This has actually been going on for a while, but in keeping with the usual Field Notes standard of cutting-edge reportage I only just now noticed that the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as part of its celebration of the 75th anniversary of its Tanglewood concert series, is bringing out 75 concerts from its vaults throughout the summer. Many of the concerts had not been previously available and as I understand it some are of programs that were only performed at Tanglewood.
The BSO is making one new concert available each day as a free stream. After the first day the concert is available for sale, whole or in parts. You can also subscribe to the whole series at a substantial discount off the cost of buying the concerts individually.
Imagine what a promotion like this would have looked like before the web. The symphony would have worked out a deal with one or more radio stations to get a regular block of time for broadcasting the day's selection. Assuming it could swing the deal, you the listener would have to set aside that same block of time to listen to the concert, or at least record it off the air for later listening.
The symphony could make the entire series available for mail order as a set of CDs (or vinyl, if we want to go back in time). If you didn't want the full set, you might be able to order individual CDs, but you wouldn't get to pick what was on them. If you liked one piece from each of five concerts, you could end up buying five CDs to get them all. And then you'd wait for them to show up in the mail. If you lived outside the listening area of the radio stations involved, you'd have to buy the concerts on spec without a chance to listen, and you'd be more likely not to have heard about them at all.
Put together all the conveniences of the web, I wouldn't quite say you've got a revolution. The dedicated classical music fan has had access to top-quality performances for quite some time. Nonetheless, it's enough to make a difference. Whether it's also enough to keep the symphonies in business in this age of digital entertainment remains to be seen, but it certainly seems like a good approach to try.
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Monday, March 22, 2010
Counterfeit negotiations
You may not have heard of ACTA. I don't believe I had until I heard a radio piece on it a few days ago. Certainly it hasn't been on my radar screen and I get the distinct impression that as far as the parties involved are concerned, the fewer radar screens it's on, the better.
ACTA stands for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. While "counterfeiting" might suggest coins and bills, ACTA appears to be aimed at counterfeiting of goods (for example, generic drugs) and of content such as music and movies. I say "appears" because since its inception in 2008, ACTA has been negotiated in secret, albeit with occasional substantive leaks.
While I can see the common thread here, it seems a bit of a stretch to treat piracy, where no one is really pretending that an unauthorized copy is anything other than that, with counterfeiting, which tries to pass off something illegitimate as legitimate. Add to that the overall lack of transparency as to what's being negotiated or even exactly who is doing it on whose behalf, and it's very easy to see why the EFF and others have been strongly opposed to the whole business from the outset.
Whatever one's opinions on intellectual property and the role of the internet in distributing it, and no matter whether ACTA is in fact an attempt to make major changes to IP policy or just an alignment of practices among the entities involved, I can see no good reason to hold such a negotiation in secret. At the very least, doing so gives the net.world one more reason to believe the RIAA and company are either acting in bad faith or stunningly clueless. That helps no one.
[ACTA was signed by several countries in 2011, but only ratified by Japan, meaning that no one else is actually legally committed to following it, and leaving it a bit moot whether Japan is following it in its relations with itself. -- D.H. May 2015]
[ACTA was signed by several countries in 2011, but only ratified by Japan, meaning that no one else is actually legally committed to following it, and leaving it a bit moot whether Japan is following it in its relations with itself. -- D.H. May 2015]
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
"You can google it"
At the store the other day I overheard a sales pitch for some wondrous kitchen product. "Our product's motors last twenty to thirty years," said the lady. "You can google it."
Meanwhile, in the run-up to the XXI Winter Olympic games, Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie and company have pulled together a (mostly) new crop of celebrities to record a 25th anniversary version of We Are The World to benefit Haiti. You can download it to contribute.
A while ago, I noticed that "Call or click today" has replaced "Operators are standing by" as the tagline for legion upon legion of infomercials.
Some combination of these and other cases like them has finally crystallized something that's been floating in my head throughout the not-so-disruptive-technology thread on this blog: There's a crucial difference between pervasive and disruptive. If you're going into business, pervasiveness is a much better goal. People don't want their lives disrupted. They want them improved.
New technology certainly can and does disrupt particular sectors. If you're a recording artist, particularly an established artist used to selling music on physical media, the shift to downloading must be worrisome. If you're a major record label it's terrifying. But if you're a consumer, it's just another way to get music. Mind, I'm going on anecdotal evidence here -- if you're actually a recording artist I'd love to hear your story (I'm pretty sure I've already heard what the labels have to say).
Stepping back a bit, I claim new technologies are much more likely to become pervasive than disruptive, if indeed they do either (videophones, anyone? [Well ... five years down the line videophones, in at least some sense, are pretty pervasive -- D.H. May 2015]).
