The first level of space that Levy mentions is earth. This is humans in the beginning, when they were nomads following the herds of potential food and the seasons. He contends that this is where “humanity invented itself by allowing the earth to unfold around it” (Levy, p. 131). It is the “cosmos in which humanity communicates” with all that is around it, where we identify ourselves in terms of other humans (eg. Names relate us to who are our kin). In terms of music, this relates to a time where people used music (mostly song) in order to tell stories, remember what to do in certain situations, and communicate to one another. The music identified itself in terms of tune or perhaps the name of the account it told (i.e. The Iliad). It also allowed for different interpretations and performances of the same music, but who was to say whether it was right or wrong when the original performer was most likely long gone? This decentralized who held the power to whoever happened to be performing or singing it. During this time, music was a huge part of culture given that there was no writing.

Music's role changed significantly with the next level's emergence called territorial space. This was when humans were no longer nomadic, but rather settled in one place and people linked themselves, not just to their kin, but to where they were from territorial as well. Writing and agriculture were the major developments that allowed for this level's emergence. Obviously, in terms of music, this allowed humans to reproduce music on paper and in writing, in turn allowing music to be reproduced as a carbon copy, rather than as an interpretation as with singing something from memory. This gave power to the person that wrote the music, because most people did not travel great distances to distribute the music. There was a concrete “correct way” to play the music. This very much centralized the power to the writer (or the piece of paper with his work), just as most societies at this time centralized power to one king who was able to say what was right and wrong. In other words, both earth and music were turned “into something sedentary, domesticated” (Levy, p. 6).

The next level of space that developed was commodity space. Levy likens this development with the industrial revolution. This level is based on movement and the controlling of movement of products and services. Levy makes the point that capitalism is a huge part of this level as it “transmutes into merchandise everything it draws into its orbit” (p. 136). It puts the previous spaces “in terms of its own objectives,” meaning that it uses the earth space and territory space to spread capitalism and envelope the other spaces. In terms of music, we can look at how artists began selling their music in exchange for money. As the ability to record, copy, and distribute music developed, the artist's demand for money and high sales grew so that they became huge stars. They could try to control the movement of their music by distributing it to as many people as possible. Wealth in the music industry was controlled now by album sales and the amount of “movement” that the music made to different listeners. The listeners had no other way to listen to the music than on a bought album or on the radio (which were used as promotion). The advent of the internet radically changed this happy place that musicians had found in the commodity space.

The next and final level that Levy talks about is knowledge space, a space that has not fully developed or emerged completely. He says that an aspect of this new space is “the appearance of new tools (cyberspatial tools) capable of bring forth…unknown and distant landscapes, singular identities characteristic of this space, new sociohistoric figures” (Levy, p. 8). This clearly refers to the emergence of the internet and how we have not quite realized how to use it to its full effectiveness. It stresses collective intelligence which means that we all hold knowledge about something and we must be able to put it together in order to enrich humanity as a whole. We must become apprentices to each other to learn about what can be done better and learn more. The music industry has not fully realized these things. With the advent of the internet followed by digitally sharing music over this medium, the music industry has been in a flux. They have tried to ignore it “failure to recognize the other as an intelligent being is to deny him a true social identity” (Levy, p. 15) and control it (through the court system), but neither has worked as consumers are very smart and realize that, most of the time, the law cannot adequately enforce the laws enacted on everyone if almost everyone is downloading music and media.

Levy states that “we cannot simply capture his (the other) expertise or the information he possesses” (p. 12). Bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have taken this and realized that the music industry may not survive if it contains to live in a commodity space. Instead, they have taken a chance to become an apprentice of the consumer and learn. Radiohead's last album, In Rainbows, was offered online for digital download for a penny (or however much the consumer wanted to pay) without help of a record company and Nine Inch Nails' new album, The Slip, is offered completely free. Radiohead experienced mixed results, but, instead of trying to change the space, they reorganized and decided to take advantage of it to get more copies of their music out to the world.

I'm not sure if this is the direction that all music will go into for the future, but Radiohead's approach matches up with Levy's argument of reorganizing and trying to take advantage of the new space of the internet and cyberspace. Most consumers appreciated Radiohead's efforts because “when we acknowledge the other for the range of skills it possesses” (to download music no matter what the law), “we allow him to identify himself in terms of a new and positive mode of being, we help mobilize and develop feelings of recognition that will facilitate the subjective implication of other individuals in collective projects” (Levy, 15). Perhaps more musicians will realize what Radiohead did and quit banging their heads against the wall, trying to stop people from downloading music online.