Concluding Remarks
As an offering of music content, DR DJ actualizes an eclectic experience by providing a platform for exhibiting and activating interrelated metadata that are curated within a frame of a DR personality but are free to be explored and put together as a user sees fit. The proposal for DR DJ should be seen as an organic movement in the digitization-process of DR’s music archive, in which metadata have been set to use as operationalized meta-sources for music curation. Instead, it is deemed as an unnecessary construction that obfuscates the managerial strategies of DR. These strategies keep radio listeners fixed via a strengthened music scheduling that emulates the algorithmic playlist-logic of streaming services, YouTube, and commercial radio stations. In terms of public service, this forms a dilemma: DR of course needs a certain market share in order to stay relevant and eligible to receive tax funding, but DR also needs to challenge the public and go in multiple, and different, directions.[13] If actualized, DR DJ would have been a qualitative attempt to balance such a duality.
Thus, it is of importance to engage in an ongoing reassessment of DR’s conduits of music communication and to reflect on the variations of DR’s music media is such an action. To do a variantology of media is, for Zielinski, to defy the hegemonic forces that create a homogenous standardization in the ways media are practiced and discoursed. As such, a variantology of DR’s music archive challenges the inherent capitalist mechanisms of all media culture. Entertainment is important, also for DR, but entertainment does not need to be in opposition to qualities such as difference and experimentation. To regard DR DJ as imaginary media, as a non-actualized capacity of DR’s actual music communication, can help us to imagine DR’s music archive differently. In fact, viewing the proposal as imaginary media will inadvertently force us to think of DR’s music communication differently. Variantology is a methodological tool that can help us in shifting focus between multiple levels: from the specific, that a track in the archive might have indirect connections to other tracks in the archive; over the ungraspable, that a track in the archive points to tracks and/or occurrences outside the archive; to the political, that a track in the archive might be present at the expense of other tracks. Zielinski wants to change our geographic attention from North to South and from West to East, and thus make us rewrite media history in order to rewrite history. I think this instigation of the variantological method is important to bear in mind when speculating on alternative directions for DR’s, and for any, music archive.
The history of recorded music is nonlinear and should be understood non-chronologically. Within an event, other non-actualized events are always slumbering, and we need to remember that. Any communicative uttering about recorded music is always only one situated perspective that acts within a wider mapping of music and media. If we are not actively shedding light on music’s multiple temporalities and geographies, we are not trying to make a better world than the existing one. Music has democratizing potential, but if we are not offering full and unlimited access to music’s potentials of change, it might work diametrically opposed. How sad it is if music appears undemocratic because of strategies of dissemination. Histories of recorded music, just as histories of media, ought to avoid linear logic and the “hegemony of the new” (Parikka 2012: 11). This is where the variantology of Zielinski is helpful. By scrutinizing alternative deep times, it is possible to bring out the forgotten or the oppressed trajectories in the history of recorded music. To develop speculative scenarios widens the actual music communication outlets and infuses them with critical reflection. When I verbalize the proposal of DR DJ as imaginary media, I warn against what is actually at hand within DR’s music archive, and the institution’s linear logic to music communicative strategies. But I also emphasize that DR’s music archive possesses capabilities and willingness to carve out other paths in the archival field that can connect things differently, again and yet again, ad infinitum. The history of recorded music is cyclical and pervaded by diversity – to think otherwise is an appropriation of both music and media technologies. Variantology potentiates the deep times and the loose geography of recorded music, which connect to alternative futures for recorded music and how these might be communicated and experienced.