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Pandora's division of labor
A while ago Roku added Pandora to its selection of channels and a shorter while ago I got around to trying it out. I like it, though I don't listen to it all day long (I generally don't listen to anything all day long).
Pandora's main feature is its ability to find music "like" a particular song or artist you select. This is nice not only because it will turn up the familiar music you had in mind, but it will most likely also turn up unfamiliar music that you'll like. As I understand it, that's a major part of its business model. Record labels use Pandora to expose music that people otherwise wouldn't have heard, and Pandora takes a cut.
To that end, it will only allow you to skip so many songs in a given time (though there is at least one way to sneak around this). They pick out likely songs for you and they would like you to listen. You can, however, tell Pandora that you like or dislike a particular selection. Pandora will adapt its choices accordingly.
So how does it work? Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project, which is a nicely balanced blend of
- Human beings listening to music and characterizing each piece on a few hundred scales of 1 to 10 (more precisely, 1 to 5 in increments of 0.5).
- Computers blithely crunching through these numbers to find pieces close to what you like but not close to things you don't like.
This approach is very much in the spirit of "dumb is smarter". Rather than try to write a computer program that will analyze music and use some finely-tuned algorithm to decide what sounds like what, have the software use one of the simplest approaches that could possibly work and leave it to humans to figure out what things sound like.
Even the human angle has been set up to favor perception over judgement. The human judge is not asked to decide whether a given song is electroclash or minimalist techno, but rather to rate to what degree it features attributes like "acoustic guitar pickin'", "aggressive drumming", a "driving shuffle beat", "dub influences", "use of dissonant harmonies", "use of sitar" and so forth. There are refinements, of course, such as using different lists of attributes within broad categories such as rock and pop, jazz or classical, but the attributes themselves are designed to be as objective as possible.
This combination of human input and a very un-human data crunching algorithm is a powerful pattern. Search engines are one example, Music Genome is another, and if there are two there are surely more. In fact, here's another: the "People who bought this also bought ... " feature on retail sites.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
60 Minutes and the MPAA: Part VI - What now?
Along with passing along the $6 billion/year figure, Steven Soderbergh tells 60 Minutes that, thanks to piracy, movies that got made in the past could not be made today. He cites The Matrix as an example.
Clearly all kinds of movies are still getting made, including some pretty expensive-looking ones. A lot of them stick pretty close to the usual formulas, but that's always been true. Movies by unknowns? I wouldn't know, but I'm quite sure that intersting movies by intersting people with interesting viewpoints are still getting made.
But what about the future? The movie studios are understandably worried, particularly in light of what their brethren in the music business have been going through. But every industry is unique. Movies are not the same as songs and albums. Nobody goes to a "music theater" to listen to pre-recorded music.
Making a movie, even a cheap movie, carries a lot more overhead that recording a song, and songs are easier to market. At least one songwriter has recorded a song a week for a year at a stretch, and at least one of them was pretty good. Plenty of small bands self-produce and self-distribute, and a lot of them are pretty good. By comparison very few feature films are made without the involvement of some flavor of existing studio. There's plenty of self-produced stuff on YouTube, but much less of it is pretty good and most of it goes unseen or nearly unseen anyway.
In short, the economics are different and hey, people still make money selling books, to my continual puzzlement. So my guess is that the movie industry is going to be just fine, particularly if it stops trying to boil the ocean and embraces online distribution.
I certainly hope so, anyway. As much as I've questioned the MPAA's rhetoric and logic, I wholeheartedly agree with them on some basics: Movies are cool, and people who make them should be able to get paid for their work.
P.S. While chasing down the link above on YouTube, I ran across two previous posts on paying for movies, which might be relevant.
"The chances of a movie, for instance, like 'The Matrix' being made shrinks. Here's a guy, here's a movie, two guys, they've made a small independent film. Warner Brothers gives them $75 million to make this script that nobody can understand, right?" Soderbergh said. "Wouldn't happen today."Now, I'm not going to claim I know anywhere near what Steven Soderbergh knows about getting movies made. I will go so far as to claim I know next to nothing. And yet, looking at the Yahoo! box office grosses, I can't say I see anything amiss.
Clearly all kinds of movies are still getting made, including some pretty expensive-looking ones. A lot of them stick pretty close to the usual formulas, but that's always been true. Movies by unknowns? I wouldn't know, but I'm quite sure that intersting movies by intersting people with interesting viewpoints are still getting made.
But what about the future? The movie studios are understandably worried, particularly in light of what their brethren in the music business have been going through. But every industry is unique. Movies are not the same as songs and albums. Nobody goes to a "music theater" to listen to pre-recorded music.
