If, as Amanda Marcotte suggests, the Internet is like the Beach Boys in 1963, then I guess we have a few more years of inspired genius before the psychosis, death, and exploitation set in. Then again, everything goes faster on the Net, so maybe we're already in the psychosis, death, and exploitation phase.

Like Amanda, I think that Bill Wasik, in his book, glosses over the fact that one of the foundational characteristics (and joys) of popular music has always been its ephemerality, the way new bands buzz in and out of consciousness like beautiful bees. As Stephen Malkmus observed in 1994 (well before MySpace):

Music scene is crazy
Bands start up each and every day
I saw another one just the other day
A special new band

And I don't think it's true that, as Bill suggests, "overnight sensations" have "almost always been manufactured by radio, or by big record labels, or by the interplay between the two." In fact, overnight sensations emerged regularly from the very "local scenes" that Bill contends (accurately and sadly, I think) that the Internet is undermining. Scenes are almost by definition fickle and hungry for the new. If you look, for instance, at the garage rock explosion in California in the late 1960s or the British punk movement of the late 1970s, you see that disposability was actually part of the point (and the excitement).

I was a bit too young for the Sixties, but I can speak from experience about the Seventies. That was before marketers came up with such terms as "indie rock" and "alternative rock." Back then everything was just "rock," and it all fell into basically two categories, which we defined for ourselves: "fucking great" and "fucking shit." At that time, radio and record labels largely concerned themselves with "fucking shit," and their goal was not to encourage one hit wonders but rather to sustain elephantine franchises like, say, ELO, Yes, and the Eagles. The ephemeral stuff, which also tended to be the good stuff, existed almost entirely outside the radio/label ambit. It existed in the scenes and was promoted, largely, via word of mouth.

So to the extent that the Web encourages "the ecstatic surf from new band to new band, from track to track, from style to style," it represents as much a continuation of the "scene" ethic as the "corporate" ethic.

The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its imperialistic iron fist, the "ecstatic surfing" behavior on everything and to the exclusion of other modes of experience (not just for how we listen to music, but for how we interact with all media once they've been digitized). In the pre-Web world, we not only enjoyed the thrill of the overnight sensation - the 45 that became the center of your waking hours for a week only to be replaced by the new song - but also the deeper thrill of the favorite band in whose work we deeply immersed ourselves, often following its progression over many records and many years. It wasn't that long ago that buying an album represented, particularly for your average teenager, a significant investment. You thought a lot about that album before you bought it, and once you bought it you took it seriously - you listened to it. Repeatedly. Today, we're quick to dismiss those ancient days of "scarcity" and to celebrate our current "abundance," but scarcity had something going for it: it encouraged a deep engagement in listening to a particular piece of music, across the expanse of an album, and it also encouraged, in the artist, an interest in rewarding that engagement. I would like to get back the money I spent on records in my youth, but I would not give up the experience that money bought me.

It's the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of "tracks" at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Just hit Shuffle.

Amanda's retreat to vinyl is, I think, a recognition that we're trading away something important for the riches of the Web. And while I applaud her retreat, I have to think it's a rearguard action that is happening a long way away from culture's front lines. Whether it's news stories or pop songs, we're skimmers now. It's a one-hit-wonder world.