(we are) electronic performers

Asking music industry reps on how they see the current situation in their business, their answers will probably along the following lines:

• Illegal music downloads impoverish musicians
• The cost of music production needs to be minimized to the max
• Music becomes more of an expensive hobby
• The whole process chain of production, distribution, promotion and concerts is destroyed

Through the eyes of the music industry, the last few years with both the mass distribution of digital copy tools (such as CD/DVD burners) and the internet as a very efficient mechanism of distribution, are nothing but their apocalypse. The "good old times" are portrayed as the time where the music business was a closed, independent business where the monies stayed in the family for good.

We will look at those good old times and try to put things back into perspective by pulling out the history books and looking back a little further in history than the beginning of audio recordings.

After this necessary shift of perspective, we'll look specifically at the implications of universally available digital technology and will try to establish a theory of digital dialectics where digital technology not only gives you endless reproduction without losing quality, but also endless possibilities of creating new, unreproduceable art and how this brings us back to the very foundation of what music has been in a very distant past.

We will even try to demonstrate that with a small performance. Bring your clubbing shoes.

This talk will be iteration two of a talk we originally planned and held for a small local congress on the future of music in hamburg, germany, called "Operation Ton". Amazingly, our talk/performance even made it into the german newspaper TAZ (Achtung, german content): www.taz.de/1/leben/musik/artikel/1/eine-kultur-flatrate-fuer-alle/

Since it is largely inspired by talks we both enjoyed at the past few reboots, we found it very fitting to bring it back to the reboot. Namely, these two past talks could be seen as legitimate ancestors of our proposal:

• Rasmus Fleischer and Magnus Eriksson "PERFORMANCE" @ rbt09: www.reboot.dk/page/2318/en
• Jeremy Keith "The Tradition of Transmission" @ rbt10: www.reboot.dk/page/4676/en