ABSTRACT
This chapter examines No World Order amidst several intertwined subjects: Todd Rundgren's long career as a musical and technical innovator, the recent history of digital interactive music, the construction of No World Order and how it followed several themes from Rundgren's earlier innovations, and the reasons for its commercial failure and limited popularity. The music app has been a more persistent medium, partly because it is connected to the digital downloading of content, which has become the primary means of delivering musical content to audiences. Upon its release, the interactive version of No World Order achieved very limited commercial success, for a variety of possible reasons. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the lessons that can be learned from it with respect to interactive music and innovation, and Rundgren's career-long approach of working with emerging technologies – both to avoid stylistic, conceptual, and technical limitations and as a way of limiting possibilities in order to fuel creativity.
