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Online Music Brings New Life To Old Music
Rick Zeman writes to tell us The Washington Post has a look at how online music has helped to revitalize eclectic or out of print music. From the article: " Because the Internet has changed how people discover and share music, the rules of marketing it and the hierarchy of who determines what's hot have also changed. As radio-music listenership declines, the industry finds itself spending more time courting a broader field of tastemakers who, through Web sites, are popularizing songs that never get radio play. The primary tool in this transition is the playlist -- a sequence of tracks posted on blogs or shared on music purchase sites such as iTunes.
Not just that, but also 'about 2,700 albums have been brought back through the Vault, with more than 5,000 scheduled to follow' with those albums not having enough demand to justify another printing."
Just how much "demand" does it take?
You'd offer them for sale, on-line. There's no distribution costs.
And you wouldn't even need to keep them in stock. Just charge enough to cover printing the inserts and burning the CD. All of the costs are passed on to the buyer. It's pure profit. The "advertising" would be done by the "blogs" mentioned.
A great site I found a couple of years ago is http://english.sovmusic.ru/ . It's got thousands of mp3s taken from Soviet LPs and such, going back to the 1930s. Really amazing stuff. And it's run by a communist with a real to-each-according-to-his-need point of view, so everything there is free to download.
= saintwar
If you want an idea of the mentality in Russa after the fascists attacked, listen to this:
http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/download.php?fname
"The primary tool in this transition is the playlist"
So how long will it be before someone cries foul, waves a 'playlist' patent and tries to make a dishonest buck out of this?
Stupid idea perhaps, but my god if there haven't been some godawful 'patents' showing upand causing trouble of late.
I'll go back to the cynics corner now....
SHORT VERSION: My company is one of the back-end providers of music to Apple iTunes, EMusic, Rhapsody, and all the other digital music services. But we sell/distribute ONLY independent music directly from the artists - no record labels.
When our sales reports started coming back from Apple, I was stumped. They were artists I had never heard of. I assumed it would be our top-sellers in the physical-CD world, but instead we had artists who had only sold 2 CDs, ever, selling $5000 in downloads.
It took a lot of research, but I figured it out : all of the top-selling albums in the digital music services were albums with cover songs. Often selling their full-album if they had even one cover song on it, which means that strangers were finding them because of that cover song, then liking their original music so much they bought the whole thing.
I'm advising all musicians I know to include one good creative (not-too-covered, not-too-obscure) cover song on their future albums, to help call attention to it in this song-based search world.
As a first step to experiencing this universal availability the purveyors of the various works will pay sites that manage to attract a profitable slice of people seeking to experience a new (or old) genre.These 'cool people' who act as conduits to rediscovered works should be pushed aside when search engines can easily provide stepping stones from work/artist to another. For example there are major works by J. Hydan, Mozart and Beethoven that each draw on the same musical source, (I believe it's Mozart's 40th, Beethoven's 5th and a source work from Hydan I can't immediately recall). Once the web is in full swing a neophyte to any genre will be able to hop, skip and jump through the various tenuous associated works with an ease that unthinkable before the web.
I've posted in the past that the best way to circumvent the attacks of copyright holders on the open imaginative playground that is the web is to float on the web the entirety of folklore in terms of folk music and folktales that would present an ocean of prior art from which most modern works have drawn their inspriation.
The web in a way becomes the framework for players of Das Glasperlenspiel.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Most people DON'T realize that punk (no I don't mean Green Day.. think SST records, anything through Blacklist Mailorder from MRR...etc) a lot of music was/is only available on 7 inch vinyl. Because the young uns today don't know what a reecord is.. (it's what we all listened to before CDs).
Digitizing this stuff in not only a way to preserve it but to also turn the kids on what started a lot today's great bands because today's kids always need edumacatin' about music. (Well every generation does in it's time)
As radio-music listenership declines, the industry finds itself spending more time courting a broader field of tastemakers who, through Web sites, are popularizing songs that never get radio play.
If only the radio industry could begin to realize that people do *NOT* like to listen to the same 7 songs over and over again throughout the day with the occasional "older" song thrown in to attempt to trick everyone.
If they could instead harness what we really want to hear (podcasts, *true* variety (across genres and decades), and less pointless commercials). It's obvious, through the success of podcasting and sat radio, that the formats they have been using in the past are done.
It's amazing to me that they are so slow to adapt as they watch their numbers fall.
It could easily be feasible on a "tipping point" system. As soon as that 100th copy is ordered, the lot is pressed and shipped out. Consumers could then provide further advertising by lobbying their contacts to also order the album knowing they would only get theirs when 100 copies have been ordered. In a global market place, 100 copies of a release is nothing...a drop. And yet, knowing all these will be purchased results in zero risk of recoup for the manufacturer/distributer.
Pandering to the lowest common denominator would be less frequent if more people were prime numbers.
I'm advising all musicians I know to include one good creative (not-too-covered, not-too-obscure) cover song on their future albums, to help call attention to it in this song-based search world.
.mp3, of course).
This is VERY good advice. I bought The Ataris' So Long, Astoria *specifically* because of the well-done cover of Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" it had. Turns out the rest of the album was pretty good, and it remains planted on my playlist (after the requisite ripping to 320K
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." -- Tom Lehrer
Actually if you go to Archive.Org the entire collection of the Edison National Historic Site is available for guilt-free 100% free download. When the Cartoon Geeks Podcast was looking for theme music, I went there and found the song that we're now using, Sensation Jazz by the Jazz All Stars. It was recorded in 1919 for Edison, and features the xylophonist who later would go on to play on Disney's first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, and the later Disney classic The Skeleton Dance.
