The Gatekeepers: Introduction
Writer’s Note - this is a draft of the introduction for an in-progress nonfiction novella.
In the months leading up to the new millennium, a fear started to creep into America. Suburbanites began hoarding bottled water, batteries, and supplies typically associated with hurricane season. They weren’t afraid of a storm on the horizon, but of something they couldn’t see. As the 90s came to a close, people began to realize that the advances in technology had been an enormous leap with implications that we could not even understand. The internet was already beginning to change every industry and aspect of daily life. Things were shifting from tangible to digital, and once people could no longer hold what they owned - money, music, letters - in their own hands, the fear was that it could all be lost. Something as simple as a super computer glitch between the moment of midnight at 1999 and January 1, 2000 could send us all tumbling back into the dark ages - or so some thought. On June 1, 1999, six months before the ball dropped and the world didn’t end, two teenage hackers launched a peer-to-peer file sharing service called Napster that irrevocably changed the commodification of art in ways that no one had predicted.
Who determines which songs reach our ears? At this very moment, groups of teens are playing instruments together - in schools, garages, and basements - with dreams of record deals and sold-out tours. Who decides which music will never leave the garage, and which songs are destined to top the Billboard charts? Before the internet, the gatekeepers were obvious - A&R scouts, record executives, PR reps, and music critics - and an absolutely essential part of how music was able to reach an audience. Who has that power now that an artist can record an album on a home computer and publicly share it on a website? Is everyone a gatekeeper now?
