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Wednesday, 29 September 2004

Locking Ourselves In ::

Last month, I wrote about Piracy and “Economic National Security” and Keith commented:

The current problem is related to music piracy and movie piracy in that it springs from the recent divorcing of information from traditional (i.e. non-electronic) media. Music is easy to copy and distribute because it doesn’t need tape or a disk; used books are easy to hawk and distribute alongside new ones because they don’t need a store.

A simple fix would be royalties for each sale, both initial and subsequent. However, that can’t happen until information is entirely divorced from non-electronic media, at which time the file formats themselves can support some kind of revenue stream to the copyright holder. If the file finds itself in unfamiliar territory, it won’t open unless somebody sends the author a few pennies.

So it’ll probably even out once we’re all using e-books and iPods.

I had an immediate reaction but postponed replying right away.

Imprisoned Data

I don’t want to see information entirely divorced from non-electronic media. I considered how I can go to my parents’ house and find some of my favorite childhood books. When I left home, I threw out a lot of stuff, but kept every piece of original writing (both music and English). I know where that box is.

I also know where to find the floppy disks containing everything I created on my Fat Mac before I got my first 5 MB hard disk in December 1986. I do have a computer that will read Mac floppies, but I rarely turn it on and have no idea if the floppy drive works. I strongly suspect I do not have a complete set of applications that will both run on that older computer (a lot of those documents were created in copy-protected music software apps) and read those ancient documents.

I mastered a full-length recording in 1989 on a borrowed device that recorded digitally onto a Beta tape. Some years back, I wanted to transfer it to DAT, so I mailed the tape to my friend, who was unable to transfer it without a number of digital dropouts.

I recognize that I should be able to let go of the past. But I hate the idea that my past digital creative output is locked up in proprietary/obsolete formats while my past “analog” output is still perfectly accessible in boxes of notebooks and papers.

OK, it’s my fault for not being a better digital archivist and making sure that my data gets exported to interchangeable formats whenever possible, and periodically transferred to new media.

So I was pleased to read last week about the EU’s decision to use open document formats. Tracking this down, I found nice quote from Tim Bray:

You should have the right to own your own information. It’s your intellectual capital and you worked hard to produce it for your citizens. Sun doesn’t own it, Microsoft doesn’t own it, you own it, and that means it should be living in a nice, long-lived, non-proprietary data format that isn’t anyone’s competitive weapon.

(He wrote more about the EU’s moves and The DRM Debacle earlier this month.)

That’s the problem with digital documents for stuff I create. Now what about the stuff I consume?

I forgot to deauthorize my Mac for iTunes Music Store songs before wiping the boot partition of a hard drive six months ago. Oops. Fortunately I have only purchased around $30 of music, not $30,000 like the ITMS’s biggest spender (as reported by Steve Jobs in a keynote talk earlier this year).

The Death of Rock ‘n Roll

There was a wonderful LA Weekly article, by Alec Hanley Bemis, about the history of the record industry and how it has gotten itself into the sorry state it’s in. Check out this chronological list of the industry’s 10 best all-time selling albums:

1968: The Beatles, The Beatles (Capitol) -- 19 million
1971: Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV (Swan Song) -- 22 million
1976: The Eagles, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 (Elektra) -- 28 million
1977: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours (Warner Bros.) -- 19 million
1979: Pink Floyd, The Wall (Columbia) -- 23 million
1980: AC/DC, Back in Black (Elektra) -- 19 million
1982: Michael Jackson, Thriller (Epic) -- 26 million
1985: Billy Joel, Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II (Columbia) -- 21 million
1992: Whitney Houston, The Bodyguard (Arista) -- 17 million
1997: Shania Twain, Come On Over (Mercury Nashville) -- 19 million

The business model of the big labels is to try to create superstars who sell 10 million albums. They’re having a harder and harder time doing that. Not because of file-sharing. It’s because, as the article’s author Alec Hanley Bemis puts it: “after 1980, the corporate music industry had given up on its golden age in favor of churning out purposely characterless dreck.”

I’m remembering becoming an Elton John (discography) fan when I was 12 or 13. I remember listening to 11/17/70 in particular and being amazed at how different it was from, say, Caribou. I remember reading an interview where he said something about how his approach to writing pop music was to remember that it was utterly disposable. I wonder when he picked up that idea. I suspect I would today enjoy listening to, say, Tumbleweed Connection or Madman Across the Water, and definitely Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. But after that, there’s very little I think I could stand to hear, and a whole lot of albums I’ve never heard of.

And yesterday I came across Chuq’s The Digital Threat to Jazz. He’s commenting on a Newsday article. It mentions that digitally distributed music comes without liner notes. Chuq responds that a lot of that information is available online.

I still buy CD’s. I like having a booklet of art, lyrics, credits, and personal notes from the artist—sitting in a little case right next to the music. Yes, I also like ripping the CD onto my iPod so I can listen in the car. But I bet I’ll still have the CD 10 years after the iPod stops working.

Music that is created with an attitude like Elton John expressed in that interview 25 years ago, that it is disposable, will be treated as disposable by listeners. And I’d like to believe that if music is created from the heart and it genuinely touches a listener, the listener will want to make sure the artist has been paid, and he will want to make sure he has a copy of it that he’ll be able to pull out and listen to again in 25 years.

Maybe this sounds naive in an era of seemingly insatiable “music consumers,” people who assemble such enormous MP3 collections that they can’t possibly savor and get to know any of the music. But as an artist, I’d be happier to know that 50 people listened to a piece of my music 50 times than to know that 2500 people listened to it once.

Now I speak as someone who does not own an audio CD player (broke when I moved; I just use the computer) or DVD player (never owned one, have used the computer for 5 years now). I use software synthesizers when I make music. I send MP3's of my demos to friends. I pay most of my bills electronically; I rarely even take notes on paper. The only things I can remember using a pen for recently are writing a check and addressing an envelope—just twice in the last month. So I’m not a Luddite bemoaning the inferiority of digital media. I’ve bought the whole trip, hook, line, and sinker. I’m just concerned about the longevity of my data—and concerned that the world may be locking its own future cultural heritage up into boxes that, because of the pace of technological change, won’t necessarily be openable in 25 years.

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