Music – Page 17 – Auxiliary Memory

Pono? Just What Did They Hear in Neal Young’s Car?

Neal Young, is promoting a new portable sound system, called Pono, that plays uncompressed digital music files, promising sound quality equal to the 24-bit master recording files. Young claims music consumers are only hearing a fraction of sonic fidelity that goes into producing a song when playing MP3 files on the mobile devices, or even CDs on their home stereos. Visit the Pono Music site for the full press marketing campaign.

http://vimeo.com/88705147

Watch this video. Just what are those people hearing when they are in Neal Young’s car? Their glowing comments sounds like it’s 1967 and they weren’t talking about music. These guys are used to working in studies, recording songs with master 24-bit files, playing them back on the absolute best studio equipment. They are also used to playing music live. Why would they claim this is the best sound they’ve ever heard? Sure, some clarify, the best in a car, but others are saying anywhere.

I can understand the complaints against MP3, but against CD too? What the hell am I missing?

I’m not going to pledge to buy a Pono at Kickstarter, but when they come out I’m willing to drive over to Best Buy and try one out. But even if I bring my V-Moda headphones, will it sound as good as Neal Young’s car? I doubt it. I can’t help but believe that buying a Pono also means buying a deluxe sound system to support it.

And what about the music? Once again, I’ll have to go buy my favorite albums all over again. I’ve bought some albums already on LP, CD, MP3 and SACD, and now I’ll need to go buy them again as 24-bit FLAC files? See, this is where I wonder about the success of Pono. I’ve switched to streaming subscription music. I’ve given up on owning music. Buying a Pono means going back to owning music again, and I’m not sure I want to do that. If I hear what those people getting our of Neal’s car claim to hear, maybe I will. But it’s going to have to be a Hubble telescope leap in high fidelity!

Let’s say I have to buy my favorite 100 albums again. That’s $2500-3,000, assuming the prices are like current 24-bit files. Pono could make things cheaper, but only if millions buy it. Pono appears to be like any other high-end DAC player, but scaled for portability. If you look at the other products at the Ayre.com site, the company that will be making the Pono player, you’ll see what I mean.

There is nothing technically stopping Rdio or Spotify from streaming 24-bit 192kHz FLAC. We’d need 24-bit DACs to play such music, but that’s not far-fetched either. People are streaming HD video, so why not HD sound?

I wish Neal Young all the success in the world for his Pono device because I hope it brings about a new high fidelity revolution. Two years from now I might not own a Pono, but I might be listening to 24-bit 192 kHz music.

JWH – 3/14/14

Twenty Hours to Playing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”

I have no musical ability what-so-ever. But, I’ve always wished I could play guitar. I tried when I was young, but got easily frustrated, and merely ended up playing chord patterns I made up. I had no discipline at all. A complete wimp when it came to practicing. If I had known about the 10,000 hour to greatness theory of practice, I would never have tried at all.

Today a reader, Andreas, posted a comment about a Josh Kaufman TED Talk, “The First 20 Hours – How to Learn Anything” that was far more encouraging. What Kaufman claimed from his studies is that it takes 20 hours of concentrated practice to get beyond the frustration stage and see encouraging results. Watch his TED Talk yourself.

Now, that got me to thinking. I messed around with a guitar back in the 1960s and 1970s, but I didn’t put in 20 hours of concentrated effort at actually learning anything. Ten years ago I bought a cheap guitar and was going to try again. I tried a few of times, probably spent less than an hour, and again got frustrated and quit. The guitar has been sitting on its stand ever since – untouched. Well, I dusted it a couple of times.

What if I conducted an experiment to test Kaufman’s hypothesis? Would twenty hours of concerted effort, applying myself in a systematic way, get me past the frustration barrier? Would just twenty hours get me to a point where I felt like I was getting somewhere? If Kaufman’s hypothesis is true, I could apply it on all kinds of little ambitions.

Don’t we all give up too easily? Is twenty hours of good practice the real solution to getting past the frustration barrier?

To test this idea, I think would need something very specific as my goal. Playing “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan immediately came to mind. If I could learn to strum the guitar and friends could recognize the song, no matter how badly I played it, I think that might be a good enough proof. It’s only five chords, so I don’t think I’m being overly ambitious.

Just how much would I have to learn in that twenty hours? Luckily, the web gives me a tremendous head start. For example, at e-chords, here is the song with chords and words, and even animations showing the finger positions of the chords: Like A Rolling Stone – full arrangement.

And here are two YouTube videos with guitar teachers.

