Personal Ramblings

Thoughts on the current state of music

This item came about after conversations with friends who are also music lovers.

There are huge amounts in the press about music distribution these days, in some cases even about the ins and outs of digital audio formats! Views vary wildly, from the 'everything should be free and we can do what we like' crowd at the 'file sharing' end of the spectrum, to the 'everything should be very expensive, and you do what we say' at the industry end.

I don't claim to have any answers, all you will find here is opinions, acknowledged as such.

I'm going to start with a statement of position. I do >>NOT<< think music should be free, I have many friends who are professional or semi professional musicians. They deserve to make a living, (and the best deserve to make a very good living indeed!). People who feed off the file sharing networks never buy music are theirs, pure and simple. But I do think that the music industry has a large share of the blame in how this came about, and also that their estimates of the damage caused are way over the top.

Digital music has transformed the way we listen to and buy music. Mp3 players, like the ubiquitous Ipod are everywhere. Sometimes it seems that most people on the buses have headphones, and more and more workplaces, including my own, permit people to use them while working. Instant gratification in the form of downloadable music makes impulse purchasing possible from the home. Centralised internet music shops, starting with Amazon but spreading to many others, allow people to browse a vastly bigger range of CD's than is practical in any store. Samples are available for listening The economics of web sites make it perfectly practical for even small and amateur bands to give away sample tracks, or entire albums if they wish.

I was working at an internet company before the bubble burst, and followed the industry view with great interest. Net companies kept trying to get records companies to move online, and go for the new channel. Now when the bubble burst, much of this was revealed to be hype. But that's not why the music companies did not adopt the channel.

There were several reasons, but the most important were:

a) They liked things the way they were - they were making money and things were chugging along nicely.
b) There was a deep distrust of digital formats that appeared (correctly) to be very easy for people to pass around. Therefore what experiments there were had constraints (e.g. tethered downloads, pay per listen), that consumers found unacceptable.
c) They had contractual control of the artists, and therefore felt that they were secure.

This all fell apart with emergence of the Mp3 format and the growth of file 'sharing' networks. I put 'sharing' in inverted commas because it's at best a euphemism...

MP3 is important because it became possible to make reasonable quality music files that were small enough to move around easily. And with the typical exponential growth in the comms that built the net, it got easier fast. Napster arrived, spread around the world with incredible speed, and soon students the world over were sucking up all the music they could find, without paying for it, via university broadband networks.

This is where I feel the music industry made its biggest mistake. By refusing to move to digital formats and distribution, it lost control of the format. As I mentioned, the legal services were few and far between, and offered little to consumers. Most artists were simply not available legitimately at any price.

The results of that are still with us today. Music players are always MP3 players if they want to sell. Ones which only play rights controlled formats (however reasonable those controls are), are unpopular, and fail in the shops.

It will take huge effort and expense if the industry is to regain control of formats, and it will probably mean offering much better value to consumers, to tempt them away from something well supported, where they already have a stock of media.

So, here are some predictions for the future!

1. High street CD stores will shrink and get less business. They can't compete with the range of the centralised online shops or the immediacy of download shops. They will not vanish, there is still something very pleasant about browsing a physical product.

2. MP3 players will continue to grow in capacity and popularity. In a few years most will be able to hold ALL your music.

3. The industry's centre of gravity will shift away from the big labels, and towards the bands and specialist labels. They are simply not doing enough for bands to justify a 90% cut of a CD price. If the artist gets something like 5 times the price per copy, the temptation to do it yourself will be very strong. And that's before you think of the benefits to the artist of being fully in control of what is released when.

4. Some sort of agreement will be found for a legal way to run public podcasts / amateur online radio, probably based on audio quality limits. People will accept constraints on 'free to air' stuff that they won't accept when they hand over their hard earned cash. It's in everyone's interest for this to happen.

5. Diversity will increase in the music industry, as it becomes easier to get exposure. This will be a mixed blessing as quality will drop. (If you don't believe me, take a look at some of the free music warehouse sites where people donate their efforts - I say 'look' because you really don't want to listen!)

6. Fan trading of live recordings will grow hugely. Many big name bands are happy with this, as long as no money changes hands. It builds a loyal fan base, and is no substitute for the quality of studio releases. Never did The Grateful Dead any harm!

7. Track based pricing will contract to effectively become the new singles market. It just does not make sense to charge the same for a 3 minute song as a 25 minute piece. I suspect we will end up with something like 20p a minute when something like a whole CD is bought, more when individual tracks are bought. This 'music by weight' model will cover all styles of music without problems.

Labels who wish to push up the price for a 'premium' release will do exactly what they do with DVD's - add a bunch of less interesting 'bonus' material, such as alternate mixes or interviews, and sell it as a bundle.

8. Copy protection of CD's will die, if it's not dead already. The popularity of listening on the move simply means that if people can't rip it for an MP3 player, most people simply can't listen to it when they want. I don't buy copy protected CD's, not becauise I am a prirate, but because they are no use to me.

9. New physical formats will meet very strong resistance from consumers. People are just not prepared to replace their CD collection, let alone their players. I can see some possibility for DVD based higher quality recordings, but these will be for audiophiles only, and of limited appeal.

10. Radio. Digital radio will be the next battleground with the RIAA. It's relatively easy to copy, (no I won't tell you how), and high quality audio. In the very near term, every radio station in the world will be online, (its not far off that now). In a few years some will be moving off the air to become online only. Its a cheaper way of reaching a global audience. And you can use the viidsual channel for advertising, without interupting the music.

11. Phones. Phone and MP3 player technology will merge. I don't know anyone who views cameras in phones as more than a gimmick, similarly for GPS systems and other built in gadgets. 3G phones are a flop. But with phones and players, you listen to both, and a phone that could interrupt your listening when a call came in would be handy. But this will be mainly driven by music sales. The impulse purchase power of a mobile phone means people will pay 3 pounds for the crazy frog ringtone or whatever, whereas they chafe a bit at 99p for a track of music. The first people to offer a music download service direct to a combined mobile phone / MP3 player will clean up.

And it needs to be done fairly fast - viruses for phones have been around for a while. Anyone care to bet how long before a file 'sharing' network for phones appears?

12. Computer based hi-fi. While we already have media centre PC's, there's a long way to go with this. I envisage something like the current 'Audigy' sound cards - external, and with proper physical knobs to twiddle! Put a nice big USB hard drive in there to store the music, and you have something really cool.