Todd Rundgren's Waking Dreams

It's no longer my responsibility to come up with all the whacked-out ideas. We look at Waking Dreams as kind of a home for whacked-out ideas -- the wayward ideas' home. They're wacky in the sense that we don't like to do the same work other people are doing. I come from an artist's background, not an engineer's, and I've always had a criterion that transcends my understanding of the limitations of the platform. So the difference we add is a certain kind of attention to key elements of the problem that turn it into a unique experience.

In The Individualist [Rundgren's new enhanced CD], we could have used an off-the-shelf paradigm like everyone else did: "Aw, let's just do an electronic biography." But I looked at the enhanced real estate as an opportunity to expand the experience of the statement the music was making, rather than have it be "behind the scenes" or anything like that. Having that criterion in the first place required everything to rise to another level. In other words, we have a degree of interactivity.

The problem with most products that claim interactivity is that they push all the work they were supposed to do off onto the user. They just shovel all the pictures and sound clips and stuff in there, and it's up to the user to make sense of it. My criterion is, "Hey, I'm an artist. If I have something to say, I'd better get out there and say it." I allow people to view it from a different side of the room, get underneath it or above it, speed it up or slow it down. But it can't be an empty vessel. Our first criterion was for users to be able to put the disc in, and to -- with a minimal amount of work -- be entertained or informed. You give them options, but it's only options, not a requirement.

One of those options is passivity. Not necessarily bolted-down-to-the-chair passivity, but the art and presentation should be compelling enough that they don't feel like they have to do anything. The suspension of disbelief fakes over and they are in your world. The trickiest thing to figure out is, what happens when interactivity is an integral part of that presentation? At some point or another, there's going to be a requirement of human intervention for things to gain any character.

That's an interesting phenomenon, although that demand for interactivity pushes my philosophical buttons. The idea that at some point things would grind to a halt, that you could not go any further without some input... that would have to be a real special circumstance.

How do you integrate the opportunity to interact into the presentation so it doesn't look like wings on a pig? It should be seamless in the sense that comedians have interactive performances with their hecklers. If a comedian isn't doing well, you expect somebody to step up and say, "Hey, you suck!" The ground rules for that particular presentation allow for that level of interactivity and no one thinks there's anything unusual in that. Then again, symphonic performers rarely expect that somebody would stand up in the middle of a performance and scream, "You suck!" at the conductor.

I've always felt there was an element of interactivity in most things; it's just the ease with which you can access it. For instance, if you were good enough and you were given enough information, you could splice movies together on the fly, just by hitting the channel-select button on the television. You know that game where you find two talking heads on adjacent channels and flip back and forth? You can almost get them to start delivering weird dialog. That's the kind of thing a lot of people think interactivity is supposed to bring: the ability to recognize those splice points and facilitate that for you. As it becomes easier, more integrated info the presentation, that's when people start calling it interactive, even though you always had the capability of changing it.

I'm hoping for a day when the fixation on the term "interactivity" starts to slack off, and everyone presumes a level of interactivity in all things and it gets down more to identifying your options, your navigational model. It's not so much interactive as immersive. Immersive is a model for interaction in that you're still yourself in this new place and you still use the same ways of scanning things that you would in the real world. Rather than a Netscape model, in which everything is a page and you flip to the next page and the next page.

Our ideal alternative method -- although this only works for artists who have developed some attractive element that causes people to have faith in them in the first place -- is replacing the record company with the listeners as the patron of the development of the work. In other words, record companies advance you money for you to produce the product. They expect to take from the listeners later. If we're going to eliminate the discs, why don't we just eliminate all of that and have the listeners subscribe to an artist for $20, $25, whatever, so you get a year's worth of this artist? Anything they do, whenever they do it, winds up in your e-mail box in real time, and at the end of the year, you get a hard copy of the accumulated works. We call it "Patronet." Determining the proper model for artist compensation will continue to be a problem as long as there's a material component. If people only listen to a CD once, the thing they really owned was a license to listen, not the CD. They don't technically own the CD because they can't transfer ownership of it. You're legally not allowed to sell that disc to somebody else without the original artist/producer/owner getting profit off that transaction. Obviously, people do sell records and discs and stuff to each other, but it hasn't been widespread enough for the record industry to chance turning everybody off by suddenly prosecuting individuals.

But whether you listen to it once or a hundred times, it's impossible to tell what the value of it is once you eliminate the hard objective costs of making and distributing it -- seven or eight bucks. The rest of the cost is the value of the music. Whether it's shitty or whether it's good, the rest of the music is worth four bucks. There's never been a way to actually say what the monetary worth of the listening experience is, only a way to say how much it costs to bring it to you. And that's going to have to continue to be the measure of how people get compensated.

What would if be like if people could listen to something and say, "I didn't like that. Give me my money back."? Prove you didn't like it! Prove to me you didn't like it so I can give you your money back. What if you just lied? What if you loved it and you want it for free? It gets too complicated trying to attach a worth to the actual listening experience. It has to be based on the transaction, never on the worth. So it doesn't matter how many times I listen to it.

Hopefully, it's good enough to listen to twice. But that's just lowered expectations. It used to be that the market was singles. You'd buy a single and just play it over and over, one song. When I got the first Beatles album, I listened to it every day two or three times when I got home from school. It meant a lot to me from a listening standpoint, but it also had all these social implications. The whole experience of imagining, "I could do this. I could be chased down the street by girls and grow my hair long and all those other associated things that go along with the experience."

I suppose there is something essential to the experience that will disappear -- the actual having it in your hands, staring at the album cover, or whatever. Somebody's going to have to come up with a substitute for that part of the experience. The problem is that so much music doesn't justify creating something you can hold in your hands. So much music is meant to be heard and disposed of, that all the tree killing, plastic refining, petroleum transporting, and all the other wasteful parts of the process should be made to disappear as soon as we have a mechanism to deliver it in another way.