There seems to be an endless supply of guitar teachers on YouTube teaching “Like a Rolling Stone.” Some offer music and chord theory with their lessons that just confuses me. There also seems countless ways to strum the song, as well as many variations for the chords used to play the song. These kind of details are detrimental at this point. Kaufman advises in his video to:

Deconstruct the skill
Learn enough to self-correct
Remove practice barriers
Practices at least 20 hours

I think I have deconstructed the skill here already. All I’ve got to do is put on some new strings on my neglected guitar and practice for twenty hours. I’ll get back to you in about a month to let you know what happens.

JWH – 1/24/14

Hey, Rdio, Rhapsody, Google, Spotify–Add These New Features, Please

I’ve been a streaming music subscriber for years. First with Rhapsody, now with Rdio, but I’ve also subscribed to Lala, MOG and Spotify. Each service takes a different approach to the best way of listening to music from a gigantic online library. All provide the basics, search on artist, album and song, play album in order, random, repeat and repeat one, and create playlists.

New reports claim that music publishers now feel they are making more money per user from subscription services than by selling songs. This implies that subscription services are succeeding – let’s hope. I think there are many features that subscription services could add to their product that would make them stand out from each other, and maybe completely kill off the idea of owning music.

However, there’s far more potential benefits from subscription music than just playing music from a rented library. One recent article claims that most artists will make more money in the long run from subscription music than from selling hit records, but it involves a new paradigm of promoting songs. The old paradigm was to promote a hit, get as many people to buy it as possible, and then move on to creating the next hit. The new paradigm is to create a portfolio of songs that are played forever by lifelong fans. The old paradigm is based on selling the song once, and the new one is based on getting it played the most over time, year after year, decade after decade.

This makes techniques used to find songs and albums from almost a century of music, and adding tunes to personal playlists, the most important marketing tool for bands. Theoretically, songs from the 1940s could becoming bigger hits than songs from the 2010s, if the right discovery tools were created.

It would be great if Rdio/Spotify/Rhapsody had an AI (artificial intelligent) program that could look at a person’s playlist and then guarantee them a list of songs from the past will be much loved. Unfortunately, such computer magic doesn’t exist yet. If there’s a Miles Davis track out there that you’ll play for hours on end in Repeat 1 mode, you’re going to have to find it yourself.

Some recording artists might be protesting streaming music for low royalty rates, and that might be true too, but streaming music is probably the best long term solution for helping new artists be discovered. Digital Music News reported that 90.7 percent of all artists are essentially undiscovered.

With both Spotify and Rdio now offering completely free ad-supported subscriptions there is no reason not to try them.

So what features could the subscription music services offer to help fans find more songs to love? Here what I want.

Top 100 Songs/Album/Artists By Year

Streaming music services need to quickly add Year to their search feature. Having the New Releases, Current Hit Album/Song pages is just too damn limiting. I need to be able to saying, “Show me what you got 1957!” What would be even more fun would be to ask Rdio to play me the hit songs from the week I was born. Or if I felt like returning to the summer when I was 14, tell Spotify to play music from the summer of 1965.

Who were the hit artists for 1938? What labels were big in 1947?

I would also like to be able to play songs by release dates, and all songs from specific hit charts from a particularly week.

We might also need a composed year field, so I can ask for the music of the 1850s.

Far More Record Charts

Right now it’s possible to know which songs and albums are popular by everyone using the service, but that’s so limiting. What I like to see is a chart of top songs being played by 62 year old guys who were computer programmers and who love science fiction. Or if I wanted to sample another demographic, what songs are being played by college freshmen at the moment, what classical music symphonies are being made hits at the moment from Julliard graduates playing them, or what country tunes are being played the most in Nashville versus Austin or Denver, or what songs are loved by retired DJs who worked in the 1960s, or what songs are played the most by people over 90. See what I mean?

Search by Catalog Number and Label

Now that subscription music services are vast libraries of songs that span decades, and record collectors have probably squirreled away all the great platters, it would be fun to play music historian on the cheap, and listen to music by label, especially all those rare labels put out by extreme music aficionados.

Years ago when I bought LPs, record companies would advertise other LPs on the inner sleeves of albums. I especially loved the ones by ATCO and Warner Music. For example, I’d love to be able to call up ATCO albums from 1970s, and just see what Rdio has.

Here’s a screenshot from MusicMatch for a search of Verve, showing a portion of the results near Janis Ian. As subscription services grow, they will become closer to complete libraries of music history, and searching by label and catalog number will be more important. Instead of collecting music from the past, it will be all about playing the music of the past.

