Music Labels Working On Digital Album Format

Nerdfest writes to mention that just weeks after Apple announced their new "Cocktail" digital album project, the four big record companies are moving forward with their own project dubbed "CMX." The new digital album will feature songs, lyrics, videos, liner notes, and artwork. "However, this may be of little interest if CMX isn't compatible with iTunes, the default music software for iPods, iPhones and Apple computers. Whereas labels are eager to resuscitate the album format in an age of singles, Apple is concerned with selling hardware, including a tablet computer rumored to be launching this fall. The major labels plan to launch CMX, which is just a working title for the format, in November. It will reportedly be 'soft-launched' with a few select releases."

Comments

A few predictions

[Techmeology]

1) CMX will be used to facilitate DRM
2) CMX will be used to facilitate unwanted bundling (i.e. without offering singles)
3) CMX will be patent riddled
4) CMX will be designed to exclude FOSS

Re:A few predictions

[Tacvek]

My Guess:
CMX will require using specific Windows software (5 years later a Mac version will be released), and will require a mandatory 30+ second anti-piracy video before you can play a song.

Perhaps I am wrong. I mean I would not mind a file format that allowed album artwork, lyrics, and liner notes to be stored in a standardized way along with all the songs of a single album, as long as individual songs can still be extracted.

But why bother? The iTunes extentions to the aac format allow album art, all the information from liner notes, lyrics (although not synchronized lyrics AFAIK), and more to be embeded in a song. Heck, it even supports synchronized images to be muxed in along with the audio, and chapter marks to be inserted.

So I see no advantage to such a system over a zip file of all the songs of the album in AAC format, unless the whole purpose is to make albums into a branded experience.

My guess is that the format is really just a way to bundle the autoplay executable, and other "extended extras" found on the data track of modern audio CDs.

Re:A few predictions

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unfortunately, to a music industry exec, your post looks something like this:

"Blah, blah, geeky whinging, blah blah, yada yada Mandatory 30+ Second Anti-Piracy Video kids these days.... iTunes... foo blah, etc Album.

Branded Experience!

Blah, blah, mumble, blah. foo winge"

They'll definitely fuck this one up.

My digital album format

[RDW]

Sounds like both Apple and the Major Labels are infringing on my patented Digital Album Format. The working project title is 'Directory', but it looks like I'll now need a TLA to compete with Big Media - 'DIR'? DIR can hold any reasonable number of 'tracks', or even multiple albums and movies, each of which is 'tagged' with all the relevant data and album artwork, and all of which are already compatible with iTunes! Recently I've also implemented 'a brand new look, with a launch page and all the different options.' Like CMX, 'When you click on it you're not just going to get the 10 tracks, you're going to get the artwork, the video and mobile products'. Obviously I can't give away too many details at this point, but I can tell you that I'm thinking of calling the DIR launch page 'index.html'.

Re:My digital album format

[Kratisto]

Your technology sounds extremely promising, but how do you plan to keep track of multiple DIR files? I've invented a technology that we're calling "Folder" around the office. With it, we can create complex trees of digitally organized music, video, and even ebooks. The major advantage here is that you can use "Folder" to create repositories for all your digital media ranging in specificity from artists down to albums. You can even launch the media directly from your "Folder" viewer with two clicks! We expect the major bugs to be worked out fairly soon, and you might see "Folder" on your computer in the first quarter 2010.

Re:My digital album format

[TheGreenNuke]

I like your idea for the technology you call "Folder". Mind if i expand on that an create what I'll call a "Library"? This "Library" will be a user-defined collection on files portraying the data independent of your "Folder" tree. the User will be able to group and flatten the tree however they desire by aggregating multiple physical locations into a single view. If you can get your "Folder" technology together in time I'd like to go for an official release in late October 2009 for my "Library" technology.

Still failing to grasp their audience

[AdamD1]

Several colleagues of mine pointed me to this story and I just have to say: the labels - again - still don't get it, and they apparently never will.

I can understand why some artists create full length works. Few can argue that an album like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or The Beatles' "Abbey Road" work very well as complete pieces. The reality is: how many current artists are making albums that consistent? I can think of only three that actually make the cut for me: Queens of the Stone Age, The Mars Volta and until lately Nine Inch Nails. With only that last example, their audiences are not earning them in the tens of millions in sales. The only artists which are are the artists which are responsible for this massive audience shift away from album purchases!

Britney Spears is the veritable poster-child for why albums are failing: even if you are a die-hard fan, you really only want two songs, at most perhaps five, from any of her full length albums. That says: you don't want to spend $15 - $20 for a complete CD / $9.99 per digital album download. You prefer to purchase individual tracks. (That and: you'd probably still prefer they cost around $0.49)

On the other hand, if their audience are "classic rock fans", I still don't see the point. If you're a Led Zeppelin fan, you likely already have all the remastered reissues and re-re-re-issues you care to spend any money on in the first place. (And the Beatles re-re-re-re-masters are coming out imminently as well, marking something like the eighth time those have been re-issued of re-packaged in one way or another.)

That well has run dry. Why they don't face this fact is confusing.

I know that individual tracks aren't going away, and I know that digital sales on their own aren't necessarily resulting in booming profits for any of these labels, but my point is: as someone who has been a voracious consumer of music since 1979, I see utterly no legitimate business case for this "new" format, and it baffles me completely that any major label would seriously consider this as the saviour of their industry.

I would have been far more excited to hear that they decided on a $0.40 per single purchase price for new artists - big marketing campaign or not - rather than this ridiculous additional format. That or that they finally decided to give the artists more of a cut of the digital download price, since printing, shipping and manufacturing costs are of course greatly reduced for any digital download format. (Not saying it doesn't still take a creative team to create artwork, but there is no shipping, and no printing involved.)

I've already made a few wagers: I give this two and a half years at best before we see an unsurprising news story claiming that this did not significantly improve any digital music sales for anyone.

What a waste of money already. They still have a full year before they even release the first one.

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Leaked CMX details!

[Jugalator]

The music track will use the Ogg Vorbis format, included videos using Ogg Theora, liner notes and lyrics being XML formatted with various included XSLT stylesheets for 10 different attractive layouts as chosen by the artists, as opposed to the music label! The CMX sales will be supported by donations and revenue reaped from immense sales of concert tickets, thanks to naked girls performing in the pauses as they serve Ubuntu Cola!

From a group that said...

[Lead Butthead]

Coming from the group that just recently announced their paying customers should not expected DRM encumbered music already paid for to work indefinitely, their follow up announcement of yet another new format surely isn't inspiring any confidence.

Re:And another failure...

[TubeSteak]

From RIAA's Perspective: If it doesn't have DRM, what's the point?
From the Consumer's Perspective: If it has DRM, what's the point?

"Forget WAV, MP3 and M4A - major labels have something new in mind, and it's called CMX."
As a side note, TFA seems to be confused between codecs and containers.