The Music Museum is the world first online Music Museum. The typical Art Museum is an institution that is familiar to anyone living in an urban centre. In an art museum, you go to a particular place to see artworks that are in a particular, and often temporary, exhibit. Often, these works are from the museum’s General Collection, and are curated into a particular presentation or exhibit. In the Music Museum, you don’t go to a particular place (outside of the notion of “place” held by a URL) to experience a given exhibit – you go to a particular time. At that particular time, music will play that has been curated into a particular, and usually temporary, “Music Exhibit”. The music is, for the most part, from the Museum’s General Collection.
The General Collection changes over time. Every six months there is an upload of new material and a deletion or deactivation of older material.
The types of exhibits will range greatly. Some will be deep and profound – linking moods and styles of music across decades, providing insights into the culture, technology, styles, and preferences of a variety of cultures and subcultures. Sometimes there will be exhibits focusing on certain artists – ranging from the obscure to the famous. Sometimes it will be something fun and frivolous – perhaps an exhibit where all the songs have titles of or including proper names, like John or Jane.
The character of the General Collection of the Music Museum is historically referential. Early European Museums of the Renaissance and Classical periods were usually just buildings filled with all the weird stuff some rich person collected over the years. This is also true of the Music Museum – the character of the General Collection reflects the musical interests of the Administration here at the Music Museum. As the consequences of the vagaries of class, gender, and race inform one’s musical preferences, this is also true of the Music Museum’s Administration. However, the Music Museum is aware of this, and shifts and adjustments in the General Collection will often be guided by the desire to expand interest vistas and knowledge depth to provide more powerful, valuable, and interesting curations.
That said, the Music Museum will not be emphasizing popular music forms. This is not to say that popular music forms are banished – on the contrary – there will be a lot of popular music. It’s just not the focus or in the interest of the Music Museum to reproduce the facilities that other streaming services and radio stations perform for popular music forms. As a consequence, there will be very little to almost none in terms of contemporary pop music forms and artists in the Museum. As of this writing, in July 2021, these are the top 5 songs:
MONTERO, by Lil Nas X
Kiss Me More by Doja Cat featuring SZA
Levitating by Dua Lipa featuring Da Baby
good 4 u by Olivia Rodrigo
Peaches by Justin Bieber featuring Daniel Caesar and Giveon.
Obviously, they are all forms of contemporary pop and rap music. Neither these styles or artists will be of great significance in the General Collection, except insofar as they might, at some time, be part of a curation where their presence is required for the listener’s attention to a particular curatorial notion. There is another reason for this: the Museum’s Scope.
The Music Museum focuses on works between 1920 and 2020. From plague to plague. From 78s to streaming. This does not mean that there will be no new music admitted that was created after 2020. There will; just not as frequently featured as works from the past. This is for a number of reasons both practical and aesthetic. The practical reason is that more music is released each month in 2021 than in the entire year of 2000. It’s nearly impossible for the small operation that is the Music Museum to review that much music. Thus, contemporary music production exceeds appreciation, and acquisition decisions become increasingly strategic and centered around curatorial interests. Music is in an age of cultural hyperproduction, and there is little to be or should be done about that. It’s a great flowering. It’s also the end of the Musical Society, but that’s a topic for another post.
The aesthetic problem has to deal with more hauntological issues. In fact, the Music Museum is a hauntological project, as all Museums are. The Music Museum is self-consciously so. The Music Museum serves a variety of purposes, theoretical, philosophical, aesthetic, historical, and cultural. These will also become clearer over time as exhibits are curated and explained in a variety of papers that will appear here on this website.