Browse by Genres and Subgenres

Sometimes I want to play music by genre, especially genres I’m not familiar with, but most streaming services have very limited ways of doing this. Rdio is pretty nice for genre browsing. I can browse by “Stations” and pick Jazz, and then have the choice of 10 sub-genre stations, and then a 5 position control that ranges from Popular to Adventurous. But what if I wanted smooth piano jazz from the late 1950s? Or to hear the musical heirs of Charlie Parker? Right now this kind of feature is one of the best ways to discover new old music on Rdio, but it could be infinitely refined.

Better Playlists and Collections

Right now I can have playlists and a collection to organize my musical favorites on Rdio. Playlists are just lists of songs. I’d love to have Album Playlists, to group albums I’d like to play together. I’d also like to have multiple collections, so I can keep my jazz albums separate from my rock albums. I was keeping my Collection on Rdio limited to albums I liked a lot, but when I downloaded the local client, it looked at the albums I owned on my computer, and added all of them to my collection, which is now one big mess.

Playlists and the Collection is how I get to remember what I liked on Rdio. Without them I’d forget tons of music. When using a subscription music library it’s very hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of music I can play. 20 million songs, which is probably a million albums. I’m lucky if I could sit down and write a list of my 100 favorite albums from memory.

When playing subscription music I mainly listen to what I already love. But I, and new artists, want me to try new stuff. Often I go through the weekly releases of new albums and try as many of them as I can. There’s always more than I can try. And if I find a song I like I can at it to a playlist, or add the album to a collection. What I’d like to have is a personal library, which has unlimited collections. Now some collections I want to name myself, but others I want Rdio to auto-generate. So if I add Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen to my Rock Collection, it would automatically add it to a 1975 Collection, and a Columbia Record Collection, because there will be times when I’d love just to play my favorite albums from 1975, or even December, 1975.

Collections and Playlists are the way I distinguish my music from the background library of everything. I want more tools for organizing my music, and even browsing it visually.

Higher Fidelity

Over time, as technology changes, I want streaming music to offer better fidelity. It’s wonderful now, but I don’t want to be tempted by any new technology to come along that would make me want to start buying individual songs and albums again, either as digital files or on physical medium. I’m over owning music. Renting is so much more convenient. I’m happy to let Rdio do all the library scut work. Nor do I want to hop from one service to the next, as new companies promise features old ones don’t. I’m currently thinking of subscribing to another service, adding Rhapsody or Spotify, for a while, just to see if they offer more. But I’d rather they didn’t. I invested a lot of love into Lala, only to have Apple ruin it. Now that I’ve spent so much time with Rdio I want it to both succeed and keep competitive.

Export and List Features

A lot of work goes into discovering new music and creating playlists and collections, so if Rdio went out of business I’d loose a lot of knowledge I’ve put into their system. I want to be able to export that knowledge to another streaming service. Or if I subscribed to two streaming services, I’d like to sync that knowledge. I’d also love some database tools to just study big data views of my music, or make printouts, like for putting on this blog.

Conclusion

The phrase “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” is an apt one for music streaming technology. I’ve lived through so much technological change in my life, even just in the music industry, that I know nothing stays the same. If I live another ten or twenty years I expect amazing things, and since I’m running out of time, I’d rather have them now.

Music Technology News

If you’re interested in reading more about subscription music, try these sites.

JWH – 1/19/14

Models of Making Money by Making Music

Songwriters and performers dream of writing a hit song that will be heard by millions and make them rich enough to quit their day jobs. As a life-long music lover I want my song making heroes to make as much money as possible, so it disturbs me when I read stories like “Get Ready for the Streaming-Music Die Off” that report artists are making so little from my favorite method of buying music that it might die off. I’m upset that the artists aren’t getting paid properly, and I’m upset that I’m losing my favorite all-time method of buying music.

Music is very important to me, it’s brought my life much joy, solace, inspiration, happiness, stimulation, and pleasure. It’s well worth the money I pay for it, and it’s angers me that so many people don’t. Anyone who doesn’t pay for their music has no respect for music, or its creators. Nor do they have any respect for capitalism and our economic well being. With the music business we want to do two things: reward the creators of music, and reward the business of promoting, publishing and distributing of music. Sadly, it appears that the publishers of music have always been greedy and routinely ripped off their artists. With the new digital technologies of music distributions it appears artists are getting an even shorter end of the stick than ever before.

Most people think little about music, and even less about how it’s bought and sold. But if you love music, and you know who you are, it’s very important to know how your favorite artists are paid – their songs are the soundtrack of your life. But we want more than that. We want to promote economic strength in our country, and we want a vital music industry. Americans are making less and less to sell to the world, so unless you want everyone working at a fast food counter, it’s important to promote industry too.

