Tag: Music

What Does the Demise of the CD and DRM Mean?

Yesterday I went to my favorite Borders bookstore and was shocked to see that they had removed their entire music shopping area.  Life is getting mighty hard for record stores and High Fidelity type dudes.  Now, it’s been awhile since I bought any CDs at Borders, so I won’t miss it, but seeing that big gapping space in the back of the store made me realize that the era of the CD is over.

If you go to Google News and search on DRM, you’ll see all the announcements about how Rhapsody Music will now sell DRM-free songs and albums.  I’m in the process of ripping my old CD collection, which is very time consuming.  From now on, whenever I buy a new song or album I’ll just get the digital edition.  The last CDs my wife and I bought were a few Beatles titles we didn’t already have.  Beatles For Sale might have been our last CD purchase.

It’s a whole new world for music fans, that’s been evolving since the advent of the MP3 player, and especially since the iPod.  But what does this paradigm shift mean?

Cover Art

When music albums shifted from LPs to CDs, cover art moved from major galleries to refrigerator art.  Going from CD to MP3 we lose the art altogether.  I think a marketing angle record companies should pursue is adding cover art to sales of digital albums.  I’d recommend setting up a free standard for desktop art gallery software, like I envisioned in Inventions Wanted #4 – The Desktop Art Gallery.  Or at least back existing desktop software like Webshots.  Then if buyers select a whole album to buy, reward them with several desktop scenes of music related pop art.

Liner Notes

Another feature to be missed is liner notes.  I loved the liner notes on the old huge 12″ record jackets, but hated the microscopic booklets that came with CDs.  It’s time to bring back good liner notes with lyrics and band/fan info in elegantly designed Acrobat Reader files that size to the computer screen.  Maybe music lovers don’t buy albums because they aren’t the art form they used to be.  I know aficionados that still buy vinyl records because they miss the whole experience that was once part of buying an album.

Shopping and Listening

Hanging out in records stores used to a great way to waste time and even a prime activity for dates.  No wonder sales are down.  Without the word-of-mouth recommendations gained from social record buying there’s not a lot of incentive to shop for music like there used to be.  See my post, “Why Has Listening to Music Become as Solitary as Masturbation?”  Record companies need to invent software for FaceBook that puts people together for song listening parties.

Also, online record stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon need to create a virtual store experience that enhances the shopping experience beyond searching a database for new music.  One feature I would like to see is accurate discographies that list which songs are in print and are for sale and which are out of print.  There’s no reason in our digital universe that all an artist’s work should not stay in print.

Peach Crates

In the old days people stored their albums in wooden crates that made it easy to flip through the LPs one by one and easily see the covers.  When you met a new friend you’d go through their LPs to see what kind of person they were.  An album collection, with their beautiful artistic covers, were as revealing as a deck of Tarot cards laid out.  Kids today can give each other their whole collections, but what good is that?  Stolen music is indiscriminate.  And long iTunes Library lists are just rows and rows of black and white words.  No personality.  Record companies should allow music fans to decorate their blogs with songs, cover art and lyrics.

Ownership

The downside of digital music is ownership.  Protecting your digital collection is going to be a hassle.  Sharing is iffy.  Selling used albums on eBay will be weird.  Handing down your fabulous collection to your children probably won’t happen.

Personally, I think MP3s are not the ultimate format for music, and even wrote my opinions in “Are MP3s at the End of Their Lifecycle?”   My prediction, people are going to discover that owning invisible intangible objects will be a pain, lacking in style and glamour.

Unless music is freely traded, it’s going to be hard for songs to become hits.  If songs are freely traded, nobody will want to buy them.  Thus, the value of subscription music.

Playlists

Playlists will be the sharing medium of the future.  Everyone will be their own DJ – creating musical mood experiences, showing off talents for discovery, and defining identity.  Send your favorite playlist creations out to your friends, and if they have a subscription to the songs, they will play.  Or build blog pages and web sites around playlists, so when surfers drop by that are subscribers, they will have instant background music.

Next

I expect music to start disappearing from Targets and Walmarts.  Not everyone has a MP3 player yet, but the tsunami is bearing down on us.  It will be interesting to see what an all digital music world will be like.  Won’t it be strange to live in a world and never to see a LP or CD?

