[Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of Ron Kuper’s opening-night speech, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” presented at the 2004 Texas Interactive Music Conference and Barbecue. Every October since 1996, the conference, better known as Project Bar-B-Q, has assembled 50 of the top minds in computer audio to brainstorm the future of music on computers. Project Bar-B-Q is hosted by George Alistair Sanger, aka The Fat Man, a prolific video game composer who grew frustrated with the disappointing MIDI playback on computer sound cards in the 1990s and decided to do something about it.]

Tonight, I want to start off with a simple question.

Where’s all the money? You know, that money we’re all supposed be making doing what we do?

The question doesn’t really have an answer. But consider this: What percentage of the world’s population is able to make music? ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. Singing or clapping hands counts. Music is universal, but don’t take my word for it.

Two years ago at Project Bar-B-Q I was lucky enough to be sitting next to [renowned composer] Morton Subotnick at lunch. He was saying that music—like language—is one of the few things that people are “wired for” at birth. Unfortunately, it’s also way too easy to squash that innate musical ability we all have—by not using it, by bad education, and so on. But the fact is, we all are born able to make music.

All of us who are gathered around this fire are computer people of some kind. Aren’t computers supposed to help people, make their lives easier, expand new horizons? (Forget about IRQ conflicts with your video card for a second.) You would think that computers would be enabling gazillions of people to make music.

Sadly, this has been only partially true. (Music software has been around for 20 years, and yet Apple just “invented” Garage Band last year. Give me a break.) The fact is that many people have computers, but way too few computers are helping people make music!

Must Be the Pants

So the simple question was, where’s all the money?

I still don’t have an answer. But now consider this: What percentage of the world’s population is able to play golf? Here’s an activity that people are most certainly not wired for at birth. It takes lots of time, lots of money, lots of practice. Hey, that’s starting to sound like learning to play an instrument, isn’t it? That’s not a coincidence. When you buy a guitar, do you buy the one Eric Clapton plays? When you buy golf clubs, do you buy the ones Tiger Woods uses?

Now let’s talk about that money.

According to some market research firm that published some report sometime that I read on the Internet somewhere, the size of the retail computer music software and hardware market is something like $200 million a year. Probably something like $120 million of that goes to Digidesign. It’s good to be the king.

Seriously, the $200 million a year is probably about right. Meanwhile, according to public filings with the SEC, the combined annual revenue of Taylor Made and Calloway is about two billion dollars.

Let me say that again: People spend ten times more money buying golf equipment from these two companies than they spend on the entire computer music industry! Golf, a game that is impossible to play and takes more time and effort than almost any activity you can imagine, makes tons more money than music—something that everyone could do, and with computers, everyone should do.

You should be angry right now. I sure am. Where the hell is all the money? What have we done so terribly wrong?

But don’t worry, there is hope!

Just Look at Yourself

Related Reading GarageBand: The Missing Manual By David Pogue

Let’s start by taking a look at ourselves. Who do we think we are? We are people who make musical gear like keyboards, synthesizers, audio converters, and sound cards. We make software to compose music, edit music, interactivate and even integrate music (whatever that means). We make software to protect our intellectual property, or we make software to steal music ... I mean, duplicate music for private use. We write music for games and movies. We write “commodity” music for whatever. We believe music is fun, educational, socially redeeming, and personally rewarding.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we think we’re pretty cool. The problem is, nobody else does. They’re all out playing golf.

We know that computers have vast potential when it comes to helping people make music. But a computer can’t make people want to make music. People want to download music, but they don’t want to make it. So, maybe we’re not so cool?

We think our “industry” has a lot of potential for growth. The problem is that ordinary people spend their disposable income on anything else but what we’re selling them. We are a sorry, deluded, opportunity-squandering bunch.

But there is hope!

Who Poisoned My Well?

First, let me tell you about our polluted, dysfunctional ecosystem. If the consumer hi-fi industry acted like our “industry,” here’s what you would see: Sony cables for Sony gear. Yamaha cables for Yamaha gear. Plug your Onkyo AV receiver into your Sony TV and the audio would be out of sync with the video. Salespeople in Best Buy would say JVC televisions were better because their volume could be controlled in 128 discrete steps instead of 64. VHS and Beta would each have 50 percent market share, and everyone would own two VCRs.