What Business Models Benefit the Artists?

There are two basic ways to sell music:

Artists sell digital and physical records directly to their fans
Artists sign with a publisher that sell their work in a variety of ways

In a perfect world fans and artists would cut out the middle man, but there’s a problem. Getting a million people to listen to your song is hard. Getting ten million people to hear it is far more than ten times harder. If you want to get rich selling music you have to work with a publisher, and that involves working with loads of other people that take a cut out of the preverbal pie.

Every Tuesday new albums come out. On Rdio I page through so many I can’t count them. There are millions of would-be recording stars out there, all wanting millions of other people to listen and buy their music. Most, if not practically all of them, will never make any money, not the kind of money that would let them live off their creative efforts. In all the articles I read about the artists complaining of unfair treatment by the music publishers, I don’t see any figures on how many fans does an artist have to find to make a living. That would be very interesting to know. If a song writer wants to make a million dollars on his song, how many people have to buy the song directly, or listen on the radio, or hear it from one of the ever growing ways of hearing new tunes.

We know if an artist sells a song on their web site for a $1, it will take 1 million fans buying the song. But how many would it take if the song was sold on iTunes or Amazon? How many plays would it take to make a million dollars from fans listening on Spotify or Rdio? Or Pandora or iTunes Radio? Or just a plain old radio? Each method of distribution has it’s costs, and investors that want their share of the action.

Artists are complaining bitterly about streaming music services not paying enough, but as the article linked above shows, it’s the music publishers who make the deals with the streaming services, and it might not be the streaming services to blame for low royalties.

I now get my music almost exclusively through Rdio, which I play $9.99 a month. I’m contributing $120 a year to the music industry and their artists. It troubles me when I hear that artists get little from this business model. Would I benefit artists and the industry more by buying $120 worth of CDs? Or $120 worth of MP3s from Amazon or iTunes?

To complicate the mathematical understanding of this problem, many of the songs I play on Rdio are ones I already own on CD. I use Rdio as a convenience. My favorite playlist is just over 200 songs. I play it 90% of the time, and listen to new albums 10% of the time to find new songs to add to my playlists. Probably 100 of those 200 songs I own already, so for about $120 I could buy the others, and go the MP3 buying model of business. If I did that, I’d probably spend about $50 a year on new songs.

It’s doubtful I’d ever go back to buying physical CDs. That means paying $120 a year to Rdio puts me at my maximum spending, and the artists on my playlist are getting paid a tiny fraction of a cent every time I play one of their songs. Thus the solution by my standards would be to pay the artists at a higher rate, and the publishers less.

What Business Models Benefit the Fans?

For most music fans, the casual back ground music listeners, radio, whether AM, FM or various internet service, getting music for free is all they want. They pay for their music by listening to ads.

Let’s ignore the barbarians that steal music.

Next up are fans who love songs enough to buy them. They might buy a handful of songs a year, just the ones that are catchy enough to keep. They will spend a $1.29 here and there. Over their lifetime they will collect and own a playlist of their favorites.

Then we have fans willing to buy whole albums from their favorite artists, either digital or physical. They are willing to commit $10-15, or more. These kinds of music lovers often buy one or more albums a month. However, this model of business is disappearing. Fewer and fewer fans collect albums.

For the hard core music fan that loves the widest variety of music, nothing beats streaming music at $10 a month. (Or $5/month if you only listen from your computer.)

How to Grow the Industry?

Streaming music is based on the idea that fans will pay a monthly fee to hear whatever they want whenever they want. $10 a month gets convenience. This is the model I prefer. I was hoping this model would be the one to succeed. I show off Rdio every chance I get, but I have convinced damn few people to buy it. The streaming music model is like owning a giant record store for $10 a month. It’s an unbelievable deal, but it’s not popular. Spotify is hoping to get 40 million subscribers, but only has six million now. It would take a 100 million subscribers to make subscription music a 12 billion dollar a year industry, and that’s not likely, but it would make music into a cable TV like industry.

If digital music had never existed, and the only way to own music was via physical media, the music industry would be huge, but I doubt we’ll return to that business model.

Let me tell you a story. My friend Leigh Ann brought over a stack of old LPs she had. She thinks she got them from an estate sale. They were old Broadway show soundtracks from the 1950s and 1960s. They looked rare, valuable and in good condition. Most of them were on Rdio. My $10 a month gets me whole areas of music I’ve never even tried. Mostly I use my $10 a month service to play the same 200 songs over and over again. I haven’t even begun to explore 1/10th of 1/10th of the music on Rdio. $10 a month for unlimited streaming music is the best money I’ve spent in my life.

