From a band's point of view, it theoretically makes no sense to play your own songs for any reason other than an ego trip or impressing others - there are, after all, plenty of great songs already written. No matter how good you are at writing your own, they're not going to be better than the best of all the songs written by millions of different people in the past. You should play better songs instead of worse ones, right? Division of labor will make the product better, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. As Dennis Dutton wrote and I keep repeating, in music, as in all art, people aren't looking only for great melodies, lyrics, arrangements and performances, but also for a glimpse into your soul. With a cover band you get a glimpse into both the author's and the performer's soul, which is slightly confusing and therefore more difficult to trust. If you want to learn something about other human beings, unfiltered information is the best. So, if you want to learn about human beings from music, then a great performance of a great song can actually be an inferior product to a worse performance of a less interesting song if the latter is performed by its author. It won't be that way every time, of course. Authentic crap is still crap. At the upper end of the scale, Cole Porter didn't have much of a voice and his songs couldn't reach their full potential unless performed by others.

Is this interest in authenticity a new cultural phenomenon? After all one of the big historical trends in music over the past 50+ years has been the increased prominence of people performing their own material. I don't think any kind of shift in culture is necessary to explain that; culture has just been catching up with technology. Hearing Haydn's orchestra perform his composition with Haydn himself on violin was always more desirable than another orchestra playing them, but back then very few people could actually come to the performances, and just getting the orchestra to play in your summer palace was a huge pain in the ass for everyone. We've been gradually working our way towards making it possible for more people to hear a specific individual's performance since. Better roads and transportation, louder instruments and larger concert halls with better acoustics were all big steps in this direction. Later came amplification which was huge - it not only allowed many thousands of people to hear a single performance, it also allowed bands to shrink vastly and their equipmnent to become much sturdier which all made extensive touring far more practical. Recording, broadcasting and distribution technology followed, and now hearing Haydn's orchestra would be a trivial matter. Hell, I can easily hear songs written by middle-class teenagers on the other side of the world.

I don't think we're quite finished with the shift yet, though. Weddings and corporate parties used to require a live band, but now many of those gigs are going to high-end DJs - who are largely playing material performed by its authors. Sure, classical music, a lot of pop and Nashville country still maintain the division of labor, and hip-hop still has a strong division between producers and MCs - though it's sine qua non for MCs to write their own rhymes, so that part of the work is never split. I think the future will feature even fewer professional songwriters, more MCs making their own beats, and fewer cover bands.

Does that mean cover bands will disappear completely? Nah. I think we're just headed towards a different equilibrium where more people than before perform their own songs, but big numbers of symphony orchestras, professional songwriters and cover bands still remain. There will also be plenty of situations where music creates communion with other human souls but focusing on the entire community around us rather than the specific souls of artists - church music, children's music, military marches, national anthems etc. Still, I am something of a dying breed. I could sit around moaning that this means my enemies are taking over, or that people don't really want the best performances of the best songs, but really, the listeners get more out of the songs. When all's said and done, this is a change for the better. At worst I'll just have to get more gigs accompanying female songwriters.