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The Internet, and the music-related technologies that it has popularized, haven’t been a topic that’s gotten a lot of play in Focus. With this column, we hope to change that. I’m Jay Ashworth, and I’ve been involved with the Net in one fashion or another for close to 20 years, and with music for longer... in one fashion or another. My focus (no pun intended) will be on the intersection of music and technology: how those technologies affect music today, both for the performers and for the listeners.
The hot topic these days is, of course, MP3. What is MP3, you’re asking yourself? Ok... you asked... What we like to call ‘MP3’ files are actually MPEG2 Layer 3 compressed audio files. They come in a dozen or so subtypes, and are compressed with a piece of software called a ‘codec’ (for some reason, both pieces, the COder and the DECoder seem to get called that, even though the name really refers to the pair, together).
Now, compressing audio isn’t really all that new, people have been doing it almost as long as they’ve been digitizing it; what was important about MP3 — what made MP3 the ‘killer app’ for digital music — was the fact that it compressed audio so much smaller without appreciably degrading it’s quality.
How much smaller? Well, about a megabyte a minute — 5 to 10 times smaller than earlier compression schemes. The reason this was important in the grand scheme of things is that it happened at right about the same time that DSL and cablemodems brought reasonably wide bandwidth into the (close to) average home, and lots of colleges started providing dedicated wideband Internet connections to all of their students.
And of course, we all know that students and music go together, right? MP3’s really big break was the release of a program called Napster. Named for author Scott Fanning’s nappy hair, the program was an instant hit: it allowed its users to ‘rip’ their music CDs — a process that involves extracting the audio tracks into digital files and compressing them — and put the files in a directory that other users could download from. The Napster program then collected the information about all of your files and sent it to the index server where it was coalesced with everyone else’s index files.
The result was, on a good night, over 300,000 songs available for download, each one ready to be transferred directly from the other person’s computer to yours.
And therein lay the rub: that music on that CD you bought? You didn’t really buy it. Or so went the arguments of the record labels, who thought they owned that music. Since you don’t really own it, you don’t have the right — the ‘copyright’ — to give it away to others. (It’s not that simple, of course, but run with me for a minute here, ok?)
So, what to do? Well, sue Napster, Inc.; that was the first approach.
The major record labels all filed suit against Napster, alleging not that the company violated copyright — the music never touched Napster’s servers — but that they’d contributed to the users infringing copyright. Even the idiots at the record labels were bright enough to realize that suing each individual Napster user wasn’t an especially bright idea.
Well, almost everyone was that bright. Enter Lars Ulrich and Metallica.
In a move viewed as grandstanding by almost everyone who expressed an opinion, they printed out the names of some 360,000 odd Napster users who had Metallica songs on their computers on paper, and dumped the boxes of paper on Napster’s doorstep, demanding that these users be shut out from the service.
Napster, at the gunpoint of an injunction, dutifully did so, but the results would appear only to have hurt Metallica; they certainly don’t seem to have hurt Napster very much.
Ulrich later was one of many people to give testimony in front of a Congressional inquiry panel lead by Senator Orrin Hatch — himself a musician, a writer of spiritual music — whose final opinion on the matter was, roughly, “y’all figure out a way to play nice before I come over there and spank you”. We were all quite surprised that members of Congress were capable of being hip enough to follow the issues involved, but the transcript shows that they were.
(Of course, this shouldn’t have been all that surprising to those of us who realize that the music labels’ real problem with MP3 is that it makes them mostly useless, but more on that aspect of things in a future column.)
But there’s news of a Napster deal with music industry behemoth Bertelsmann, and accusations that Fanning is selling out, and the future of Napster is somewhat in doubt... and that seems like a good foundation on which to point out that Napster is not by any means all there is to MP3. No, no, not by any means.
All MP3 files are not illegal, as the labels would like you to believe (under the “if you yell it enough times, loudly enough, people will believe it” theory of ‘public relations’); there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of MP3 music files out there that were released by the bands that performed and recorded them. They call it “advertising”, just like radio. And they say it sells them CD’s.
The major venue for such distribution, other than band websites, of course, is mp3.com. The site provides many tools for bands and artists wanting to get their music heard — which is, after all, the hard part in a label-centric world — including LIST.
