Where Music Will Come From

em.a18 writes "There is a good article in the NYTimes about how we use music and how it changes after Napster. The article even suggests some good business models. Nicely done!" Yeah you need a free registration to read it, but it's a good piece. I like the quote 'With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. '

Comments

Re:No numbers in business models

[rlk]

Well of course no one knows how any of these business models would do! Nobody has tried them yet. Until they're tried (i. e. until the RIAA's monopoly is broken to the degree that any of this could be done without it getting sued out of existence), it's impossible to determine how they would work.

Furthermore, what's wrong with a musician working another job?

Desirable packaging? Not far out at all

[DaveJay]

Regarding this portion of the article:

"Or to release music in such wonderful packaging that it is cheaper to buy it than to copy it?"

I still hold fond memories of Infocom's games, especially The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The whole package came with a ridiculous assortment of paraphernalia, including "peril-sensing sunglasses", a "subatomic space fleet" (which was too small to see and came in a small clear plastic bag) and, of course, "no towel".

I recently downloaded a copy of THGTTG to play using a Frotz emulator, and I must admit...it was OK, but I missed the physical objects that accompanied the game. I have to wonder what an original boxed version of the game, with all original items, would go for on e-bay.

In light of this, it does not seem unreasonable to expect that packaging tangible items with a CD could make that CD worth paying for over and above the (nonexistent) cost of downloading the songs over the Internet.

Re:Desirable packaging? Not far out at all

[Chris Johnson]

Absolutely.

I'm just finishing the last stages of a massive remastering spree- taking TEN albums, pretty much my entire catalog, and bringing them up to that standard for selling on Ampcast. Sometimes that's a lot of work.

I'm a vinyl record freak myself- I don't intrinsically like CD sound, much less mp3. I have written dithering software to MAKE my CDs sound good enough that I think they represent what the master tape was. I've gone in and done spectral noise gating on certain masters originally from tape, or with hissing guitar preamps present. I've built from scratch a binary-coded passive attentuation mixing console to sum the tracks with unlimited resolution, and bought expensive audiophile input caps (Hovland Musicaps) for the inputs of my A/D converter, a modded Lexicon.

That only gets you so far- after all, my CDs do literally say on them "Please copy this CD for your friends" so obviously, while I accept what will happen anyway, I must also figure out what MORE to do. Beyond 'respect' or 'loyalty'. What can I give people that's cooler even than that?

And so I turn to packaging. I've been wrestling with Ampcast, persuading them to allow me to specify the total form of every piece of artwork on the CD case. I want it to be like when you have a record and you put the cover where you can see it while listening to the record. I want there to be no dotcom banners and small print all over the fucking album cover. I want classic album art purity- and since I'm dealing with an indie and not the RIAA, and since I'm willing to trade off being in Tower Records for producing my artwork RIGHT (NO bar codes!), I may get it- and I'm proceeding as if I can have total artistic freedom.

The most extreme case so far has been my "Postcards From Tehigue" CD. The music is up as mp3s (128K VBR) and the CD is full 44.1/16 dithered with fancy techniques from hi-res masters, but it's funny because it's a wonderfully hi-res capturing of the sound of an antique Apple IIgs making really strange proto-electronic music- done back in 1986 or so. The actual music is pretty well represented by the mp3s, though you miss out on a bit of antique electronic SKRONK that way- so what is to be done with the packaging to match the goofy coolness of this bizarre music?

Answer: I scanned the actual motherboard of a IIgs at pretty high resolution (had to reduce to 1425x1425 for the cover- I used free software from Helmut Dersch, "Panorama Tools", to do the reduction with 256x256 sinc interpolation for REALLY SHARP reduction- again, taking effort to do stuff as 'right' as possible), and I made the tray liner so that the spines are no more or less than the END of the circuit board- some jacks and stuff, metal bits, also scanned with great clarity. No logos. No listings of the producer's girlfriend and dog (separately or, um, overloaded ;) ), no pointless enumeration of the street address of the recording company- no names or numbers on the spine, either! The package looks as much as possible like a small circuit board stuck in with your CDs, with ONE exception I couldn't resist- on the CPU chip, I used Photoshop (cloning and several overlay modes) to copy the exact appearance of the printing on other chips, down to the color and the texturing of the surface of the chip, to write as if it'd been printed there:

POSTCARDS FROM TEHIGUE
CHRIS JOHNSON

...so small that you can't possibly see it in the cover art.