Jim

Living with Music Technology

The options of how you played music used to be rather simple.  You bought a record, put it on the turntable and played the songs you wanted.  Sure, you had to manually pick up the stylus arm and move it carefully to the exact track you wanted, and if you loved a particular song you had to jump out of your chair over and over again to keep that cut playing, but that technology required little thinking because there was little choice.  Of course if you were an eight-track or cassette user, the whole job was even more complicated and time consuming, but the tech skills were still pretty low.  In the twenty-first century you need to be a skilled computer operator to listen to your favorite tunes.

I am a fan of the Rhapsody Music service where I have no stylus arm to maneuver or cassette tape to position, and I no longer have to worry about scratching records or dealing with skips and pops, but it’s not all snap of my fingers easy.  I got so mad at Rhapsody that I almost canceled my subscription last week.  My browser kept disconnecting from the service, interrupting the songs I was playing, which was very annoying.  And I’ve yet to get the Rhapsody client software to play nice with Vista, even after being patient and giving Rhapsody a year to work out the kinks.

Luckily, the browser client has gotten better and better reducing the effort to listen to music down to being able to remember the name of the artist and track I want – not quite that easy as I get older – typing said information in the input box – again, not perfectly easy because I have to be able to spell those bits of data perfectly – but after that the only required effort to play a song is the physical exertion of a mouse click.  Just now I was in the mood to hear live versions of “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds.  Within seconds of thinking of this whim I discovered a newly released live CD on Rhapsody and was playing the song.  After that I remembered the live cut on the (Untitled)/(Unissued) CD, just a couple mouse clicks a way.  This is a breeze compared to the good old days.

This is not to say everything is perfect in tune heaven.  Ease of use depends on how closely tied I am to my computer.  If I’m writing like I am now, the work required is very minimal.  I have to keep a browser window open and pick out songs I want by typing their names and clicking on the play button.  If I want to play music away from the computer it gets more complicated, a lot more complicated.  My life would be easier if I just accepted I had to buy a compatible MP3 player to match Rhapsody’s requirements and pay the extra $5 a month, but I don’t like listening to music through earbud headphones.  What I’d like to do is go out to the living room, sit in my La-Z-Boy and play songs on my big stereo without having to get my lazy butt up whenever I think of a new song to hear.

Before I switched to Vista I had a nice setup with Windows XP, Linksys WiFi, Rhapsody, a Roku SoundBridge M1001 and Firefly Media Server.  I collected my favorite music by downloading files from Rhapsody, ran a system service called Firefly that talked to all my music libraries on my computer.  The M1001 was installed in the living and attached to my receiver via an optical cable and talked to my computer via WiFi.  I was in music nirvana except for all the clicking I had to do on my Roku remote to find songs I wanted to play.  And it was annoying I couldn’t stay in my La-Z-Boy to pick out the music either because the LCD readout on the Roku was too small to see across the room.

For months I dreamed of finding a small device that would allow me to control everything from my chair, with the ease of selecting music just like I was at my computer.  I thought of laptops, PDAs, and the emerging tech like the Nokia N800 Linux handhelds.  Before I could make a decision I upgraded to Vista and my lovely setup stopped working.

I wanted to give Rhapsody the benefit of the doubt and allow them time to catch up with Microsoft, however they never did.  I don’t know if it’s my HP computer, Vista or the Rhapsody software client, but they have never worked together.  Without the Rhapsody software, its DRM would stop Firefly from sending songs to the M1001.  Now I could have easily solved this problem if I was willing to spend a $1000 and buy a Sonos system.

Sonos talks to Rhapsody directly over the Internet, bypassing the computer, and even offers a handheld song selector device that would allow me to keep my fat ass in my chair and play music through my big stereo, or any stereo in my house if I that I was willing to purchase another Sonos connector.  Very cool tech but the price is too hot for me right now.  I keep hoping Sonos and Rhapsody will become a huge iPod level success and come down in price, plus give me some assurance that they have a long future before I invest even more money in my music system.

My wife recently got a new laptop and gave me back my laptop she had appropriated, so I decided to set it up as a Rhapsody music play station.  I reformatted the drive and put a fresh copy of XP on it, and then loaded the Rhapsody client.  I then took a patch cord and plugged the mini-headphone jack into the laptop’s headphone jack and the the split left and right channel RCA connects on the other end into my stereo’s CD input jacks.  I do believe the optical connector from the M1001 to the optical input on the receiver provided better sound, but I decided to leave the M1001 out of the mix right now.  My plan is to use a very long stereo cable so I can sit in my La-Z-Boy and put my laptop in my lap and use it as a music selector.