Also, when I had clearance problems for a song I wanted to use for a video I put up on You Tube, I replaced it with another piece from the Edison collection, a version of "Ride of the Valkyries" done by the Edison Symphony Orchestra. Again, found on Archive.Org.
It is ironic these recordings are now in the public domain, because Hollywood was founded on an intellectual property dispute. The dispute was between Thomas Edison and the Motion Picture Patents Trust and people like Carl Laemmle and Cecil B. DeMille who didn't want to pay the toll Edison wanted to extract on his invention. Edison probably would have loved the current IP climate, and would probably be a big supporter of the MPAA and RIAA.
Archive.Org is an amazing place.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
As much as I want access to new classics to discover I dread re-buying my cassettes in DRM'ed low bitrate lossy files. Normal Apple Lossless files are all I ask...I'm already intrigued but I have no interest in ever buying this material again and there's no reason in the world why I need to accept lower quality when much better is possible (they are indeed using the source materials many times when converting these files).
the "general public" doesn't seem to REALLY want as much variety as they pay lip-service to wanting. ... , ask [a friend] if they can name 20 or 30 bands (or even songs!) that they wish their favorite station would add to their playlist. My guess is, most people will be able to name maybe 3-5 and then draw a blank... or else their list will consist of music very similar to what's already being played.
The poor service your friends receive is not indicate narrow tastes. You can't discover what you like if you are never exposed to it and the way the RIAA world works, you will never be exposed to much outside a few "target" audience cities. To really get a feel for how broad people's tastes are, you have to understand what's wrong and what others have done to fix the problem. The way you are looking at it is insulting and does your friends a big disservice.
First, why radio music sucks so hard. The RIAA charges so much for the few songs they let radio stations play that the average station can only have a thousand or two songs on hand, and they have to be vetted carefully. How are they vetted? From sales in "target" cities. Most radio stations won't take any risks with anything but sales prooven music. Notice the catch was the high price to begin with. Between the $500,000 FCC license fee and RIAA music fee's the broadcaster does not have much choice either. As downhill battle points out, the money is NOT going to the artists. Yeah, the result can narrow your friends music tastes - appreciation comes from experience and the rude are well .... rude.
Now what's been done that's different? Plenty! and that's what the article is all about, though they seem to have forgotten all about the pioneers. Exposure is easy when you share your playlists. Napster, MP3.com and anyone who got into online content distribution in the 90's understood this. People's tastes are much much broader than the old RIAA model could ever support - that's why they killed all the early music services and are desperate to take over the entire internet and your personal computer. Decentralized distribution will put power and money back into artist's hands and local labels. The Big Three Music Publishers are fighting for their lives.
Don't believe that people's tastes really broaden when they are given choices and guidance? Ask the people at net flicks how many of the entire 60,000 DVD library is rented out on any given day. Think 1,000? You are off by factor of three ... and an order magnitude. That's right, more than half of the catalog is rented every day! People's demand for variety is something physical distribution can not keep up with.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The whole "orphaned works" problem is a special case of this phenomenon.
It also encourages piracy. A few weeks ago I was looking for a particular piece of foreign music from the early 90s. I searched lots of stores, both used and new, for a copy of the album in question. A few stores had it in their listings but, you guessed it, "out of print." I wasted hours looking for a legitimate copy of the music. Then I went to a pirate MP3 search engine and found it within minutes. If there were some way for me to buy it, I would. (I have no good way of tracking down the artist to send her a small payment.) I was fully ready to pay import CD prices to get it. And if it should come back into print at some point, I will buy it. Meanwhile, I get to enjoy it thanks to piracy.
Now, I'm sure someone will tell me how I'm robbing the artist here, getting a copy of her song without her permission -- but do you honestly think most out-of-print musicians say, "I'm so glad nobody can get my music any more! When I signed that contract for my album I really hoped the publisher would stop selling it some day. I'd rather nobody listen to my old music than someone listen to it when there's no way for them to pay me."
While we're on (or off) the topic, can you shine some light onto why all the major online music stores sell music sampled at 128kbps?
Keep in mind that 128kbps AAC is higher quality than 128kbps MP3, so if you're avoiding the iTunes Music Store because you don't like the sound of 128kbps MP3s, I suggest you try downloading some of the free tracks they offer (look in the bottom left corner of the home page, new free songs released every Tuesday). You can do this without giving them any credit card information, although you do have to register with a valid e-mail address.
Of course if you've heard 128kbps AAC and aren't satisfied, then I fully agree that you shouldn't send them your money.
To answer your question, the reasons Apple and their competitors offer compressed music are:
1) smaller files use less bandwidth for the user to download, therefore costing Apple less money
2) smaller files take less time to download, so the user gets closer to instant gratification
3) smaller files take up less space on disk, which isn't really significant on most desktop computers but is quite significant on portable media players such as iPods
4) the average person doesn't notice an audible difference between 128kbps AAC and lossless
Given #4, the demand for higher quality really isn't as strong as you expect, especially in light of #2 and #3. Throw in #1, and it's a no-brainer.
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