Making a movie, even a cheap movie, carries a lot more overhead that recording a song, and songs are easier to market. At least one songwriter has recorded a song a week for a year at a stretch, and at least one of them was pretty good. Plenty of small bands self-produce and self-distribute, and a lot of them are pretty good. By comparison very few feature films are made without the involvement of some flavor of existing studio. There's plenty of self-produced stuff on YouTube, but much less of it is pretty good and most of it goes unseen or nearly unseen anyway.
In short, the economics are different and hey, people still make money selling books, to my continual puzzlement. So my guess is that the movie industry is going to be just fine, particularly if it stops trying to boil the ocean and embraces online distribution.
I certainly hope so, anyway. As much as I've questioned the MPAA's rhetoric and logic, I wholeheartedly agree with them on some basics: Movies are cool, and people who make them should be able to get paid for their work.
P.S. While chasing down the link above on YouTube, I ran across two previous posts on paying for movies, which might be relevant.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?
Now this is just plain silly.
I'm browsing through some songs using Rhythmbox, one of the Linux song players, having just discovered the "Lyrics" feature. I select an oldie but goodie and instead of lyrics I get
I believe it's Fair Use for me to quote a small portion of the lyrics in question:
Goodbye.
I'm browsing through some songs using Rhythmbox, one of the Linux song players, having just discovered the "Lyrics" feature. I select an oldie but goodie and instead of lyrics I get
Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics).Huh? I can go browse the web and look at the lyrics all I want, but the music publishers want to make good and sure I can't do something nefarious with them, like display them in a popup on a music player? This sort of thing does nothing to quiet the accusations that music companies Just Don't Get The Web and are instead shooting themselves repeatedly in their collective foot fighting pointless legal battles.
The lyrics for this song can be found at the following URL:
http://lyricwiki.org/Public_Image_Ltd.:Public_Image
<a href='http://lyricwiki.org/Public_Image_Ltd.:Public_Image'>Public Image Ltd.:Public Image</a> [sic -- the raw HTML appeared verbatim in the text; probably there's some setting to tweak to fix this]
(Please note: this is not the fault of the developer who created this application, but is a restriction imposed by the music publishers themselves.)
Lyrics provided by lyricwiki.org
I believe it's Fair Use for me to quote a small portion of the lyrics in question:
What you wanted was never made clear
Behind the image was ignorance and fear
You hide behind this public machine
Still follow same old scheme
Goodbye.
Monday, January 12, 2009
More muddling over music
We may finally be figuring out how to pay for music in the digital age.
Actually, the likely answer has been clear for a while now. The news is that the major players seem to be warming to it: Buyers pay per song. Some of them cheat. Many of them don't. Musicians may sell directly, or they may go through a label.
Probably the strongest evidence is iTunes dropping DRM, or rather, the labels agreeing to drop DRM. The flip side of the deal is that iTunes will no longer charge a flat $0.99 per song. New songs by popular artists will cost more. Older pop songs will cost less. Other genres will follow their own traditions and customs.
It's an interesting question which of several factors have had how much influence in making all this happen. In no particular order:
All of this leads me to inaugurate a new tag (which I'll backfill at some point, as I've been beating this drum for a while now): not-so-disruptive technology. After a bumpy start, and a few false starts, we seem to be converging on a model that looks a lot like the old one.
Did online music Change Everything? No. It's changed some things, but so did the 45, the LP, the boombox, the walkman, the CD, the MP3 player and its cousins, heck, even 8-track. Did iTunes Change Everything? No. In the end the studios have lived to fight another day.
Probably.
Postscript: Some have argued that albums are going to fade away as the iTunes generation picks and chooses the songs it likes, but this may just as well be a pendulum swinging. One could argue whether albums are an artifact of the LP and CD, or whether people will continue to like their songs in that form, but the Billboard hot 100 has been going since 1958, when 45rpm singles were the only real game in town.
Post postscript: There's a whole other interesting discussion to be had over whether file sharing Changed Everything. It should be no surprise that I don't think it did. The more interesting question is how much of that has to do with the labels breathing legal fire about it, and how much of it has to do with the economics of the free-rider problem.
Actually, the likely answer has been clear for a while now. The news is that the major players seem to be warming to it: Buyers pay per song. Some of them cheat. Many of them don't. Musicians may sell directly, or they may go through a label.
Probably the strongest evidence is iTunes dropping DRM, or rather, the labels agreeing to drop DRM. The flip side of the deal is that iTunes will no longer charge a flat $0.99 per song. New songs by popular artists will cost more. Older pop songs will cost less. Other genres will follow their own traditions and customs.
It's an interesting question which of several factors have had how much influence in making all this happen. In no particular order:
- Labels may be getting comfortable with the idea that while there's going to be "leakage", enough people will be willing to pay for them to keep the wheels turning. It probably helps that the marginal cost of selling songs online is near zero, but probably not as much as one might think. Pressing CDs is pretty cheap, too. I forget how cheap, but it's a small portion of the retail price. Some of the additional costs -- storefront costs for a brick-and-mortar music shop, for example -- go away online, but many of them, particularly marketing costs, don't. Someone has to pay for all those award shows and after-parties.
