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...

Christ on a pogo stick!

I knew the uber-package for Ghosts had sold out, but I didn't really put the numbers together until I saw them in an article elsewhere: 2500 copies at $300 a pop means that Trent just earned three quarters of a million dollars in one day. And remember, that's only from the high-end package. When you add in the more modestly priced sales to those of us that live in the real world, it'll be considerably higher.

Now I'll admit that despite my ongoing frustrations with iTunes and the iTunes Music Store (and irrespective of my lust for their hardware!) I still have a lot of respect for Apple when it comes to the ongoing political issues in the music business. Their hard and fast stance with regard to iTunes pricing combined with their stubborn refusal to support competitors' media formats on the iPod singlehandedly saved listeners from a disastrously incoherent market in which DRM would undoubtedly have been used to manipulate them into repeatedly purchasing the same songs. Steve Jobs even ditched his own DRM as soon as the copyright holders allowed it. Pretty much solely because of Apple, you can now buy music that won't stab you in the back from the likes of Amazon, and it's no longer unreasonable for smaller DRM-free stores like us to reach for big-fish artists and labels as clients.

Summarizing and analyzing the past five years of iTunes politics could take up several posts, though, and it isn't really the point at the moment anyway. There's now an antitrust lawsuit of some sort over Apple's refusal to support the WMA audio format that was favored by the competing online music stores which used DRM. (Until they all tanked, at least -- remember Coca-Cola's music store? Exactly.)

The stance adopted by a lot of the kind-of-major-but-not-as-important-as-Apple players in the digital music game is, of course, that closing out competing media formats is anti-competitive. And they're right, to a certain degree -- after all, the iPods could very easily support more audio formats than they currently do, and Apple's deliberate attempts to prevent that can't possibly be construed as good for the consumer.

If that seems to contradict the preceding adulation, remember that we're talking about audio formats here, not DRM formats. I see no problem with the iPod supporting WMA, and it's only the acceptance of competing DRM schemes that would have landed consumers in trouble. And we won't even get into the irony of trying to break up the Apple monopoly by forcing them to implement the DRM scheme of a convicted monopolist.

So here we have all these hardware and media companies complaining about not being able to sell DRM protected music, but somehow nobody has yet called them out over the fact that they're not doing it themselves.

You'd think that in order to make a compelling case in front of a judge -- or in the public eye, which is ultimately the most important judge of all -- they'd offer up feature-laden hardware with support for every media format on the planet in order to contrast their strategy with Apple's artificial limitations.

Those guys are out there, but the point is not whether Cowon or the late iRiver made for more capable nerd trinketry. The problem is that powerful devices like that are not the expected standard among the iPod competitors. Where's the RealAudio support? Amazon only sells MP3, even though it's been years since Allofmp3 demonstrated that it's entirely feasible to run a multi-format download store with operating costs of merely pennies per track. And, of course, the Microsoft Zune still can't play Ogg Vorbis even though it is an awesome, totally open, and 100% patent-free format.

These are niche media formats with small user bases, for sure, but supporting any of them is trivial. If Apple's opponents really want an open marketplace, they owe it to us to make it truly free -- sell media files in many formats simultaneously, and make sure hardware support for those formats makes it to market more often than not. Then just let me pick what's right for my needs and get the hell out of the way. For the most part, they're all just trying to leverage their chosen form of lock-in, which smacks of "do as I say, not as I do."

In other words -- guys, if you want broad format support, do it yourself before filing your lawsuits!

This is particularly aggravating for an audio encoding geek such as myself, because I'm not happy with the encoding options as implemented by either Apple or Amazon. Sorry, guys, but judging from the services you're providing, I've concluded I can configure an encoder better than anybody on your staff. (I should point out, though, that eMusic comes pretty close to getting it right.) That, too, is probably a post for another day, but at least our customers are getting the benefit of my pent up frustration when they buy the kick-ass audio files we've loaded into the Monkeyclaus download store.

While Monkeyclaus doesn't yet have extensive built-in support for the niche formats, that issue is indeed on the development roadmap. In the meantime, we do sell FLAC, from which any format under the sun can be generated with a mere right-click using tools like Foobar and dBpowerAmp. Neither Rhapsody nor Napster nor any of the other also-ran download stores do that.