We live in a polluted ecosystem where major players battle each other for bragging rights to the best cable. There’s TDM, VST, AU, or DirectX; 5.1 or 7.1 or 7.2; Dolby or DTS; 32-bit or 64-bit or 8-bit for that “retro” sound. Single processor or dual processor, Mac or PC or Linux. There are more wedge issues in our “industry” than in a presidential election.

In our polluted, dysfunctional “industry,” we depend on mega-corporations who either don’t give a damn about what we do (Microsoft), or use what we do as a tool for selling more hardware (Apple).

Brothers and sisters, we don’t even play nice with each other, and the big corporations who don’t care about us only stand to benefit from our stupid, petty bickering. We’re sucking all the oxygen out of the room, that which keeps us alive.

But there is hope!

Pachydermabrasion

And now, the story of the blind men and the elephant. As you listen to the story, remember that the elephant represents something. Try to guess what it is.

Five blind men are led up to an elephant. They reach out their hands and touch a different part, and are asked to describe what they feel.

The first one, let’s call him “Mr. MMA,” says, “This thing feels thin and flexible like a cable. I feel piano keys attached to one side. I feel other gizmos and gadgets attached to the other side. I could explain it to you, but you might not understand unless you know how to play piano.”

The second one, “Mr. AES,” says, “This feels smooth, like fine precision engineering, all wood and stainless steel. Its length is precisely 100 millimeters. It has an RMS signal-to-noise ratio of 90 decibels. You didn’t understand that? Maybe you should go back to college first. You probably can’t afford this thing anyway.”

The third one, “Mr. NARAS,” says, “I recognize this thing. It couldn’t even comb its hair on Grammy night, for crying out loud. It was very famous last year and has lots of friends. I wish I had one of these, because then I’d get all the chicks.”

The fourth one, “Mr. GANG,” says, “I’d really love to get to know this thing better, but I’m on a really tight deadline. I’ve got 700 cues to write and they only let me run my computer five hours a day to get my work done. Gotta go!”

The fifth one, “Mr. IMSTA,” says, “Whatever this is, we need to make sure nobody steals it. Is there someplace we can plug a dongle into this thing? I want to paste a notice on the side saying 'Elephant piracy is evil. Please stop.'”

Different blind men, each with an unfortunately narrow view of something great. They can’t help it; they were born that way. But we know what it is that they can’t see.

Jumbo Opportunity

What is the elephant? The elephant is us—the “industry.” Not the MIDI industry, not the software industry, not the game audio music-creation industry. The industry. The one that subsumes all of us.

The elephant is the integrated whole built from a bunch of overlapping pieces. It’s the real industry that exists but has never rallied under a common flag. The elephant is standing right here among us, but none of us has given it a name yet. The elephant is our opportunity, our hope. It’s how we start making some real money.

This isn’t a new idea, it’s just new to us.

The hog farmers got together and said, “The other white meat.” Jews around the world began to eat ham in droves as a result. The beef farmers said, “It’s what’s for dinner.” Vegetarians around the world traded their tofu for T-bones. The dairy farmers said, “Got milk?” and “Behold the power of cheese.” (Those dairy guys are lucky; they have two products to sell.) Drunks around the world traded their martinis for milk.

What about us? Now that we have something to say, what are we going to say? Who is going to say it? The Music Technology Trade Association, that’s who. It’s the next big thing to come out of Project Bar-B-Q. It will be no less than the thing that brings music and computers to the masses. Its mission:

• Promote music-making as something anyone can do
• Promote music-making on the PC as something really fun and rewarding
• Promote honesty and integrity among manufacturers and customers
• Educate customers about music technology
• Establish and support standards to make PC music hassle-free for all
• Develop a consistent message, logo, or mascot for all members. Get an idea in the public consciousness on the scope of “Got milk?”

The Music Technology Trade Association will add a couple more zeros to the size of our industry, because we’ll finally have a real “industry” we can call our own.

The Music Technology Trade Association will motivate people to enrich their lives by making music with computers.

The Music Technology Trade Association will free us from Microsoft and Apple.

The Music Technology Trade Association will allow anyone, even a blind man, to see the elephant that is standing among us.

Thank you.