- Labels may be getting scared by sales of physical media going through the floor. One might be tempted to gloat over yet another example of physical copy-protection yielding to the Mighty Web, except that CDs don't really offer any copy protection either.
- Apple seems to have figured out that a flat pricing scheme looks completely screwy to labels, who have been selling music for a lot longer than it has. Charge the same price for the Billboard #1 as for a Johann Kropfgans lute concerto? You're kidding, right? Labels understand that different groups are willing to pay diffrent prices for different music. Before any classical music fans out there pummel me, let me hasten to add that the Kropfgans recording I found costs a bit more than the current #1, Lady Gaga. If classical listeners weren't willing to pay more, there'd be no market.
All of this leads me to inaugurate a new tag (which I'll backfill at some point, as I've been beating this drum for a while now): not-so-disruptive technology. After a bumpy start, and a few false starts, we seem to be converging on a model that looks a lot like the old one.
Did online music Change Everything? No. It's changed some things, but so did the 45, the LP, the boombox, the walkman, the CD, the MP3 player and its cousins, heck, even 8-track. Did iTunes Change Everything? No. In the end the studios have lived to fight another day.
Probably.
Postscript: Some have argued that albums are going to fade away as the iTunes generation picks and chooses the songs it likes, but this may just as well be a pendulum swinging. One could argue whether albums are an artifact of the LP and CD, or whether people will continue to like their songs in that form, but the Billboard hot 100 has been going since 1958, when 45rpm singles were the only real game in town.
Post postscript: There's a whole other interesting discussion to be had over whether file sharing Changed Everything. It should be no surprise that I don't think it did. The more interesting question is how much of that has to do with the labels breathing legal fire about it, and how much of it has to do with the economics of the free-rider problem.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Musopen: Making money on free music
Also on the UCSD music blog I mentioned (which, on closer examination turns out to be, ahem, the "music" category of the UCSD Arts Libraries blog) is a post on a Musopen, a free classical music site that, among other things, will let you pledge toward getting someone to record the public domain work of your choice and place the recording in the public domain (They call it "bidding", but I'm not sure that's quite the right term to use -- generally a bid is for the whole price and the highest wins).
The performer sets the price (e.g., $60 for Für Elise or $3500 for Mozart's Requiem). You tell them how much you'd be willing to pay to see it recorded. When the total pledges match the asking price, the transaction goes through, the performer performs and everyone in the world can listen for free, whether they contributed or not. This is effectively one of the business models Stallman mentions in the GNU manifesto.
The economics of this look interesting. I doubt anyone is going to get rich off of it, but there would appear to be some value to people in making a recording happen and free riders be damned.
[Museopen is still around, but without the business model. The business model is still around, without Museopen, under the name of KickStarter, of course --D.H. May 2015]
The performer sets the price (e.g., $60 for Für Elise or $3500 for Mozart's Requiem). You tell them how much you'd be willing to pay to see it recorded. When the total pledges match the asking price, the transaction goes through, the performer performs and everyone in the world can listen for free, whether they contributed or not. This is effectively one of the business models Stallman mentions in the GNU manifesto.
The economics of this look interesting. I doubt anyone is going to get rich off of it, but there would appear to be some value to people in making a recording happen and free riders be damned.
[Museopen is still around, but without the business model. The business model is still around, without Museopen, under the name of KickStarter, of course --D.H. May 2015]
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
IMSLP and international copyrights
While digging through the links in a so-far fruitless search for evidence that the Worldscape Laptop Orchestra still exists, I ran across an interesting blog on music, hosted by the University of California at San Diego. Along with posts on local goings on and stuff like cool-looking random musical instruments, it contained this interesting/alarming post on IMSLP (the International Music Score Library Project).
This site was basically a carefully-moderated wiki to which people could upload music scores. The Canadian administrator of the Canadian-hosted site had been very careful only to put up scores in the Canadian public domain, and the Canadian Supreme Court had ruled that such sites are entitled to presume that they are being used in a lawful manner.
Austrian music publisher Universal Edition sued on the grounds that it had put up works (it didn't say which particular ones) still under European copyright. At stake, then, is the question of whose copyright law applies: the host or administrator's or (effectively) the longest copyright period on the books anywhere. The situation seems entirely analogous to that of international libel laws.
As a result of the suit, the site was taken down in October 2007. At this writing, the IMSLP is back up, having been put back up in June 2008. The re-opening letter accompanying the re-launch is well worth reading. Among other things, it discusses (and endorses) the idea of collaborating with commercial music publishers.
