Author Cam Gordon has spent much of the past three decades writing about music.Supplied
Cam Gordon has been watching Canadian musicians and their fans pave new stretches of the information highway since jostling with his family over their five monthly hours of AOL access in the nineties.
The Torontonian spent much of the three decades since writing about music, while experiencing the ephemerality of digital history first-hand. He was a contributor to Chart Attack, a much-loved and now shuttered Canadian online magazine, and ran Canadian communications for the website formerly known as Twitter until new owner Elon Musk culled the team.
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Gordon’s first book, Track Changes: The Origin Story of Canadian Music on the Internet (1990-2010) – out Monday via FriesenPress – offers a people’s history of how this country’s musicians and fan communities reinvented themselves online. Beyond global phenomena that reshaped all of music, such as Napster and the iPod, Gordon unpacks the ripple effects of uniquely Canadian projects: early fan communities such as SloanNet; the message board Stillepost; the label Nettwerk’s foray into CD-ROMS; the global rise of CBC Radio 3; and the reach of influential music blogs such as Chromewaves and Said the Gramophone.
The author spoke with The Globe and Mail by phone.
You’ve been immersed in the worlds of tech and music for so long. What made you realize there needed to be a book about their intersection?
There’s been a wave of books about Canadian music from the 1990s and early 2000s, by people like Michael Barclay, Liz Worth and Sam Sutherland, and books like In Too Deep, about pop punk, plus a few books about technology from that era. But there’s not really been a book about the impact of technology on music for the people who lived through it. More than anything, this is a book about web culture.
This specific story has never really been told, certainly not in Canada. We are, at times, a branch-plant economy, and a branch-plant culture. But a lot of these innovations were led by fans and enthusiasts – SloanNet, Stillepost, a label like Zunior. There was no linear path. It was the enthusiasts and the fans who laid the groundwork for what was to come.
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Do you think the communities around music deepened with the advent of the internet?
It was never easier to find people who were deeply passionate about the music you like. The members of Sloan gave a lot of access to the folks who did SloanNet. But there were a lot of surprising names who were “good” at the internet. Loreena McKennitt is probably not the first name you think of for having a really strong web game, but it allowed artists like her to almost go fully independent and start to sell music directly to fans.
I was very conscious I wasn’t going to speak to that many musicians, because I wanted to find the actual people who were working on these websites or running these blogs or working at these startups.
One of the latter chapters addresses bloggers, including Frank Yang at Chromewaves and Sean Michaels at Said the Gramophone, and how they were taken as legitimate journalists. And I certainly think they were journalistic endeavours. Once bloggers came into the same category as journalists in a lot of circles, it had a big impact on not just their position as tastemakers, but also how music was covered in mainstream media. A lot of music was being broken at the blog level.
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You were laid off from Twitter as you worked on this book. How did that experience inform your writing?
It was a classic case of life imitating art. It really confirmed one of the central conceits of the book – this idea of digital decay, and the progression of not just the internet, but consumer technology. I worked on this book for several years. Artificial intelligence is changing our entire relationship with the internet. If I’d taken another couple of years to write this book, I feel like I would probably have a different point of view.
How do you feel about the temporary nature of the internet?
There’s tech rot, there’s link rot and there’s digital decay, but that’s been pretty much the same trajectory that any sort of media has had in the physical world.
You think of preserving old magazines and books, and you know they take a lot of effort to keep around – not just because they have to be preserved, but also because they get lost to generations, or just don’t stay in our lives. So this idea of media decaying is not a new concept.
This interview has been edited and condensed.