Music and Technology

If we’re lucky, maybe Abel will chime in and let us know if he has this problem.

In addition to a hysterical design concept, graphpaper.com has a cool post by Chris Fahey on the concept of ownership in the media world.

Slightly restated and abstracted, the point might be that impending total internet connectivity might provide an opportunity for content owners to reclaim some degree of control, because local files will be rendered as irrelevant as the CD was five to ten years back. To put it another way, if CDs were typewriters and MP3s were Microsoft Word documents, Imeem and Last.fm and other streaming services could become the Google Docs of music — a powerful, compelling online interface to the content that makes you forget that you don’t actually control the files containing it.

Down in the comments, Fahey suggests that a heretofore unforeseen level of innovation is called for.

Offering cool ways to just browse a dumb database, which iTunes is and which last.fm largely is, too, won’t be enough.

I’m not so sure I agree with that, simply because I can’t ever say I’ve seen it done. The closest I’ve seen online is the AllMusic Guide, which is great, but also offers database services for the music industry and as a result contains very little by way of user interaction and tends to be a little clinical at times since it’s often used as a means of professional verification by people active within the industry. What’s more, a brief (as in, one night when I happened to log on during a testing period) foray into audio has been largely abandoned — which is a travesty, if you ask me — and they’ve still never recovered from the absurd interface they skinned the site with six or seven years back, which typically requires half a dozen clicks, each with a page reload, to get to the information you want.

The closest I’ve seen in a local application is the CoverFlow function in iTunes, but at the end of the day that’s all glitz and very little substance. Smart Playlists are the closest thing we’ve seen to a functional evolution, but in iTunes the query logic is fantastically dumbed down. Even in other more advanced incarnations, such as the Media Views available in Winamp, the available metadata fields are limited and populating them takes more time than most people have. That is, instead of having to manually add “Greenwich Village Folk” to the comment field of every qualifying MP3 in my collection, I’d like an application that can query AllMusic and connect Bob Dylan to Phil Ochs without requiring each user to separately tag every individual file — especially since musicians are just people, and their relationships are constantly changing just like anybody else’s (who is the lead singer of Van Halen this week?).

For your daily dose of silver lining, at least the Music Genome Project should offer a whole lot of potential. It seems to be working well for Pandora so far — I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews.

I am also not so sure about the title he gave the post: “R.I.P.: Owning Music (1880-2008).” I think he’s on the right track, and a few of the bleeding-edge industry players are as well, but it’s a little premature to pronounce media ownership dead when the alternative he’s so excited about doesn’t yet exist.

But let’s get back on topic — back in 2001 or so, I was naive enough to write off the iPod simply because I was expecting that the next generation of portable media player would be a “thin client” that would connect over the internet to my home music collection instead of redundantly carrying the files along with it on a hard drive. So far we still haven’t really departed from that model.

As Fahey points out, Rhapsody was a step in the right direction, and indeed I was very excited about it in the early days. The deal breaker for me was that a lot of the music I wanted — and already had on my hard drive — was not present on Rhapsody, and even though they used a desktop application for delivery, they didn’t allow you to mix local MP3s with Rhapsody streams in the program’s playlists. This meant that every listening session had to consist exclusively of either Rhapsody streams (via their player) or local files (via Winamp). I didn’t think this was a cognitively coherent way to approach music, and it was enough of an annoyance to send me back to Kazaa.

My anti-Pod ideal music player from ages ago was essentially a “big jukebox in the sky” with minimal local hardware and an awesome and personalized music library stored remotely. I was mostly trying to keep my pants pockets light, but Fahey is essentially extending that same concept to all interactions with music.

The sad thing, I think, is that I’m still waiting after all these years for something even remotely approaching the “jukebox in the sky”. I’m a bit closer with the media server I am running out of Winamp, but there’s still a long way to go.

If only somebody made a well-designed portable music player with internet connectivity…

Monkeyclaus is currently working to find the shortest distance between the microphone and the iPhone, but we have to admit that this guy may have us beat.

Keep in mind that although the SDK was released in early March, the iPhone still is not an open platform for custom applications like this one. When that happens — the current timetable has it happening in June — it’s going to be madness.

This isn’t really related to online distribution or any of our usual discussion topics, but in a way it highlights some of the cool things that are possible on the other end of that equation now that computers can be used to create the music as well.

Amazingly enough, this appears to be a valid score. “World Music,” they’re calling it. Yuk yuk.

I bet I’m alone in this, but I am actually quite curious what it sounds like. There’s a 99% chance that the dude responsible has a MIDI file sitting around on his hard drive…

eMusic, the download store allegedly centered around indie musicians, has just landed landed the Rolling Stones now that they have decided to split with EMI after more than 30 years — and take their back catalog with them.

Put your earmuffs on, Beelzebub, or you’re liable to catch a chill.