This site was basically a carefully-moderated wiki to which people could upload music scores. The Canadian administrator of the Canadian-hosted site had been very careful only to put up scores in the Canadian public domain, and the Canadian Supreme Court had ruled that such sites are entitled to presume that they are being used in a lawful manner.
Austrian music publisher Universal Edition sued on the grounds that it had put up works (it didn't say which particular ones) still under European copyright. At stake, then, is the question of whose copyright law applies: the host or administrator's or (effectively) the longest copyright period on the books anywhere. The situation seems entirely analogous to that of international libel laws.
As a result of the suit, the site was taken down in October 2007. At this writing, the IMSLP is back up, having been put back up in June 2008. The re-opening letter accompanying the re-launch is well worth reading. Among other things, it discusses (and endorses) the idea of collaborating with commercial music publishers.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Paying for quality
Here's a music pricing scheme I've seen a few times: For one price, you get a piece of music in, say, mp3 format with a given bit rate. For a somewhat higher price, you get the same piece of music in, say, flac format with higher fidelity.
This seems a very interesting test case for the "information wants to be free" theory. Intuitively, better quality ought to be worth paying for, but on the other hand, copying either version is essentially free, so why should there be a difference?
Suppose the lo-fi version is free and the hi-fi version costs a zillion dollars. No one will buy the hi-fi version (and no one makes any money)
Suppose lo-fi is free and hi-fi costs a pretty penny. Most likely some copies will sell, but many more will circulate illegitimately. No one makes much money.
What if lo-fi costs a modest amount and hi-fi costs a bit more -- pretty much what we have in most cases? Quite possibly there will be some sort of equilibrium. Some people will pirate, but enough people will pay full price to keep the bits flowing.
My totally off-the-wall guess is that at the optimum, the proportions of pirated copies for the lo-fi and hi-fi versions will bear some simple relation to each other. On the other hand, it seems quite possible that no one will want to buy the lo-fi version no matter how cheap, if it's really bad, and conversely there's a point at which it's not worth paying for that last bit of signal quality.
The optimum price will depend on a number of factors, including local law and the cost of breaking it, demand for the particular piece of music, and (I tend to think) people's judgment as to how fair the price is and to what extent piracy hurts the record label as opposed to the artist.
When Stewart Brand said "Information wants to be free" he actually said
This seems a very interesting test case for the "information wants to be free" theory. Intuitively, better quality ought to be worth paying for, but on the other hand, copying either version is essentially free, so why should there be a difference?
Suppose the lo-fi version is free and the hi-fi version costs a zillion dollars. No one will buy the hi-fi version (and no one makes any money)
Suppose lo-fi is free and hi-fi costs a pretty penny. Most likely some copies will sell, but many more will circulate illegitimately. No one makes much money.
What if lo-fi costs a modest amount and hi-fi costs a bit more -- pretty much what we have in most cases? Quite possibly there will be some sort of equilibrium. Some people will pirate, but enough people will pay full price to keep the bits flowing.
My totally off-the-wall guess is that at the optimum, the proportions of pirated copies for the lo-fi and hi-fi versions will bear some simple relation to each other. On the other hand, it seems quite possible that no one will want to buy the lo-fi version no matter how cheap, if it's really bad, and conversely there's a point at which it's not worth paying for that last bit of signal quality.
The optimum price will depend on a number of factors, including local law and the cost of breaking it, demand for the particular piece of music, and (I tend to think) people's judgment as to how fair the price is and to what extent piracy hurts the record label as opposed to the artist.
When Stewart Brand said "Information wants to be free" he actually said
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. [See here for example]We don't always remember both halves of that statement, but both are essential.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Radiohead: Just what is going on here?
A few months ago Radiohead put out its latest album, In Rainbows, in two formats. You could get a "discbox" with a vinyl pressing, bonus CD, album art, etc. for a fixed price, or you could just download the tracks as .mp3 files and throw whatever you wanted (or nothing) in the tip jar.
So what happened? Who paid what? Do we have a whole new paradigm for music sales? An interesting one-off experiment? An out-and-out boondoggle? All or none of the above?
It's hard to see In Rainbows as a whole new paradigm, if only because there are so many special circumstances. Radiohead is an established band with a loyal following and a formidable reputation. The band happened to be between record contracts for this album. The downloadable version was a companion to a more traditional offering. And Radiohead is Radiohead. What works for them might not work for anyone else.
In fact, it may not even have worked for them. Certainly the band saw the online release as a one-off. They are currently in negotiations with both record labels and iTunes, and the download offer has been discontinued (effective New Year's Eve).
Beyond that, the picture gets very muddy very quickly. One report, by Gigwise, claims downloads of at least 1.2 million copies of the album. How much did people pay? Those who know aren't talking, but one survey indicates an average of 4 pounds (about $8), with 1/3 of downloaders paying nothing. Another, hotly disputed by the band, suggests that 62% paid nothing and the average price across all downloads was $2.26.
