Media: Thoughts on The Future of Sharing Music

[JackSpratts]

Whether online, on wi-fi’s, on sneaker nets or on some as yet uninvented super connection, and regardless of the outcomes of any legal actions, I’ve been wondering lately what will happen to the future of sharing music. While there’s a huge amount of material available it’s not infinite. You can with some effort get to the bottom of the pile. But while to my knowledge no one has actually done this, why are so few people making the attempt? Once they’ve explored and acquired the kinds of songs they like, and the ones they didn’t know they liked before P2Ps, most people seem to be left with few reasons to keep going. Other explorations are possible - one might start sharing more for instance. Most music aficionados explore uploading at some point, leaving their systems on nearly all the time so that others can enjoy their libraries, but the personal interest in having ever more musical experiences, once a hotly motivating desire, seems to bank, cool and become less urgent when a listener is able to graze unimpeded in any direction, for any extended amount of time.

In many ways music acts like a mild drug - but with a crucial difference. Yes, it gets you high; it amplifies a mood, tempers it or redirects it. But unlike chemicals that may require users to keep upping their doses to maintain a certain level of effect, music seems to have an easier to reach plateau, and once that level of satisfaction has been attained a listener can lose interest.

This peculiarity has always been important to the music industry because it suggested that the way to keep their customers hooked was to keep them from ever arriving at that plateau in the first place because if they got there, and too often, they might lose interest. To prevent that they limited access to the content. Using high prices and catalog manipulation a company could withhold that ultimate satisfaction and in so doing influence demand. Disney has done this remarkably well with old movies. While inexpensive, films in their back catalog go into and out of production at seemingly inexplicable times, helping keep the customer off balance and insuring demand stays high and ennui low. Figure out what it is that your customer wants and then make absolutely sure they don’t get enough of it. It’s a tough balance between present profits and future sales but the industry’s been doing it for a long time and they’ve gotten pretty good at it.

For the record companies the most dangerous thing sharable content can do is saturate listeners with all the music they’d ever want to hear until their interest evaporates. Then their worst nightmare occurs; the labels find themselves face to face with people who were once steady customers but who now post things on file sharing bulletin boards like “I haven’t downloaded anything for weeks. There’s nothing that I want”. What are potential customers who don’t want your products, even if they can get your products for free? What kind of business are you in if you can’t sell anything, if there’s no demand for your service at any price? At no price?

It’s a conundrum all right. Record company inventory becomes worthless, assets are shed, divisions are cut and people let go until the business itself becomes unrecognizable; the value of the label approaches zero. It’s happening now in music and I hear the movie guys feel they might be next. I think they’re right. How did this happen?

You can’t build a business based on scarcity (like say old art or antiques or vintage cars) in a medium that’s so easily reproducible, especially when technology makes the reproduction, storage and in particular the transmission so much simpler to do with each passing week. Let’s face it, any ten year old with a PC and an internet connection is now a publisher on just about the same level as a major record company. They sell us copies of ones and zeros after all - never originals - there’s nothing tangible there, like a sweater or chair or vase and we can now do that as easily as they can. In the aggregate we can actually do it a lot better than they can. For instance, look at their attempts to “take us on”, to “flood” the P2P networks with bogus files. For all their effort what did they accomplish besides further alienating the customers who occasionally still shop in the stores? There are a few bad files out there but not many, and in no way are there enough fakes to get people to even consider for an instant that it might be better to get a song some another way. It’s just five companies doing the flooding after all, and however powerful they are they’re up against three hundred million individuals acting in concert. There isn’t much of a contest. They can create animosity by the ton but they haven’t done much damage to the people’s networks. When your stock in trade is as evanescent as a breeze, when it can’t be weighed or held or even seen, when anyone anywhere can make a million perfect copies anytime for anyone for nothing you’ve got to wonder what the hell you’re doing in that business anymore.

