Music Delivery in the Post-Future
Over 40 years ago, Mr. McGuire told us there was a great future in plastics. But it’s clear that, in the case of music delivery, we’re entering the “post-future” (to quote Anthony Braxton). Although CD-Baby founder Derek Sivers argues that you “alienate a percentage of your potential audience” by going download-only and not releasing a CD, I find myself wondering how long it will last (if it’s even true)? (In the UK this week, the number one single was a download-only oldie that doesn’t even have a holiday theme!)
Anecdotally speaking, I see more and more musicians giving up on physical formats, both as consumers and as artists. Although I know a handful of groups that can still sell CDs like hotcakes from the bandstand, an overwhelming number of artists can barely give them away, which has led to resignation and disappointment. Instead, CDs and CD-Rs are being treated more and more as business cards than as sellable product, primarily because clubs, radio, and the press don’t take you serious unless you’ve “invested in yourself” (as the booker of one San Francisco bar told me). But it has been clear for years that, at some point, music will be as easy to access as water, once we figure out how the tap will work and what the corresponding metaphor that equals a public utility will be. How will we invest in ourselves as artists at that point?
As a consumer, I’m thrilled about the prospect of hearing any music I want, immediately. With our house in upheaval during construction this month, and most of our CDs in storage, I simply turned to Pandora and dialed in a holiday channel (“mid-century jazz stylings only, please”) as the peeps and I wrapped and decorated. Sure, I have no control over what song will play, and, yes, the audio is digitally compressed. But we were looking for commercial-free mood music, which terrestrial radio can’t deliver, and audio without aliasing, which satellite doesn’t offer. Pandora, of course, is just one of many ways to get the music today—although it’s still primitive by post-future standards.
And if music or video content will be at my beck and call, why would I want to “own” it on some “thing?” I confess that I’m one of those people that still likes to have a physical artifact of the music I’m listening to, whether it be CD, LP, or cassette. But as a musician and an indie-label owner, I have to wonder why I bother making them anymore? If the new paradigm is to watch and listen in informal and convenient situations, why not fulfill those needs, as well as be totally green about it, and stop manufacturing all these plastic discs and the wasteful packaging that delivers them? It’s only a matter of time when we can stream uncompressed audio and high-def visuals over the line or through the air. Or is it to much to assume that commercial forces will actually lead us to formats that deliver higher resolution content?
As music producers, how far have we actually gotten in the last decade regarding the quality vs. convenience issue? We certainly haven’t solved the problem of how to get people to listen to music on a system that delivers the fidelity we intended. Shouldn’t we, instead, be mixing in a compressed format with earbuds in our ears? Think about it: today we mix and master on accurate and expensive systems, in a room that is as acoustically flat as we can make it, only to intentionally degrade the audio with a somewhat mysterious algorithm so it can be delivered from a pinhole placed next to our eardrum.
Ah, right! We’ve kept a 24-bit, 96 kHz, 7.1 surround version of the mix for some future delivery format, just in case. Keep your fingers crossed while you burn through your multi-terabyte hard drives that the next generation will rebel against the current paradigm of low-quality audio by learning to appreciate full-spectrum sound. However, current research seems to be revealing the opposite.
My question to you is: How long do you think physical media will have relevance? And how will artists destinguish themselves when its gone?
Those are two of the billion-dollar questions I’ll be pondering as we enter the next decade.
May your holidays be filled with music and creativity! See you in two weeks.
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December 23rd, 2009 at 7:27 pm
WaaaaaWaaaaaaaWaaaaaaaa,
The kiddies are the buyers therefore we have probably lost the battle.
Vinyl rules. But yet it is about convience and money.
In the early 80′s there was a format being developed that was in direct competition with CD PCM. It was on the lines of DSD. This format was buried why good question!!
SACD never had a chance due to the cost of the media.
We live in a give it to me now society.
Why should I pay for a whole album when I can get just the song I want.
The list goes on and on.
So I will leave you with this.
What has happened with quality and tone??
Sit down and listen to Wondering Where the Lions Are by Bruce Cockburn. Where has the quality gone??
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:44 pm
I’m completing a replication order right now and I wondered the same thing.
My dilemma is getting the music to radio stations around the globe.
Most still require a physical CD! Yes there are download services; (like DMDS and Play MPE) but expensive to get more than one track delivered. I am hoping CD’s stick around for a while longer. I prefer having a CD so I can rip and then play anywhere.
I do have a regular artist as well who has participated in creating a collectors series~
Like YES did at one time long ago… I pray the people would desire to treasure the complete package. Look out for the new CD FREE February 2010.