The major advantage of MP3, though, is eyeballs — like other such aggregators, it’s a great place to be because it gets lots of traffic, some of which you might get to take advantage of if you go there. Of course, that’s the same argument the labels use to explain why they’re a great way to make it in the music business.
So, can MP3.com and it’s ilk live up to the standards set by the labels?
Just ask Billy Wells of local rock (excuse me: rawk) outfit Gunburner:
“MP3.com is great for independently pushing your band... if you don’t mind doing all the work yourself.” Wells and his cohorts went on the road in early ’99, on the MP3.com “Music and Technology Tour”, playing 6 dates in western arenas as one of 4 opening acts for headliners Goo Goo Dolls and Tonic.
“The tour was great,” he says, and he thinks that MP3.com managed things well, but does he think they’ll eventually replace the traditional labels? “Online music is the natural evolution of the music business itself, but it’s only a matter of time before the labels take it over. It’s open frontierland, and I think MP3.com will survive... but they’ll probably end up belonging to one of the majors — if the majors don’t just try to replace them.”
Can the labels replace MP3.com? Can they move fast enough, and reinvent themselves into something that is capable of replacing MP3.com? A recent independent film called “The Target Shoots First”, a documentary shot by Christopher Wilcha of his job with the Columbia House Record Club, and it’s travails attempting to digest a new, young, hip club catalog, suggests that they can’t — at least, not effectively.
So, at least in theory — at least for the moment — mp3.com and sites like it allow you to have your cake and eat it too. Does it work?
I guess it depends on what sort of music you play. Classical pianist John Bell Young thinks so.
He’s earning thousands of dollars by participating in mp3.com’s Payback for Playback program... and selling his CD’s through the site to boot.
So does rock legend David Bowie, who was one of the first major artists to create his own website, and who’s been heard to predict that the web will soon make record companies, and record stores, obsolete. Frankly, I hope he’s wrong about the stores — record stores do not only sell records — but we’ll see.
We’ll take a deeper look at mp3.com, and some of it’s competitors, next time. Stay tuned.
Programs, Patents, and Pennies
MP3 is great: it made it possible to compress music into a format that could practically be fitted onto the types of storage that are currently available for reasonable amounts of money — making computerized music practical.
As noted, that scared pluperfect hell out of the record labels, since it was no longer necessary to own a vinyl pressing plant to bootleg albums. But, while amateur pirates have never been the issue anyway (more on that in a future column), there’s a much bigger problem.
The real problem, you see, is that the compression method used by MP3 is patented (software patents are a whole other thing, and don’t get me started on that) by a German company called Fraunhofer , and while they haven’t been exerting those patent rights in many cases yet, they say they will...
Why does that matter? Ever hear of Linux? Linux is an operating system — a program that runs your computer, much like Windows 98. But it’s free. You can download it off the Internet, much like all that music. That’s possible because the functions it needs to implement are not patented; if they were, they couldn’t be given away for free; someone would need to pay a license fee.
There are free implementations of the MP3 encoding and decoding programs as well, but it’s not strictly legal to use those, even to encode music you wrote and own... without paying royalties on the encoded files.
So, there are other coding schemes in development, some of which will compress the music even more tightly, the most delightfully named of which is probably Ogg Vorbis.
All of these compression schemes have one thing in common: they way that they get the music crunched down that small is by throwing things out. The theory is called psychoacoustics , and it says, roughly, that the physics of the environments in which we listen to music, and the mechanics of our ears, conspire to hide some parts of sounds so that they don’t actually make it to our brains. And if they’re not actually going to be audible, why store them?
Coders like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis take advantage of this, allowing the compression of a CD quality audio signal (176 kilobytes a second, or slightly under 10 megabytes per minute) into a stream of only 128 kilobits per second, or roughly a megabyte a minute. That’s roughly a 10:1 compression ratio, but while you will hear people say that the compression has audible artifacts, I’ve been a fairly critical listener for over 20 years, and — listening to compression of everything from solo guitar and piano to the Electric Light Orchestra — I can’t hear the difference.
I guess you’ll have to judge for yourself.
But apparently it’s good enough for the major CD player manufacturers: the next generation of CD/DVD players are coming out with the ability to play music from data CD-R’s burned with collections of MP3 music files.
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