Don't get me wrong, though, this frustration is not limited to them. Even though I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to iTunes, when wishing upon stars and birthday candles and such I still inevitably hope for FLAC support in Quicktime. Keep your fingers crossed.

My own FLAC purchase was cut off by a download error and when I emailed tech support for help, they said they'd be working all day to fix things and would get my purchase to me by tomorrow morning. The NIN online store was shut down for a good chunk of today, replaced by a message saying they were trying to bolster the server's stability and would have the store operational again soon.

Well, it's up again, but I was surprised when I saw that the $300 limited-run ultra-deluxe edition is no longer one of the purchase options. I assume this means that they've sold all 2500 copies already, which is really surprising -- with all the attention being paid to this as a low-cost digital release, the most expensive of the physical packages sold out in a single day!

He made an admirable attempt to hide it, but all winter it was pretty easy to see the steam shooting out of Trent Reznor's ears.

When Radiohead dropped In Rainbows back in October -- and that's "dropped" as in "hydrogen bomb on the industry," not merely "new album" -- Reznor was one of the most outspoken advocates. I even remember seeing an interview somewhere in which he said he put some exorbitant rock-star number into the set-your-own-price box -- several thousand dollars, I think, though I can't find the link at the moment. Still, it seemed a little forced, because it was obvious that Reznor was just annoyed to bits that he hadn't come up with the idea first.

A few weeks later, the moment he was able, he ditched his record label and promised to pursue a more direct relationship with his fans. This wasn't entirely surprising, given the antagonistic comments he had been making about his label during his Australian tour the preceding summer.

Then came the Saul Williams project which he produced, sold online with an optional payment in a slight variant of the Radiohead stunt. It seemed like his enthusiasm had been tempered somewhat when he posted a message, quite obviously frustrated, on the NIN web site detailing the sales figures for Williams' album, which he found underwhelming.

Not so, apparently. In a note posted abruptly to his web site last night, he announced the release of a new four-volume, 36-track instrumental album called Ghosts which is being distributed through an online direct-sales tactic every bit as outlandish as Radiohead's. Let's consider all the ways in which he is breaking with tradition here.

For starters, the first movement -- it seems inappropriate to call it a "disc," since Reznor doesn't refer to it as such anywhere on his site -- is available for free download as a sampler of sorts. This mirrors the In Rainbows plan quite closely: release part of it for free, and then sell the complementary part of the album through the package. Lots of people seem to have forgotten that In Rainbows was actually a double album and only disc 1 was released online. To get the other half, you had to to buy a hard copy.

Reznor is not requiring anyone to buy a physical copy in order to get volumes 2-4, but he is asking them to purchase a download. The price is a seriously lowball $5 -- remember, this is 36 tracks that comprise a good two hours of audio -- and that will even get you your choice of lossless audio formats if the lower resolution of MP3 isn't your bag. Those who want a hard copy can pick up a two-disc Digipak for $10, which is still remarkably cheap for a double album from an artist of his caliber.

Volume I, meanwhile, has been uploaded to the popular BitTorrent sites by Reznor himself in an attempt to spread what is effectively the album's promotional sampler as far across the internet as possible.

Furthermore, all the tracks are released under the Creative Commons license, which is a special sort of quasi-copyright that reserves the usual rights but then promises only the laxest enforcement in a deliberate attempt to allow certain uses such as sampling and remixing. In short, most non-commercial use is allowed.

To that end, he's also selling a $75 deluxe version, essentially his answer to Radiohead's vinyl-and-goodies Discbox package, which includes multitrack versions of all the songs. As cool and forward-thinking as you may think this is, the truth is that he has done it before, specifically with the singles from the With Teeth and Year Zero albums. Still, this time he's including all the songs, and the previous multitrack releases weren't under the Creative Commons license, so there wasn't really a whole lot to be done with them when your noodling was done. Chances are we're going to be having a lot of fun playing with these in the Monkeyclaus studio in the near future.

There's also a 24-bit, 96 kHz version of the album provided on Blu-Ray disc; if you're not an audio geek, that basically means "insanely high quality." It's certainly the first Blu-Ray audio release I've ever heard about.