So basically, we don't know how many copies were downloaded, how much people paid for them, whether the price paid changed over time, why there's a discrepancy between the two surveys, or much of anything else. Except that the band most likely pulled in millions of dollars for the downloads, some further amount for the discboxes, and expects further income from traditional distribution. That's not even counting the T-shirt sales. Not bad for a bunch of guys from Oxfordshire.
If the tip-jar/download approach is not obviously the future of music distribution, but it's not a massive flop either, what is it, and why is the band discontinuing it? Is it the tip of the iceberg, or an evolutionary dead end like the million dollar homepage?
My guess, and it's only a guess, is that the tip-jar model is not going to dominate, though it might not disappear entirely. Rapper Saul Williams is currently spinning a variation on this with a low-bandwidth version of his latest release. The hi-fi version is available for a $5 donation.
Why is the band discontinuing the offer? My recollection from the original page is that it was never promised indefinitely in the first place. Most likely the band has gotten the good out of it. I would expect that people who care enough to pay also care enough to download early (which might explain some of the discrepancy between the two surveys). The band also seems not to have burned its bridges with traditional distribution channels, and continuing the "It's up to you" offer would only muddy the waters there.
So what happened? Who paid what? Do we have a whole new paradigm for music sales? An interesting one-off experiment? An out-and-out boondoggle? All or none of the above?
It's hard to see In Rainbows as a whole new paradigm, if only because there are so many special circumstances. Radiohead is an established band with a loyal following and a formidable reputation. The band happened to be between record contracts for this album. The downloadable version was a companion to a more traditional offering. And Radiohead is Radiohead. What works for them might not work for anyone else.
In fact, it may not even have worked for them. Certainly the band saw the online release as a one-off. They are currently in negotiations with both record labels and iTunes, and the download offer has been discontinued (effective New Year's Eve).
Beyond that, the picture gets very muddy very quickly. One report, by Gigwise, claims downloads of at least 1.2 million copies of the album. How much did people pay? Those who know aren't talking, but one survey indicates an average of 4 pounds (about $8), with 1/3 of downloaders paying nothing. Another, hotly disputed by the band, suggests that 62% paid nothing and the average price across all downloads was $2.26.
So basically, we don't know how many copies were downloaded, how much people paid for them, whether the price paid changed over time, why there's a discrepancy between the two surveys, or much of anything else. Except that the band most likely pulled in millions of dollars for the downloads, some further amount for the discboxes, and expects further income from traditional distribution. That's not even counting the T-shirt sales. Not bad for a bunch of guys from Oxfordshire.
If the tip-jar/download approach is not obviously the future of music distribution, but it's not a massive flop either, what is it, and why is the band discontinuing it? Is it the tip of the iceberg, or an evolutionary dead end like the million dollar homepage?
My guess, and it's only a guess, is that the tip-jar model is not going to dominate, though it might not disappear entirely. Rapper Saul Williams is currently spinning a variation on this with a low-bandwidth version of his latest release. The hi-fi version is available for a $5 donation.
Why is the band discontinuing the offer? My recollection from the original page is that it was never promised indefinitely in the first place. Most likely the band has gotten the good out of it. I would expect that people who care enough to pay also care enough to download early (which might explain some of the discrepancy between the two surveys). The band also seems not to have burned its bridges with traditional distribution channels, and continuing the "It's up to you" offer would only muddy the waters there.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Laptop orchestras. You read that right.
The University of York has been getting publicity lately for its Worldscape Laptop Orchestra, currently billed as the world's largest, though not the first. Others include the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra and Princeton's PLOrk. Create Digital Music has a good summary. [There doesn't seem to be a good permalink for the Worldscape site yet -- I'll have to remember to fix the link when there is one][I've updated the link from York Music's home page to the press release for Worldscape. They still don't seem to have their own page, which leads me to wonder if they're still around].
So just what is a laptop orchestra? A bunch of people clicking "play" on some mp3 files and listening to the results? Not at all. Worldscape and its cousins are bona fide orchestras, making live music, often collaborating with more traditional instrumentalists and at least in the case of Worldscape, requiring a conductor. There is also at least one club sponsoring open jam sessions where anyone can show up with their gear, plug in and play.
The key here is the interactive element. An instrument in a laptop orchestra isn't just spewing out pre-programmed bits. It's responding to the musician's input, whether through specialized controllers, gestures grabbed by a video camera, or whatever else. As with any other orchestra, the musicians respond to each other, to the conductor (if any) and to the audience. The result is a genuinely live musical performance.
