One could argue that digital music has become emblematic of the shift to the internet as both distribution network and site of cultural experience. Perhaps for this reason, today’s Mesh Conference kicked off with a keynote talk with the head of technology for Warner Music, Ethan Kaplan. Kaplan, besides spearheading how Warner use of tech in its business, is famous for parlaying an R.E.M. website he first made when was 16 into the career he has now.

Kaplan is clearly a ‘theory guy’. He began the talk (moderated by Mathew Ingram) by suggesting that digital music places less emphasis on the ‘form’ of art because the distinctions between forms have become broken down by technology (think of a music video on YouTube or Vimeo being the only way to experience a song). More importantly, this shift puts more focus on content rather than form, which to Kaplan, results in ‘a freer artistry’ (this is debatable, but best saved for another time).

So, what’s the role of the label in all this? Unsurprisingly, Kaplan argues it is significant, and he suggests that the function of the label is to provide the infrastructure for artist promotion, whether that is websites, blogs or working as a liason to destinations like last.fm, iTunes or Amazon. So, this is a sort of consolidation of the relationship between label and artist, vertically integrating A&R, promotion and recording.

Ultimately, Kaplan argued that labels work because they are a filtering system. Interestingly though, he stated that a service like Myspace Music is not and could not be a label precisely because there is no filtering – and it is here that the speaker’s interests became clear. Sites like Myspace Music and last.fm do have a filtering system: their users. And as I twittered, Kaplan fails to see this as a valid filtering mechanism because it largely bypasses the labels by focusing on the democratisation of music distribution. And while I am never keen to uncritically valorise democracy – as an audience member at another panel put it, “there is a fine line between democracy and anarchy” – the situation seems infinitely better when users can collectively promote the music that connects with their tastes and interests rather than that chosen by an A&R person.

Where Kaplan ended up was essentially the same place as Kevin Kelly in his “Better than Free” post – that labels need to commodify and fetishise the authentic experience in order to still sell something of value to the consumer. To my mind, what this displays is an incompatibility between the labels’ mentalities and the new mechanisms of music discovery and distribution. While it’s certainly true that artists need to be compensated for their work, it seems Kaplan’s perspective is still, for the time being, rooted in an approach that requires skimming and selection on the part of the label.

So, while I was overjoyed to hear someone at a tech conference talk about Derrida and Deleuze, as someone behind me remarked, asking Kaplan to defend the record label was like asking Microsoft whether open-source software is viable: there’s just no way to get an honest answer. Overall, Kaplan is a very smart guy and an interesting speaker but, while the talk opened in an intriguing manner, the direction it took toward the end was, to me at least, somewhat disappointing.

The image used here comes from Flickr user hyku.