Leigh Ann and I started playing her albums but it became obvious that it was much easier just to call them up on Rdio. I could buy her albums, but the artists that created them wouldn’t get paid. Someone, probably not the original artists, do get paid, even if it’s a tiny amount, if I play them on Rdio.

Artists should get better rates from subscription music, but subscription music should be the model to market music. It has one fair concept – artists are paid every time a song is played. That’s better than what they get from stolen MP3s or people buying used LPs and CDs. And streaming music keeps millions of albums in print that would be forgotten.

JWH – 12/6/13

How Internet Pricing Influences My Buying Decisions

You can go out at night and see a movie for $10. Watching a movie a night would cost $300 a month.

If you like to own and collect movies, you could buy DVDs and Blu-rays for the same amount of money if you shopped for bargains, ending up collecting 365 movies a year. But if you’re buying a new movie every night to watch, when would you re-watch anything in your collection? Ownership ain’t what it used to be.

Then there’s cable TV. For $80 a month, 24×7 movies, don’t worry about going out, shopping, collecting or shelving.

But for $7.99 a month can join Netflix and get one disc out at a time, and if you watch them immediately, and live in a city with a distribution center, might squeeze in a dozen movies a month, paying 67 cents a movie. $15.99 a month you can get 3 discs out at a time, and probably cover having a movie every night of the month, getting your per flick cost down to 53 cents.

For that same $7.99 you can get Netflix streaming, and theoretically watch twelve 2-hour movies a day all month. $7.99 / (12 x 30), which is about 2 cents a movie, or a more realistic 26 cents a movie if you watching only one a night.

Of course, you could just steal movies on the net and pay 0 cents per movie, but hey, we’re not thieves.

In other words, the Internet makes things cheaper. But does it improve our lives and society to let people watch a movie for 26 cents?

In 1965 I became a record addict, and averaged buying 2 to 4 albums a week until I found Internet Pricing. In the old days I bought LPs, and then CDs. At it’s peak I was spending $200-300 a month on music. Now I spend a flat $9.99 a month at Rdio and get access to over 20 million songs. Internet Pricing strikes again.

My wife and I used to subscribe to the local paper and over twenty magazines. Except for a couple e-magazine subscriptions on my Kindle, I no longer subscribe to periodicals and read stuff off the internet for free.

I’d like to get The New York Times, but at $15 a month is too expensive to what I’ve got accustomed to from Internet Pricing. For $18 a month I get Netflix streaming and Rdio, or tens of thousands of movies, television shows, documentaries, and a couple million albums. So why would I pay $15 for a single daily paper? Why isn’t there a company that charges $7.99 a month to read all newspapers from around the world?

Next Issue charges $15/month for access to 107 magazines. That’s the same price The New York Times charges for 1 newspaper. Sadly, none of my favorite magazines are available through Next Issue (The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, New York Review of Books, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Harpers, Discover, New Scientist, Sky & Telescope, etc.)

See, I’ve been corrupted by Internet Pricing. At one time getting The New York Times for $15 a month would have been a tremendous bargain. Now, I feel it’s too expensive when I compared other content I buy off the Internet. My innate sense of pricing was also distorted by reading the NYT for free online for years, and the fact there are many good newspapers from around the world that are still free to read online.

Would we have a more vibrant economy, with more jobs, if the internet didn’t exist?

I’ve been corrupted by Internet Pricing in other ways. Last month I wanted to buy an issue of Harper’s Magazine to read one article. But I just couldn’t let myself spend $5.99 to read one article. However Harper’s is tempting me. For subscribers to their paper copy, they give access to 163 years of back issues on the internet. I can get a year sub to Harper’s at Amazon for $15. See how Internet Pricing is disruptive? $15 for one month of the NY Times, or $15 for 163 years of Harper’s Magazine for a year. The New York Review of Books recently offered me 10 issues for $10 that included 50 years of online archives. The Rolling Stone also has a similar deal for $19.95 for a 26 issue sub and a complete run of back issues online. I don’t want paper copies of anything, but I do want access to complete archives. However, they won’t sell me just the archive access. Those savvy magazines publishers have figured things out, sell their old technology at normal prices and give Internet Pricing for free. I took the $10 deal, and I’m seriously considering subscribing to magazines again if I get their complete archive.

I go into a bookstore now and it kills me to pay list price for a magazine. I’ve been corrupted by Internet Pricing. Now I might just be a cheapskate, but what if I’m typical. How is being corrupted by Internet Pricing affecting people across the world. What is its impact on GDP?

JWH – 9/23/13