so it also provides an analytical 'snap shot' of the point of emergence of a new cultural technology in a specific national market and location. Drawing on this, the final section of the article expands the scope of the analysis and speculates on the likely development - and eventual obsolescence - of the (music) CD-Rom in the light of expanding services such as Internet. In this way the curvature of the article's analysis both complements and substantiates the statement from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle which prefaces the article and much of the thrust of his book's characterisation of the logic and deferral of commodity succession 2.
The juxtaposition of the article's opening quote with Debord's statement on the operation of Western capitalism serves to signpost the duality of our approach in this article. As aficionados of popular music and computer media we are enthusiastic about the possibilities of music related CD-Rom material. As cultural analysts, we are all-to aware of how the public promotion of CD-Roms conforms to the Western media industry's dynamic of product succession and the marketing of seemingly ever-more spectacular media texts and formats. This split writing position is a familiar one to those who have been schooled in Cultural and/or Media Studies. We acknowledge and emphasise it here however since we feel that much influential writing around computer/new technology media has rarely even paid lip service to such dualities. Magazines such as Mondo 2000, for instance, have primarily reinscribed marketing hyperbole as cultural and (pseudo) analytical discourse through the breathlessly euphoric 'fan' orientation of their writers. Indeed, such an approach is the virtual raison d'etre for the vast majority of in-culture publication in the field. In order to pursue a different course we recall and cite Debord's analyses as a series of checks and balances to prevent us from being swept up by the internal promotional discourses of the consumer culture we inhabit, study and - however problematically - enjoy.
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