I really think that if you are trying to make ART (of whatever sort- even if it's kind of weird) there is always a way to keep following that out to where you're producing something that DOES have a value of uniqueness- even in a world of Star Trek Replicators where NOTHING can be 'unique'. In that world, what you end up doing is producing something so iconoclastic that you end up with just a few people totally floored by it- who're ready to pick up your version of it simply because, well, it's not that much more expensive than copying every detail, and it's YOUR version- the closest they can get to what you actually touched and did.

If you could buy a beautiful painting with a bar code, and download jpgs of the beautiful painting with its bar code, etc. and you had a chance at getting a copy WITHOUT the bar code- would you do it? If you could get a clone without bar code, versus a print that the artist had produced with his own hands (rather like Andy Warhol's screen printing experiments), how much is that worth to you? How much is it worth to a rabid fan of the artist? How much is it worth, if the art is so idiosyncratic that nobody else will make it for you the way you like?

"liquid music"

[d5w]

The most interesting (if not original) point in the article for me was summed up in the future possibility:

So many amateur remixed versions of a hit tune are circulating on the Net that it's worth $5 to you to buy an authenticated official version.

While I don't think this is likely any time soon -- it's so much easier to make a clean copy than a warped one -- I like the idea of the tools for music manipulation and analysis reaching the point where this is a possibility. The tools out there allow an awful lot of audio manipulation, but they don't make it easy to "X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it". They let you do gross cut-and-paste maneuvers, but that's about it.

I've seen various research projects and half-completed products for dissecting music -- finding the chords, pulling out the melodies, profiling the rhythmic structures -- but imagine if the sort of "music processor" implied by this work was as ubiquitous as vi, Emacs or Wordpad. Then we'd really see some remarkable (and remarkably awful) music variations floating around.

Then I might be willing to pay just to get someone's digital certificate of authenticity. But I'd still be looking for the best comic variations on everything, of course.

Not likely to happen

[Tetrad69]

The article makes some nice points, and a lot of them I agree with. Personally, I think they should have brought up the monetary concerns a bit more, namely the fact that studio time costs a pretty penny, as well as does the distribution process for CDs, but that's forgivable.

The main problem I see with this pseudo-utopia of free information is the copyrights. Or rather, that the artists don't own them.

Copyrights, as far as I know, seemed to originate so as to promote creative and scientific work. Namely, being able to reap the rewards of coming up with something that people would want to buy. Now with the media moguls, the only thing promoting new work is that it's usually specifically stated in the artist's contract. "Make more or we'll sue", or something along those lines.

Now as far as I know, the bands still make most of their money from concerts and going on tour (as they should). With the digital age and the prospect of infinte supply, the media companies' business models are doomed to fail.

How about this for an idea: Force the distributors to give up the copyrights and give them back to the artist. Tear up all the old contracts. Now, instead of the monopolistic practices that they're using now, they may actually have to fight one another. Come up with new ways of making money from the distribution process that doesn't involve shafting both the consumer and the artist.

I'm sure everybody would be surprized at how quickly and effeciently the companies would change their business model if they knew they had to fight with one another to get contracts. And they would have to stay competitive or the artist could just pick up and leave.

I'm sure some of you more monetarily gifted than me can figure out a way to make money without actually holding the contracts. A percentage of sales, perhaps? Or maybe the artist paying the company to provide a service? There will still be the problem of who has the last say when it comes to media exposure, but I think that's what agents are for anyway. Take that job away from the Universals as well.

An idealized notion, I'm sure, but from my understanding of the situation, that's the key problem at this point in time...

Studio costs

[richieb]

[...] namely the fact that studio time costs a pretty penny, as well as does the distribution process for CDs, but that's forgivable.

Actually studio equipment is pretty cheap. The same issue of NYT magazine about Moby and his at home studio. He produces all his music at home.

It probably costs few thousand dollars to set up really nicely equiped studio in your basement. I have a four track recorder that cost $300 when I bought it. Today you can use a $1000 PC as a multitrack recorder.

So studio costs are not a real factor.

Distribution over the net is free - if you use P2P systems and avoid centralized servers. Let the listeners make their own CDs.

Re:Let's face facts

[Chris Johnson]

All very fine except you can't trust the RIAA/MPAA like that. You can't GIVE them slack- not like give anything in return. They are trusts, monopolies, they want to stomp out any other avenues for art. You can't even trust them to be fair to their own possessions- they pay their artists less than a tenth of what I, an indie, get per download, a hundredth of what I get per CD, and they have a hundred thousand times the resources of my indie distributor (Ampcast). What they WILL do is loan money- at terms that would embarrass any self-respecting bank.

Please don't cut the RIAA any slack. You're arguing like they represent musicians. You're wrong.

Eating lots of poison may be unhealthy but that doesn't mean the goal is to figure out a MODERATE, REASONABLE amount of poison to eat...