The fine folks at Pitchfork launched their new video project yesterday — it’s effectively an online MTV for indie artists.

I have high hopes for this for a couple reasons. First, P-fork founder Ryan Schreiber has said that he highly values high-res content — he specifically complained about YouTube’s video quality while discussing the launch — so they’re currently “broadcasting” using H.264, which you video nuts already know looks totally freaking unbelievable at the resulting file sizes.

YouTube is obviously still king of the hill for online music-related videos (for online anything-related videos, really) but video is the next major online media battleground, and it’s nice to see a strong, early hold being taken by the media outlet that has singlehandedly brought independent music back into the cultural spotlight over the last five years.

It could also lead to a general shift in tone. Pitchfork can be disgustingly smarmy at times, but their staffers are clearly hip dudes who are in touch with the culture around them, and if you’re not a jackass in real life, it’s much more difficult to come across as one on a screen than in text.

Anything is possible, though. But either way, at least that logo is awesome.

Wal-Mart’s recent abandonment of WMA format for their download store shows that they do indeed know what they’re doing and can respond to the emerging market in a fairly savvy fashion. Some of the majors still aren’t on board — which is pretty odd, given that they’re participating in Amazon’s MP3 store — and Wal-Mart remains a hated corporate behemoth, especially for rural-dwelling soy-milk hippies like the Monkeyclaus team, but after nearly ten years of stagnancy and complete, utter, across-the-board stupidity with regard to online music retail, we have to back anything that moves us into the sensible, open market that will benefit honest consumers and independent musicians. (They’re claiming they can’t sell me mp3s because the Linux machine I’m posting this from is incompatible, which makes no sense, but hey, maybe we have to take baby steps here.)

This also casts doubt on our earlier assumption that Wal-Mart just wouldn’t give a damn about music retail and Apple’s ever-strengthening hold on it. At the same time, it lends credence to the spreading suspicion that the participation of major labels in Amazon’s store is just a ploy to weaken iTunes — why else would they care which retailers are selling the unprotected copies of their content? In many cases they’re excluding iTunes, and now they seem to be doing the same for Wal-Mart. One has to wonder whether they have some back-room deals with Amazon that Wal-Mart was not willing to duplicate.

Either way, the beauty of using a non-contaminated format like MP3 is that it lets everyone in and creates a level playing field, no matter how large or small the outfit may be. Yes, it’s good for us, and our enthusiasm here is self-serving. But the thing is, it’s also good for you — unless your last name is Bronfman, that is.

The latest step in the bickering between Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails is last week’s announcement by the Brits that they’ll be encouraging fan remixes of “Nude,” the second single from “In Rainbows.”

Of course, this is one instance where Trent would absolutely get our vote in the Wired contest, because he’s been doing this ever since he released “With Teeth” way back in 2005. In fact, he even had a highly publicized spat with his record label over concerns related to the launch of a web site specifically dedicated to fan remixes — which he eventually won thanks to a “You can’t stop me” approach adopted right around the release of “Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D,” a remix record made up of songs from “Year Zero.”

Now, Radiohead is also doing their own remix site for “Nude,” but there are a couple of differences. First of all, they’re providing users with individualized MySpace-compatible widgets with playback and voting functionality, and offering their own ears as a prize to the highest-voted remixes. Strangest of all, however, is the means by which the multitrack stems are being delivered: you have to buy them individually from the iTunes Plus program, which means it’ll cost would-be remixers a few extra bucks to get the material, and also that they’re already compressed and the sound quality will take a hit as a result.

However, it’s also worth noting that while access to the multitrack files was free for the singles from “With Teeth” and “Year Zero,” getting them for “Ghosts I-IV” requires the purchase of the $75 special edition — officially, at least.

Already we’re bumping into these while just browsing some of the studio-centric sites — Todor Kobakov’s string quartet is one particularly cool example. Given the respective popularity of each group, there may well be an outpouring of remixes that far outpaces what Trent’s efforts have prompted so far.

You’re still here? Stop reading this post already, and go fire up Garageband! Or you can give us a call if you want ProTools and are feeling ambitious…

So, you thought it couldn’t get any darker than Nine Inch Nails? It almost seemed like it had to be an April Fools joke, but for the fact that this hit the news wires well after the 1st: legendary serial killer Charles Manson has recorded an album called “One Mind” and released it for free online under a Creative Commons license.

Probably the weirdest thing about this, though, is Limewire touting it on their company blog.

Anyway, anybody feel like giving it a listen? Please report back to us if you do. We’ll be in the studio, possibly recording something or other but mostly just trying to pretend we’re not creeped out.

We all knew it was coming — Reznor and Radiohead are now in an all-out brawl. In a manner of speaking, at least — Wired has stacked ‘em up side by side for a poll comparing their respective online releases along ten different axes ranging from “Timing” to “Smack talk.” If you have strong opinions about either, head on over to cast your votes.