The $300 super-deluxe eat-that-Radiohead version of the album comes with vinyl and additional artwork and is limited to 2500 pieces, all of which will be signed by Reznor. As with Radiohead's album, hard-copy purchases come with a free download package in the interest of immediate gratification.

It's a much grander scheme than Radiohead's -- some are even saying he went too far -- but then, he had to be overly flamboyant since he showed up late to the party, right? Gimmicks aside, though, the Creative Commons is an unexpected twist. Previously, that licensing scheme had been the domain solely of fringe anti-copyright activists; you typically don't see the artists who have sold millions of records become desperate to relinquish control of their copyrights.

So, did it work?

We'll have to see. We're only a few hours into the guerilla+kamikaze release, but I suspect this will be gobbled up by the media and regurgitated as a validation of Radiohead's instincts -- that is, irrefutable proof that music distribution has just gone through a rapid and irreversible mutation.

The NIN.com servers were utterly slammed as soon as the news hit the net, so my FLAC copy is still downloading very slowly and uncooperatively. I BitTorrented Volume I while I was waiting, though (I've never seen a torrent move so quickly -- there was a lot of enthusiasm all over the net, it seems) and to be honest I'm a little underwhelmed. Disc 1 of In Rainbows blew me away, which totally heightened the excitement of knowing I was part of something groundbreaking. Radiohead did this deliberately, too: it's pretty clear that they stacked the album's track listing in favor of the half slated for online release, and the oft-forgotten second disc is considerably weaker.

The portion of Ghosts slated for online release, however, almost sounds like Reznor was rushed, busting his ass all through November just so he'd have a new album to unveil using some creative release strategy.

Even if the rest of the album can't pick up the slack, I'll probably go easy on him. That kind of enthusiasm is worth encouraging.

In a press release issued earlier today, Apple announced that the iTunes Music Store is now the second-largest music retailer in the country.

This isn't entirely surprising -- pretty much everyone was shocked back in 2005 in a fairly similar manner when it was revealed that iTunes was beating Tower Records. All reports since then have pointed to the rapid growth in digital download sales, albeit not enough to offset the drop in CD sales and save the floundering record industry.

The only brick-and-mortar retailer able to best iTunes was Wal-Mart, which possesses an almost legendary amount of influence in the record industry due to their position as the sole music outlet in many rural markets -- in fact, they were even able to score exclusive distribution rights for the latest Eagles album. Apple has been getting into this territory as well by asking for exclusive tracks in exchange for lucrative placement within the store's user interface. Interestingly enough, Rolling Stone reported a while back that despite all this, Wally World would still like to see CD prices drop -- much to the chagrin of many record labels, I'm sure.

Even if that comes to pass, one has to wonder how long it'll take for Apple to pull into the #1 slot -- remember, the store launched only five years ago, so if you take a step back and view things in macro mode, we're actually witnessing a rather fantastic coup d'etat here. The wild cards here include the ongoing abandoning of DRM -- which has in turn allowed the first strong iTunes competitor ever in the form of the Amazon MP3 Store -- and, to a lesser, extent, the fact that Wal-Mart also runs their own music download store which is also benefiting from the lack of DRM. Still, it's not unreasonable to expect the crown to be handed over to iTunes within a few years, especially when you consider that Wal-Mart has many other more lucrative revenue streams and probably won't really give a damn about keeping up.

By some sheer stroke of luck and/or force of fate, I happened to be present at the closing of the last Tower Records location in the country when the company shut down for good in late 2006 -- the store was gutted to the bone, with everything from signs to chairs to CD racks offered up for sale to the public (I picked up a huge red plastic shopping basket for about two or three bucks myself) and they started playing Don McLean's "American Pie" as they flipped the light switch for the last time ever -- "the day the music died," indeed.

The scary thing to consider in all this is that even though iTunes made headlines when it leapfrogged its way past a store which had been a pillar of music retail for decades, Tower was still within the top 5 or so retailers nationally at the time. Obviously Monkeyclaus wholeheartedly embraces digital music sales in a way that Tower didn't, but it's sobering to realize that being one of the biggest retailers in the country -- even if that was a step or two below Apple -- wasn't enough to save them. This business is trickier than ever, for sure.