One telling detail: How do you record a laptop orchestra? You might think you'd just capture the digitized sounds the laptops are producing and mix them down. That's certainly possible, but if you want to capture the experience, it's better just to put mics in the house and record what the audience is hearing.
That's not to say you couldn't do the same thing online. I've heard of small-scale live musical collaborations over the net (though I can't remember where). I suspect, however, that keeping an orchestra of fifty in sync online is going to be a problem. I doubt you could just put everyone on one big Skype conference call, but if it's been done on that scale I'd be glad to be proved wrong.
So just what is a laptop orchestra? A bunch of people clicking "play" on some mp3 files and listening to the results? Not at all. Worldscape and its cousins are bona fide orchestras, making live music, often collaborating with more traditional instrumentalists and at least in the case of Worldscape, requiring a conductor. There is also at least one club sponsoring open jam sessions where anyone can show up with their gear, plug in and play.
The key here is the interactive element. An instrument in a laptop orchestra isn't just spewing out pre-programmed bits. It's responding to the musician's input, whether through specialized controllers, gestures grabbed by a video camera, or whatever else. As with any other orchestra, the musicians respond to each other, to the conductor (if any) and to the audience. The result is a genuinely live musical performance.
One telling detail: How do you record a laptop orchestra? You might think you'd just capture the digitized sounds the laptops are producing and mix them down. That's certainly possible, but if you want to capture the experience, it's better just to put mics in the house and record what the audience is hearing.
That's not to say you couldn't do the same thing online. I've heard of small-scale live musical collaborations over the net (though I can't remember where). I suspect, however, that keeping an orchestra of fifty in sync online is going to be a problem. I doubt you could just put everyone on one big Skype conference call, but if it's been done on that scale I'd be glad to be proved wrong.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
We'll be with you after a brief delay ...
One of Deutsch's distributed computing fallacies is that latency is zero -- messages arrive the moment you send them. In practice, it takes a bit of time for your message to get through your firewall to your ISP's router, onto the backbone, to your recipient's ISP, through their firewall and to their host.
Much of the time, this won't matter. If your mail client is polling every five minutes, who cares if the packets containing your email took some fraction of a second to get to your mail server? On the other hand, if you're trying to do something on the net that requires precise synchronization, things can get hairy.
The Network Time Protocol keeps good time (to within about 1/100 of a second over the internet), but NTP relies on propagating accurate timing out from a small set of central servers. It doesn't try to keep everyone in sync with each other directly.
Depending on the circumstances, people can notice delays as low as 20-40 milliseconds. For example, a lag of 40 milliseconds between hitting a key and hearing a sound is enough for a musician to notice. Echoes become perceptible around 100ms and extremely distracting not long after.
Latency on a local network can be quite low, often just a few milliseconds. The round-trip time for pinging a major service can be in the teens and twenties. This is partly because the major providers replicate their servers so that you're generally talking to a server close to you.
For example, I pinged www.google.com.au (Google Australia) and got a round-trip time of about 15ms. That's pretty impressive, given that I'm about 15,000km from the nearest point in Australia and light travels at 300,000km/s. That would give an absolute minimum time of 100ms for the 30,000km round-trip. However, the name www.google.com.au resolves (where I'm sitting) to a server in Mountain View, CA. That's fair game, as long as the Mountain View server looks enough like the "real" one Down Under.
However, if I try to ping the Australian Broadcasting Company (which probably has little reason to put a duplicate server in my neighborhood), I get a more believable time of 200ms or so. Depending on circumstances, that much delay can cause problems. For example, a badly placed speaker phone in a conference call between Oz and the US can render conversation nearly impossible.
As it turns out, most of the populated world has water directly opposite on the globe, but there are a few extreme cases, such as Hamilton, New Zealand and Córdoba, Spain. There are also plenty of less extreme cases, whether Europe/Australia, California/India or what-have-you, where even the best case may introduce noticeable delays.
The high-order bit here is that some level of humanly perceptible latency is likely to be with us, in particular situations, no matter how fast the hardware gets. Moore's law can make the pipes bigger and the processors faster, but it will do nothing to increase the speed of light.
Much of the time, this won't matter. If your mail client is polling every five minutes, who cares if the packets containing your email took some fraction of a second to get to your mail server? On the other hand, if you're trying to do something on the net that requires precise synchronization, things can get hairy.
The Network Time Protocol keeps good time (to within about 1/100 of a second over the internet), but NTP relies on propagating accurate timing out from a small set of central servers. It doesn't try to keep everyone in sync with each other directly.
Depending on the circumstances, people can notice delays as low as 20-40 milliseconds. For example, a lag of 40 milliseconds between hitting a key and hearing a sound is enough for a musician to notice. Echoes become perceptible around 100ms and extremely distracting not long after.
Latency on a local network can be quite low, often just a few milliseconds. The round-trip time for pinging a major service can be in the teens and twenties. This is partly because the major providers replicate their servers so that you're generally talking to a server close to you.
