Fear for the Music
This past week in my musical life has been interesting. Early in the week, I read a post on a great 80s Music blog – Slicing Eyeballs – about the release schedule for John Peel sessions featuring literally dozens of artists performing within the BBC studios at the height of their musical creativity. To my mind, there is an unspoken rule that rock and roll is certainly a young man’s (and woman’s) game. While there are still dozens of bands from the 80’s still creating and still performing live, only a very small percentage are at the same level they were at 20 years ago. But I digress – my point is that while I was already imagining new limited edition deluxe CD releases (anyone remember ROIR Cassettes?) and special paper booklets, all of these new John Peel BBC “releases” were digital only – MP3’s my friends. No precious CDs to be found.
Around Wednesday, this past week, I was on Facebook (an increasing habit, I will confess – not nearly as fun as music, alcohol or drugs, but sill fun nonetheless) and digging through these wonderful Polaroids posted by singer/songstress Kate Schutt. I discovered Kate’s music during our recent trip to NC when a great over the air radio station – called the Penguin – played one of her tracks. Now I was on her Facebook and saw a polaroid of Kate with another singer named Kat Edmonson. Kate and Kat, sounds like a 90’s TV sitcom, but as I soon discovered, Kat is really very talented in her own right. My preliminary digging brought me to a Youtube clip of her performing “Lucky” on a TX television program. Simply amazing – it was just Kat and a trumpet player; no drums, no electric guitar, and I was just stunned by her tiny precious voice. As I set out to purchase her CD with “Lucky” on it, I quickly discovered that was not going to be an option. The only possible way I could own “Lucky” was by purchasing the MP3, through Amazon, which is exactly what I did. My first ever mp3 purchase through Amazon.
Then driving home later in the week, backed up traffic had me driving new back roads and seeing new cities while I was catching up on some podcasts that had become lodged in my iPod. My rule for podcast auto-downloads within iTunes apparently prevents me from getting far behind because I had five IndieFeed podcasts from June and July. If you don’t subscribe or haven’t listened to at least one of the IndieFeed genres, their stream can basically feed your iPod one song a day – roughly one great song per week: Heaven for a new music geek like me. The best of this bunch was a band from the UK, called Schizoid Club, and the song was “Theme from End Games”. A wonderful soundtrack for our life during wartime. When I returned home that night, I checked all the usual sources for the physical atoms that represent this band – Amazon, eBay, CDBaby and more. Even their label’s website. Everything was bits – no shiny aluminum CDs to appease me.
All of this wraps up nicely as yesterday I spent 16 hours of my life getting to, from, and attending the first day of the Singularity Summit in NYC. Spend just an hour or two with some of these presenters and attendees and you quickly get the sense that technology is changing so rapidly that it’s not a matter of IF we will have artificial general intelligence within machines that surpasses our collective intelligence – but when. And I have been a “computer person” since the age of 13 – if anyone should embracing a digital music future, it should be me, but I’m not, yet. I was at the 1998 MP3.com conference in La Jolla and got to meet all of those important players of the day. But because I know computers, I know computers FAIL. Hard drives fail – again not IF but when. And power supplies fail. Computers get stolen, computers get broken and computers burn easily and are high susceptible to water and other extreme conditions. What happens then? Your memories can’t wait and they may not be recoverable. Are you going to buy back your songs or will Apple and Amazon just hand them over upon request? If so, for how long? What’s the statute of limitations on my 99 cent purchase this week? Knowing these things has me being REALLY resistant to the idea that some of the music I will own (or now own) will only ever exist in a digital form. When I walk into my “library” I feel warm and comfy being surrounded by my CDs, books, artwork and DVDs. I don’t get that same fuzzy feeling from the 1.5TB external hard drive I just bought.
And that’s not even touching upon QUALITY of the music. I started creating MP3’s and ACC’s because I didn’t want to take my original CDs with me in my fairly unsecure / easily accessible Jeep. I Zimbra, it spends half the Summer’s with no doors and usually no top, so my iPod is ideally suited to be my portable music library that fits in my pocket when I park. But I can easily hear a difference in quality between when I’m playing a song off the iPod and playing it off a CD – the bass response is better and the highs are cleaner and clearer with CDs. Even in a soft-top Jeep, you can hear the difference.
I may have made this point in a prior post, but I believe the music industry missed an important strategic opportunity during the mp3 boom at the turn of the century. They could have easily been getting people to focus on the QUALITY of sound that comes from CDs, DVDs, DVD-Audio discs , Super CDs or even heavy weight vinyl. Let the people have their mp3’s as a way to sample artists and get the word spread, but when it’s time to sit back and enjoy, don’t you want the best sound quality options available? Quality speakers, well-printed gatefold graphics, artwork & text to enhance your listening pleasure?
All of this might sound like a very 70’s or 80’s audiophile’s fantasy. Maybe my ways need to change. Maybe the hounds aren’t at the door, but I think it may be some other animals. Today, the average selling price of a CD on eBay is likely less than $2US. I can easily see a future point in time when they might wheel me to my new room at the home; when all I will have is a small 8×10” OLED digital picture frame with 10TB of flash storage that contains every picture I’ve ever taken or owned, all my favorite movies, all my family videos and every email I’ve ever received, each and every one of these damned posts and all the CDs, nay, all the MUSIC that I’ve owned will all be held in my two wrinkled and frail hands. All will be good and fine – until I drool on it and short circuit the damned thing.
Welcome to the future.
-pjc
PS: Since I borrowed the Talking Heads album name “Fear of Music” for this post, I took some creative means with that album and used the titles of all 11 tracks within this post. Was it obvious? Did anyone notice? Hello – David Byrne – are you there?