There are differences in mediums and different approaches to them. Not every publisher has spent 100 years removing the substrate that holds their salable information. Take the written word; books have content which still has substance. You can see it in the medium layer and the act of receiving it requires an intimate physical connection. People seem to like that. It’s a bit harder to do than listening to something, a bit more active but time and again you hear readers say they like the act of reading. They like the turn of the page, the position their body assumes in a chair, the quiet introspection the practice lends itself too. The physical connection they have with the material, quite apart from the intellectual. All of that’s been lost with records and films. Remember sitting on the floor with a stack of discs and a close and play phonograph watching them spin? Remember grooves? Remember looking at them and trying to figure out which part was the chorus and which the beat? And film - who remembers seeing a movie on actual film in a private home or at school and looking through the celluloid at the captured images, so tiny and repetitive and in line but out of synch with the mysterious, squiggly lines of the soundtrack? The feeling always present that with a little knowledge and the right materials you could make this thing too. Sometimes on a hot day friends and I would place a record player tone arm on the quiet lead out groove of an old record and laugh and scream as hard as we could and sometimes if the gods of mystery were kind the tone arm would transfer the vibration to the soft vinyl and leave a little impression for us to hear. We'd made a record! We’d connected to the medium in a tangible way. Accessible magic. To quote Roy Batty, the terminal Replicant in the movie Bladerunner, "all these things are lost in time". But not lost really. Given away. Deliberately and with great forethought and effort and purpose. Let go.

The media companies have been striving mightily for decades to divorce themselves from their media to move reproduction and distribution costs to near zero in a quest that continues today. Just last week the chairman of Sony said the day is soon coming when his corporation will send pure content to a steering device inside a consumer’s house. Nothing physical at all. Just streams flowing through the ether and landing in a machine - preferably one made by Sony - but not necessarily. Because the stream itself is what’s important, maybe it’s more important in a media executives mind than anything, and maybe that’s the problem. It may not be so simple. Maybe their customers want more of a relationship with the information. Maybe we still want to see the squiggles and feel the grooves. Maybe “phoning it in” isn’t good enough anymore. Maybe it’s like a personal relationship with a distant lover that just stops working when the phone and the emails are no longer enough - you were glad to have them for a while because it gave you something to hang onto but maybe you just need more. Maybe some important things are simply lost for good when the medium vanishes and all we’re left with is a perfect sparkling sheen of empty digits passing through our heads.

- Jack Spratts.


jackspratts@lycos.com

[goldie]

Jack, this post should be printed, framed and hung, advertised, linked to and passed on to a hundred million zines, rags and webpages.

This is classic. Very good, Very thought provoking and, at the bottom of it all............

So very true.

Worthy of publishing IMHO.

[TankGirl]

A great essay, Jack. Always a pleasure to read well thought-out essays on p2p!

You lay out nicely the huge difference between the old, crumbling scarcity economy and the new, emerging luxury economy in the realm of digital information. After three years of p2p the paradigm change has become inevitable. The core technology for the new order is already invented and demonstrated, and it is both understood and well received by the great masses. The only thing still holding up the old house of cards is a few corrupted copyright laws and a few corrupted legislators behind them. And even they can only cause some friction and delay to what is going to happen anyway.

- tg

[JackSpratts]

The turning point for the industry may have been the 8-track tape, where for the first time the listener was locked out of the roundelay between medium and sound. Once that occurred and sales didn’t suffer it emboldened the labels and opened the way for the cassette, (you could at least see little things turning) the CD (ditto), DAT, mini-disc and ultimately the computer file (WAV, MP3, OGG, WMA), where we no longer have access to the medium or to the thing the medium comes on (flash memory, hard drive, broadband). It’s now possible and common to download a song, using a Real player for instance and hear it without it ever entering a part of your system that moves, making final the mechanical divorce between consumer and artist. It is this that I feel the industry has to address if it ever hopes to continue as a going and relevant concern. If anyone can copy - and anyone can, and we’re getting really good at it, then what’s the point in paying for it? One is as good as another. Indeed the industry goes to great pains to broadcast their complaint that digitally, they’re indistinguishable. You can make a conceptual case, maybe, that paying for it is morally good, and it may be true. On the other hand I can make the case that paying for it supports the RIAA, their international lobbyists and all the disturbing immorality that implies. It’s an argument I ’ll leave to others for the moment.

No, if the media companies hope to re-engage the modern consumer they will need to find a way to rekindle the magic that was once inherent in the discovery of a new song or film. Selling "copies" just ain’t going to cut it anymore more.

