Re-released: TheProscriptions.com
A short post commemorating, announcing and explaining the re-release of TheProscriptions.com.
Monday, 2009-11-16 | Music, On the Internet, Tyranny Belle
| "...one who tells stories must always have another to whom he tells them, and only thus can he tell them to himself." |
| Umberto Eco, Baudolino |
Early this morning, I re-released TheProscriptions.com.
Now that the dust has settled and the day-zero bugs and fixes have been resolved--i.e. now that the site is live and serving content, instead of dead and sputtering debug messages--I'd like to say a few things about a.) what the re-release is and b.) what the re-release means.
I'd like to begin with a question: "why do I call it a re-release instead of a 'launch' or a 're-design' or something that sounds more germane to web-design and web-content?"
That answer has two parts. First, I call it a "re-release" because, due to the unusual (but, I should remark, increasingly "usual") nature of Tyranny Belle Records and the music associated with that project, publication on the Internet does, in fact, constitute a release. The vision and mission of the label became, before ithe abrupt and acrimonious end of the the vision, the mission and the label itself, one where free (as in "beer" and as in "speech") publication using free (as in "beer" and as in "speech") tools would constitute a legitimate and "full" release.
The idea that a "web-only" release was somehow "partial" or less than complete still sticks in my craw to this day, as it seems contrary to the facts of life for no valid reason.
It is, of course, fine to behave in a manner contrary to what seems to be demanded by the facts of life if your reasons are good, but to believe--either because you haven't given it any thought or because of some "feeling" that you can't quite pin down--that so-called "web-only" releases are less than adequate or complete is to act in accordance with abandoned values and market-models. Big Media, with its primitive paper products and ROM media argued--desperately, un-ironically and abortively--that their "true product" was intangible and that copying it was therefore a crime, but also that their product was tangible enough that only their copies were legitimate copies. To possess the belief that a "web-only" release is some how insufficient is to possess a relic of this abandoned way of thinking (and selling).
And so, therefore, I believe that to publish an "album" or "collection" of music on the Internet is to release it. The fact that the albums that are currently available at TheProscriptions.com were, until this weekend, available for free download via a simple HTML interface means that they had already been released. The fact that I re-wrote the website that presents the content for download and consumption therefore constitutes a "re-release", in my way of thinking.
The second part of why I call it a "re-release" instead of a "launch" or even a "re-launch" has to do with the fact that the original release, since I am still, on some level, thinking about these things according to the (admittedly antiquated) paradigms of Big Media (which held that new packaging constituted a new release, even if the content was unchanged), was constituted as much by the content as it was the presentation of that content. Since I believe that the original, HTML-based website was the first release, I consider that release to be "out of print", since it can no longer be accessed publicly: accordingly, I believe the current release to be "in print".
And now that I have said some things that I hope will prove helpful about what the re-release "is", I would like to say what I think it "means".
Simply, I don't think it means--or should be taken to mean--much of anything. There is not, to the best of my knowledge, new Proscriptions music in the pipeline and there are no plans to expand the site's content.
Now, that having been said, I should also mention that it is definitely not the case that there has been a conscious decision made to never again create content. What the re-release means is simply that: the original content has been "re-packged" and is now available in a new format.
Enjoy.