This isn’t a perfect setup.  The laptop is much bigger than a Sonos remote, and it gets hot on my thighs, but it does the job.  However, I can imagine a fair number of improvements.  Rhapsody provides an extremely large library for $120 a year, but it’s not complete.  It appears to offer almost everything in print – there are a few holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zepplin, but that’s not the big problem.  I have hundreds of CDs in my library that are out of print and no longer offered by Rhapsody.

Now I could consider Rhapsody’s millions of songs all I need and ignore my older CDs, or I’ll have to develop a dual music library system.  I’d have to rip all my old albums to supplement Rhapsody.  That would be a huge job that I’ve avoided until now.  I’d need a newer laptop with a larger hard drive, and I’d have to make backups and keep them off site, and all of that becomes a long job list that bums out thoughts of my future free weekends.  It makes me wonder if the old days were better, even if I could only play one LP in a sitting, and had to leap over to the stereo every time I wanted to skip a song.

I can understand why young people love the portable players like the iPod.  If only Steve Jobs would bless the concept of subscription music.  I could buy an iPod Touch and call it quits.  This past year I finally got rid of all my LPs I had been dragging around the country for forty years.  What a relief that was.  My wife and I still struggle with storing and shelving all our CDs.  Susan hasn’t embraced subscription music because she believes music should only be played in the car where God and 1950s America intended.  Susan recently discovered the powers of the iPod for music, a device she previously only used for audio books, and has began ripping her favorite CDs and taking her iPod for rides and leaving the CDs at home.  Sadly for me, she’s refused the job of becoming our MP3 librarian though.

Even if we did rip 2000 CDs, I can’t imagine using iTunes with so many songs.  Nor can I imagine protecting all those hundreds of gigabytes from now until eternity.  In my quest for finding simplicity in my old age I’ve considered following two musical paths.  One would be to give up digital music and go back to CDs.  The second would be to give up all physical music and live completely with subscription music.  There are even portable players out there that will talk directly to Rhapsody over WiFi, but can you imagine what the world will be like when iPhone 3.0 has subscription music?   Can you see the future where you have a device that goes anywhere and allows you to just name a song and it plays.  That’s pretty damn Sci-Fi to daydream about.

Why choose CD only?  Well, they’re paid for, and if I retire to some nice little town and never relocate again until it’s time to move into my coffin, taking care of all those CDs wouldn’t be too bad.  However, if I make several more moves before I retire, it will be a blessing to go all digital because my old back doesn’t like humping all those boxes of CDs.  To be honest, it’s no choice.  Since I’ve been a Rhapsody subscriber I’ve seldom even touched my CD collection.  I would make the decision right now if I knew subscription music had a solid future.  But except for one blogging friend, I don’t know anyone that enjoys subscription music.  All my music fan buddies prefers to buy digital songs or CDs.

No one seems to understand the Valhalla of digital subscription music, so I have to wait to make my decision.  If the concept of subscription music goes the way of the 78, LP and SACD, I’ll have to rip my CDs and start buying tunes from Amazon one at a time and figure out how to schlep those gigabytes around for the next thirty years.  If only Steve Jobs would give his kiss of approval, owning music would be over.  Why has he embraced subscription movies but not music?

I’m in a holding pattern with music technology.  I’ve heard that Rhapsody and other subscription music services can be had through Tivos and cable TV boxes, but I haven’t played with such devices.  What would be better than Sonos is selecting tracks to play through my HDTV that’s connected to my receiver in the living room with the same remote I use for selecting video to watch.  Now that would be converging technology!

When I’m working at my computer I could play Rhapsody.  If I was in my living room I could play Rhapsody though my TV.  For those people with portable players they can get music over cell phone technology.  And when the Internet comes to the car, music subscription could follow me there.  What more could I ask for from technology?  A chip in my head that when I think of a song it plays in my brain and I hear music like I had a $100,000 stereo system in my head?  Would people call us songheads, and look down on us like we’re dopeheads?

Jim