Tag: mp3

No no no no no

Er, excuse me for blurting out my first reaction but have you lost your mind? An Apple takeover of Vivendi Universal Music will inevitably be a disaster. Much as I love the cat-among-the-pigeons potential of a tech counter-strike deep in the heart of showbiz-land, we now have decades of evidence that mega-mergers like this one almost always destroy value (and sometimes wipe out the merging businesses).

Here’s an idea: resist the mechanical logic of a merger – “we got a platform, they got content” – the kind of logic that produced AOL/Time Warner. Leave Vivendi Universal to dispose of its music division to some old school media mug and spend that cash pile on technology, design and marketing – stuff that will more directly produce high margin sales which is what a 2% market share luxury goods player like Apple needs most. Thanks to Jack Schofield at Online Blog for the the link.

New ways of listening

As I said, it took me a long time to adjust to the new ways of listening implied by clever tools like iTunes. A concrete example: what I used to do was exactly analogous to listening to a CD: flick through the long list of playlists until one catches my eye, double click to play. No change there. Later I downloaded a ‘play random track’ applescript and, together with the ‘shuffle’ button, that became my standard way into the library. But sometimes, random can be a bit too random. So now I use iTunes’ search function, which is simple enough. I just free associate until I get an interesting-looking playlist. Then shuffle through the results.

This is really orthogonal to the experience of ‘putting an album on’ – ‘artist’, ‘album’ and ‘genre’ are secondary to mood or ambience. Meanwhile, the whole MP3 universe is still organised into albums – MP3 players even try to locate album cover art when you play a track – but the new ways of interacting with music must imply at least a loss of emphasis on the album. Once we’re accustomed to ‘dialing up’ a mood or a feeling or an era, will we want to buy albums at all? Or will we buy (or rent) an hour of ‘contemplative’ or ‘aggressive’ or ‘Renaissance’ or whatever? Here’s one of my playlists. iTunes search terms were ‘I’m’ and ‘You’re’.

I'm Still In Love With You, Al Green
I'm Fricking Awesome, MC Paul Barman
I'm Waiting For The Day, Beach Boys
I'm Only Sleeping, The Beatles
I'm Amazed, The Pixies
I'm So Tired, The Beatles
I'm Serious, Beenie Man
I'm Waiting For The Man, Velvet Underground
You're a Big Girl Now, Bob Dylan
You're Pretty Good Looking, White Stripes
You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, Bob Dylan
I'm Taking My Audition To Sing Up In The Sky, Cap, Andy, And Flip
You're So Vain, Carly Simon
You're My Thrill, Chet Baker
I'm On My Way, Clifton Chenier
I'm Waiting For The Man, David Bowie & Lou Reed
You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma, David Frizzell & Dottie West
I'm Coming Out, Diana Ross
I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas, Goons
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hank Williams
I'm In The Mood, John Lee Hooker
I'm Prison Bound, John Lee Hooker
I'm Beginning to see the Light, Johnny Hodges
You're The One That I Want, Less Than Jake
You're A Friend Of Mine, The Meters
I'm not Worried At All, Moby
I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy Waters
I'm Ready, Muddy Waters
I'm Like a Bird, Nelly Furtado
I'm Depending On You, Otis Redding
I'm Leaving You, Otis Spann
I'm A Man, Pulp
I'm Housin', Rage Against The Machine
You're in the air, REM
You're In My Heart, Rhonda Vincent
I'm Someone Who Loves You, The Roches
I'm So Glad, Skip James
I'm An Old Cowhand, Sonny Rollins
I'm An Old Cowhand (alt. take), Sonny Rollins
I'm Gonna Make You Love Me, Supremes/Temptations
I'm Still Here, Tom Waits
I'm So Glad, Skip James
I'm Taking My Audition To Sing Up In The Sky, Cap, Andy, And Flip
You're My Everything, Zoot Sims

A chink of light for file sharing

The FT reports that, in one market at least, file sharing may finally be damaging CD sales. In the US, three years after downloading became widespread and a year after the total number of tracks downloaded first exceeded the number sold, CD sales are down only 5% – the jury is still out. In Germany, though, sales are sharply down (9.2% year-on-year against a European background of increasing sales) and CD burning looks like it’s become a national hobby (a quarter of households has access to a CD burner).


Assuming that the German numbers are real and that cause and effect are established (not a done deal), this is big news for the music industry in its war of attrition with the file sharers. The people of Germany are replacing their CD collections with MP3s – real, mainstream economic substitution is under way. History tells us that once a new media technology becomes popular the terms of engagement must change – from pitched battle to subtler combat and ultimately to accommodation. This has been true for all of the existential threats perceived by rights owners – from the gramophone to radio to minidisc. The people who run media businesses are not stupid and, once the customer has spoken, the damaging legal phase of the battle must end. Product and business innovation must now take over. The labels will quickly adjust to what is becoming a mainstream consumer activity. Although nothing can be taken for granted and you probably shouldn’t bet your last tenner that any viable media businesses will survive the MP3 era, precedent is eloquent. Record labels (and movie studios, for that matter) will survive, adapt and thrive.

No real good could ever have come from this period of conflict. Now that it’s coming to an end, we should see more cool applications ? an ocean of legal content organised and interconnected by the tech upstarts’ clever code ? and more humility from the RIAA. Incidentally, Universal Music just announced an extension to their downloading experiment. They’ll permit their eMusic subscription service to distribute a thousand neglected albums from the label’s back catalogue. This makes sound, undogmatic, commercial sense. Back catalogue was always going to be the starting point for the next wave of digital distribution – returns have withered and investment is long finished so commercial risk is low. It’s directly analogous to the way the movie studios created a new source of revenue by packaging movies as VHS tapes. Is this the beginning of the end of the file sharing wars? It’s a start.


(you may need to be a subscriber to see the FT article).