4 Great TED Talks About Music

If you’re anything like me, you probably paid thousands of dollars to go to school and study arts and communication. It was a very creative way to get into debt. If I could do it over today, I’d stay home and learn on YouTube where there are thousands of hours of great content. For instance, TED Talks offer you lectures by some of the brightest minds illuminating our culture (and a few duds - let’s be honest - which you’re free to skip) and you don’t have to get into crippling, life-altering debt to listen to them. Here are some of my favorite music-related ones.

Auteurs in the ether | Alan Palomo

Using the myth of the auteur as a jumping-off point, Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian) explores the relationship between collaboration and creativity. Plagiarism in popular music is a new phenomenon in the history of humanity, considering. Before music could be captured and duplicated, a good song used to be like a good recipe, something you can serve to the people around you, reshaping it to your will, without really having to give credit to anyone. There’s a pretty blurry line between appropriating an idea and using a pre-existing equation to create a new formula. 

Palomo's presentation is less flashy than Mark Ronson’s Talk on similar themes, but it’s way more interesting. It’s, err… just like their respective discographies. 

How artists can (finally) get paid in the digital age | Jack Conte

If you search for TED Talks on the subject of the music industry, you’ll find a lot of Debbie Downers exposing what’s wrong with pop music, or declaring that streaming is killing the music industry. These are your glass-half-empty people. On the other side, you have Jack Conte, the proto-YouTuber behind the indie band Pomplamoose, and, as it turns out, the co-creator of the membership platform Patreon. As he explains, it has been a weird couple years for the cultural industry, but he offers a pretty positive outlook on the future of monetization for artists of the digital age, which is still in its infancy at the moment.

The Bare Maximum | Steve Lacy

Thus answering the question: “What would it look like if someone got really high before a TED Talk?”

Steve Lacy isn’t the most eloquent orator, but his message is so powerful that it makes up for it. Most people have all the tools they need to create something awesome right there in their pocket. You don’t need much more than an old iPod Touch and Garageband to create a hit and connect with your audience and some of the coolest musicians out there. Start today.

Pop Music is Stuck on Repeat | Colin Morris

Colin Morris uses computational techniques to represent the repetitiveness of modern pop music. This could’ve been one of those “Wasn’t it better in the old days?”, but instead, it's a vibrant argument for the edification of pop culture. Today’s music isn’t worse, it’s just different than what it used to be. And in many ways, it’s really interesting. A repetitive song isn’t necessarily formulaic, sometimes it’s simply essential. This will give a lot of food for thoughts if you have to write lyrics and you always get stuck on the first line.

Follow the TED and the TEDx Talks channels on YouTube for more great content.