For example, I pinged www.google.com.au (Google Australia) and got a round-trip time of about 15ms. That's pretty impressive, given that I'm about 15,000km from the nearest point in Australia and light travels at 300,000km/s. That would give an absolute minimum time of 100ms for the 30,000km round-trip. However, the name www.google.com.au resolves (where I'm sitting) to a server in Mountain View, CA. That's fair game, as long as the Mountain View server looks enough like the "real" one Down Under.
However, if I try to ping the Australian Broadcasting Company (which probably has little reason to put a duplicate server in my neighborhood), I get a more believable time of 200ms or so. Depending on circumstances, that much delay can cause problems. For example, a badly placed speaker phone in a conference call between Oz and the US can render conversation nearly impossible.
As it turns out, most of the populated world has water directly opposite on the globe, but there are a few extreme cases, such as Hamilton, New Zealand and Córdoba, Spain. There are also plenty of less extreme cases, whether Europe/Australia, California/India or what-have-you, where even the best case may introduce noticeable delays.
The high-order bit here is that some level of humanly perceptible latency is likely to be with us, in particular situations, no matter how fast the hardware gets. Moore's law can make the pipes bigger and the processors faster, but it will do nothing to increase the speed of light.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
OK, Computer
"Radiohead have made a record. So far, it is only available from this web site. You can pre-order it in these formats: Discbox and download."
With a plummy Oxbridge accent, a curiously garish homebrew website and a Thomas Pynchon reference included at no extra charge, Radiohead is doing its part to rock the digital content world. For a price of "It's up to you ... No really, it's up to you." you can have their latest, In Rainbows, straight from the band.
Or you can wait for your friends to get it and copy theirs. No really, it's up to you.
This isn't the first time a prominent act has bypassed the major labels (the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince comes to mind), but this one seems to be getting a fair bit of buzz. For example, Auntie says here that their server crashed from overwork.
It also says that most people are choosing to pay a reasonably normal price. I'm not surprised.
The general take I've seen on all this is that bands make most of their money from concert tickets and T-shirt sales anyway, so what's the big deal. Somewhere in the mix I hear record labels whistling in the dark, though interestingly Radiohead are currently said to be negotiating with their former label, Parlophone, and others for a new contract.
With a plummy Oxbridge accent, a curiously garish homebrew website and a Thomas Pynchon reference included at no extra charge, Radiohead is doing its part to rock the digital content world. For a price of "It's up to you ... No really, it's up to you." you can have their latest, In Rainbows, straight from the band.
Or you can wait for your friends to get it and copy theirs. No really, it's up to you.
This isn't the first time a prominent act has bypassed the major labels (the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince comes to mind), but this one seems to be getting a fair bit of buzz. For example, Auntie says here that their server crashed from overwork.
It also says that most people are choosing to pay a reasonably normal price. I'm not surprised.
The general take I've seen on all this is that bands make most of their money from concert tickets and T-shirt sales anyway, so what's the big deal. Somewhere in the mix I hear record labels whistling in the dark, though interestingly Radiohead are currently said to be negotiating with their former label, Parlophone, and others for a new contract.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Classical music online
This article on classical music sales explores why classical music appears to be benefiting from the internet where everyone else seems to be struggling. It gives a few reasons, only one of which looks convincing for the long run:
You could read this two ways:
- Classical music is harder to pirate because it demands better sound quality and one generally buys it in bigger blocks. A high-fidelity recording of the Ring Cycle is a lot more bits than a 3-minute pop song in mp3 form. Classical listeners are also more interested in liner notes, biographies of the performers and such. Well, maybe, but people seem to have no trouble pirating DVDs.
- Classical music requires more sophisticated cataloging. OK, so popular music players tend to assume all you care about is the performer and get confused when you have to talk about the composer as well, and they don't tend to recognize that a single piece can comprise several tracks. That's lame, but so what? This is not an overwhelming technical problem. It's a matter of picking a system and going with it. Libraries have been cataloging classical music by hand for decades or centuries depending on how you count, so that might be a good place to start. More to the point, several players have already had a go. This will not remain a differentiator for long.
- Classical audiences are more suited to the "long tail". This I'll buy. Clasical listeners are more interested in, say, finding several performances of the same piece, or finding obscure composers, as opposed to buying what everyone else is buying. This means sellers can put out tons and tons of selections, the more the better, knowing that while only ten people might buy a given selection, someone will likely buy any given piece and in aggregate volume will be good. I don't think this is unique to the classical world, but it's not what's shifting millions of units at the top of the charts.
You could read this two ways:
- Once classical listeners figure out they can pirate, the game is up.
- In some markets, there is less desire and/or incentive to pirate.
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