I hold my hand over an unexposed paper in a darkroom, flash the lights and watch as a silhouette appears in the liquid. That’s my hand – I did that.

You could trace the movie the same way. Light from those massive Hollywood arcs bounces off a movie star, shoots through a camera lens and burns into the film. It gets developed and by and by more Hollywood light is shone through that film and then through another to expose the very print you hold in your hand. A direct connection exists between the creator of the dreams, physically through that film, and you.

Same with records and in particular 78 rpm recordings. The artist, say Armstrong, blew his horn and the air coming out caused the physical movement of a blade which cut the shellac platter used to mold the stamper that pressed the very disc you held in your hand. You trace those grooves under your fingers and you could feel the power of Armstrong himself in there, and know he did that and somehow you now have it, this thing he carved, like he made it for you to feel.

Get a 78, listen to it. Turn down the lights, touch the grooves, you’ll find yourself involved in a much larger event than hearing a song. It’s a chain of creation that goes back the creator, and helped make the record* worth it’s high cost to us. I think it may go someway toward explaining why a recording might be worth so much less today.

Yes, when we let that go we got perfect sound and it’s everywhere now, in movies, on the net and even in the supermarkets. It feeds the head. It’s free. But with nothing to touch and nothing to feel maybe along with it being everywhere ultimately it’s really nowhere.

- js.

* The process which essentially ended in the 1950’s was improved and revived with a vengeance for all sorts of recordings in the 70’s by Sheffield Labs and others. Listeners swore the one-take sound was incomparable, better than anything they’d ever heard, with startling dynamics and transients that were glisteningly pure. It’s all but forgotten today although the technique still pops up in unexpected places. At the Audio Engineering Convention in NYC for instance, the creators of the audio technologies of the future take the time to pay homage to the past and perform a labor of love – cutting a few great sounding discs the old fashioned way, live to a lathe. Here’s a page on last years session, along with an MP3 excerpt. http://www.auldworks.com/AESDD/dd1.htm
It is a seductive experience that’s ensnared its share of devotees.

[nanook]

excellent, Jack.
just excellent.
u have given me a different perspective of the situation, now at hand.
a realistic vision of the future.
and so many articles have touched upon it, many of the ones posted here, and that is what the industry just won't sit back and realize, what u and many others have realized.....a real solution to their problem.
hey, maybe they have.
but maybe they just don't know how to get there yet.
again, it will be very interesting to see what the next few years bring us.
thanks for sharing that with us.

[assorted]

It's not going to work the same way for movies. I don't think that simply because we are already used to movies on demand through cable and the saturation point you write of has not happened.

Digital cable is now offering 50 or so films ON DEMAND at any point you want. HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, etc. are all offering 10-12 films each that you can start watching at the press of a button at no additional charge. In spite of this, my mother reports that my father has not DEcreased his movie watching habits.

When we all have our own home theater system, and we can download in under an hour any film we want to play in flawless quality (or at least as good as whatever is on the tv normally quality) and have it to immediately watch on our system in a surround mix... then i believe that threat could happen to movies.

but i'm not seeing that. plus, they are getting in early enough in the game that they will be able to control the technology a little better then the RIAA did (at least in terms of the next generation of home theater equipment, cable boxes, etc.).

also, what you have complained about in music (obscurity creating demand) has already happened for us film geeks in DVD. there are directors in films that were painfully hard to see that are now being released on dvd with pristine visual transfers that i formally had to look at as either a shitty 16mm print at the library or 3x taped over VHS tape i was lucky enough to come by. and these titles are all getting released, noone's sitting on any rights or releases.

to be a film fan right now is a great time, and it has nothing to do with these crap harry potter cams floating around. the entertainment giants ARE giving consumers what they want still.

[justed]

Originally posted by JackSpratts

There is an ephemeral quality to music as you have pointed out.

In part a reflection of the need to fill the pipeline with product - ‘pop’.

But there is also music that transcends its time - ‘classic’ as you have also pointed out.

Whether associated with poignant memories, or truly ‘classic’, for most it has nothing to do with medium – grooves et al.