December 24th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I wish the DVD-Audio/SACD format would come up as a replacement for the current redbook specs. I love the idea of multichannel mixing, I started out making my own cheap 2 track recordings with the line in rca plugs when I was a kid. mp3 is conveinient, so as a promo or free download, I don’t have a problem. I would not, however release an album (personally, I use Cdbaby, so it’s sent out as mp3s)as a download only. It kills what albums are for me. I love theme albums, concept albums, and try to have that in my releases. so I wan’t those delivered in as high a quality as possible yet making it accessable. CD for me. Vinyl YES!
Physical format is important to those who care about music, I believe. album artwork, Liner notes, Little ditties. I bought a use Vinyl of the White album, when I was 13, and someone had left the 4 photos inside! I thought that was the coolest.
December 26th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
The change from hardware to downloads is a process and Sivers seems to be closer to the grass-roots progession than Robair. Out here in the hinterlands, and in folk and traditional musics as well as in indie
forms, many people still want to leave a show with hardware, or aren’t carrying handheld internet devices
(in fact, there are still many areas in the US that can’t get broadband service and I know of several large areas of that in Indiana), so artists still find hardware to be a friendly and useful medium of transmission.
Nothing changes overnight and I dare say that most artists understand that downloads are becoming the dominant means of transmitting audio and video art.
Just now my wife and I are visiting good friends, musicians and one-time bandmates, in a lovely midwestern city, and they and their primary friends and associates use all the contemporary communications tools based on smartphones and mobile internet use. And among those are artists who use only the internet to communicate their arts and those who make vinyl records, cassettes, public art installations, unrecorded street theatre and architectural sculpture. It’s wonderful how well all that networking serves their needs.
In the forests of southern Indiana we can’t count on all of the folks we associate with, and certainly not all of the folks who are interested in our arts, to be available the same way, or even at all. Those of us who aren’t (yet, perhaps) living completely wireless-communication lives, and who live where that’s not the dominant will continue to find hardware and in-person transmission of our work to be of value for a while yet.
So the question ‘to offer download only or hardware for my music’ is almost as tired a question as ‘mac or pc.’ Yawn. I learned long ago that artists really do know their audiences, whether they think they do or not, and so they’ll navigate the changes in forms, formats and distribution according to what their existing and yet-to-be fans will use.
I remember my time in the Bay Area and that “invested in yourself” bit. I understand it, and it seems both common-sense in a way and also a bit of a hangover from the previous era’s business models. When I was out there I learned a good principal: Any time that a band can sell 1% of it’s target market, that’s evidence of good “investment” in itself, because it shows effective organization and marketing, no matter what the product. In the ‘pay to play’ rooms of SF and other big cities, what would a publican care if a band hadn’t invested in itself, if they’re not ‘serious,’ as long as they make the $ ? Funny… people still want to be gatekeepers and talent judges. Now -that’s- obsolete. It won’t go away soon, either, but it is obsolete.
Thanks, good stuff,
stv
January 4th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
I’ve been a musician/producer/engineer/indie label owner releasing esoterica since the 1960s. Though I have made a living with my music, I also developed my talents as an economist, earning a doctorate in that field. Therefore, I am commenting from this dual prospective.
The post-future is not really that different from the past. How and why folks obtain their music continues to reflect three related decision drivers. We can summarize these as 1. Content, 2. Durability, and 3. Time-Cost. Let me explain further.
1. Content
When I started to record music in the early 1960s, the market was filled with “one-hit wonders.” It was the age of AM (amplitude modulation) DJ radio. It was also the age of the 45 RPM record with the hit on the A Side and often some filler cut on the B Side. It was not uncommon for anyone with a 2-track reel-to-reel to “download” the one desired hit from their favorite radio station. There were few groups that offered entire 12″ inch LPs with mostly great songs. The first LP that I purchased was “Meet the Beatles” by those four lads from Liverpool.
During the late 1960s, the industry turned more to “Greatest Hit” collections by groups that had a string of AM radio hits and to “concept” albums. During this golden age of LP sales, the Beatles, the Stones, the Grateful Dead, Yes, King Crimson, and numerous other groups released albums filled with solid content. Bottom line: consumers don’t mind paying for product if they feel that they are receiving value.
2. Durability
Why would someone buy a 12″ LP when they could borrow a copy and tape record the songs to a reel-to-reel or, later on, a compact cassette? First, it was “cool” to have a good album collection, especially one that a member of the opposite gender could thumb through in one’s dorm room. Let’s just say that one’s album collection could inform another party about one’s tastes and possibly cultural personality. A good collection provided a certain degree of social currency.
The second part of the equation was the actual product durability. Like current downloads, self-recorded reel-to-reel and cassette tapes generally suffered from some loss of fidelity in the transition. More importantly, the integrity and permanence of the media also left something to be desired. Thirty to forty years ago, tape would flake, break, and tangle around the capston. Unless one backed up their collection to another tape, many of one’s favorite tunes would be lost.
Today, hard drives crash. Without the expense of an additional hard drive and the time involved to make the transfer, the same issues ensue. What about CDs? As most of who use CD-Rs for multiple purposes, the technology that instantly burns an image leaves a product that is much more delicate and subject to damage in comparison to a commercially fabricated CD that was stamped from a metal master.
3. Time-Cost
This third element is basically the old “time-is-money” economic argument and may explain why younger music-listeners are more likely to prefer to download songs either legally or illegally. It is the same economics that led listeners in the 1960s to record their favorite hits off of the radio. It has to do with how an individual values their time. If a music-lover is working for a low hourly wage or has no income at all, they will value the time spent downloading, backing up, and transferring cuts in terms of what they could be earning during the same time. Let’s consider the following example.
Assuming that 12 downloads or a comparable CD costs $12, a baby-sitter earning $6 per hour could afford to spend as much as two hours of time ripping to achieve the same value. However, someone with a skilled trade or a college degree may be earning $24 per hour. Spending more than one half hour would exceed the value derived. The counter-argument of time cost of travelling to a brick-and-mortar store is offset by a person’s ability to log-on to Amazon or elsewhere in less than a minute and possibly get free shipping. The market will always change as the primary market demographic ages. It happened with the Baby-Boomers of the 1960s and 1970s and it will happen with Generation X, Y and Z in the current century.
The bottom line of all of this is that a consumer will choose the mode of the deliverable that optimizes his/her bundle of values. This bundle includes quality and quantity of content, durability, and time-cost effectiveness. These are the lessons that musicmakers and music deliverers must understand to survive. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
–Dr. John S.
January 7th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Although m4a is something of an improvement (and FLAC is restricted to a very few download sites), I am still rather powerfully disposed toward acquiring the physical objects because they still *sound* better – in addition to whatever feeling I may have for interesting packages or my personal interest in trying to acquire product directly from the person or persons who make it (since they stand to make a little scratch when I do so – I see it as a matter of support applied at the place where it might do the most good).
The distinction has started to look a little bit like my book acquisition habits: Hardback vs. Paperback [and paperback is now pretty much replaced by Kindle editions]. What marks my shelf is the authors to whom I return with regularity for pleasure (and yes, I do actually re-read books) and whose work I automatically acquire in hardback. Some of these books [the Viking Penguin Library of the Americas] are on that shelf because they’re absolutely perfect objects (heft, binding, paper, typography] – they’re the equivalent of really well designed and packaged recordings. Looking to my right in my “stuff I’m going to air on my radio program in the next few weeks” are some nice examples of that: The Climax Golden Twins’ “Victrola Favorites,” Erstwhile Records’ “Amplify” box, The Deathprod 4-disc set released with “Morals and Dogma” and the Japanese edition of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Out of Noise,” to name a few. Perhaps one way out of this is to rethink the physical object as more than a vessel for the noise in addition to its qualities as a kind of outward and visible sign of some “personal” contact or experience.
Some labels have begun to adopt a practice that I find pretty salutary: buying the physical object automatically gives you access to a very high-quality download version of the physical thing that will soon be arriving.
Oddly – I’m having somewhat the reverse experience in my life as a radio programmer. Easy and regular access to new or upcoming work is simply a lot easier for me when I can download it while going through my morning mail. It’s interesting to me that there are some labels (ECM comes to mind here) who’ve done a great job of providing timely access to new product I can download with little or no loss in audio quality, and a few labels who still think that they’ll somehow be defeating piracy if the online promo stuff is ripped at relatively low resolution (that’s declining considerably, I’m happy to say). I actually prefer to have things more quickly when it comes to getting things on air for RTQE.
This may be backwards from everyone else, of course. As is often the case for me, anything which steers toward “the best of both worlds” is welcome. However, Columbia Legacy is quite welcome to send me a promo copy of that giant Miles Davis box any time they want – the address is on my website.
January 8th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
@ Gregory Taylor – “I am still rather powerfully disposed toward acquiring the physical objects because they still *sound* better”
I don’t think I get your point. A PCM audio stream can be identical, whether it be embodied in the form of a CD, or a .wav file on an iPod or some such. If the file is identical, then playback of that file on the same system is going to sound identical.
January 9th, 2010 at 1:35 am
Mr. Bear, since the current overwhelming majority of what’s available in download form out there remains mp3 (which doesn’t sound better than CD-quality audio or a really good press on 180 g vinyl), I’m still going with the object. I’ll get back to you when the brave new world arrives – I’m delighted there are happy exceptions, and remain curious why people haven’t (at least in the iPod world) gone to m4a in greater numbers, but hey. And I should point out that I still air all kinds of formats on RTQE, including those pesky low-rezzy mp3s.
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