Daddy, where does music come from?

For non-classical music the streaming subscription services, Rhapsody in particular, provide a rich source of content at a nearly adequate quality level. Recent improvements in the Sonos search tools make it easier than ever to find music even without a computer booted, and almost every popular song I could ever want seems to be accessible. But I still relentlessly build up my own music library.

Why? Four reasons:

Ownership As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I like to own my stuff. I don’t want my access to music to depend on my fleeting financial fortunes or decisions made in corporate meeting rooms or the success or failure of Rhapsody’s business model or the reliability of my network connections or whether all the unions between here and there are happy with their contracts. My own music on my own harddrive (with suitable backups, of course) is the key to sleeping well at night, and maybe even enjoying some bedtime music on my way to dreamland.

Portability I can listen to my own MP3’s anywhere I want - at work (where the company doesn’t allow streaming), weeding in my garden, in my car on long drives, traveling overseas, or out for a run.

Searching/Tagging The MP3 tagging scheme seems to have been first designed by geeks with a degree in musicology from the back of a matchbook, and it’s since mutated into more strains than the flu virus. But its sheer amorphousness and lack of definition makes it clay in my hands, and I’ve used the tags to create schemata that allow me to search, recognize and organize my music easily. All of this is lost when I have to rely on some third-party to notate the music I’m hearing.

Audio Quality Most music services stream at 128 kbps. While there are slight quality differences between formats – MP3, AAC, RealAudio - there is no format where 128 kbps is artifact-free for close listening. It’s fine for casual music doing chores around the house or background music for dinner, but listen closely with good headphones or earbbuds and at times you will have no doubt that it’s compressed My lossy-format standard is MP3, between 192 and 320 kbps VBR. By ripping the music myself I get to choose the codec and the parameters, and I get to adjust loudness and gapless settings as I see fit.

The vast majority of my music is transcoded from CD’s I own. This addresses all four of the issues above. In recent years I’ve been only buying used CD’s, partly because they’re cheaper than new CD’s and partly to thumb my nose, within the bounds of the law, at a record-industry that remains in denial about what century this is. They don’t make a penny when I buy a used CD. Occasionally I buy MP3’s online from eMusic or Amazon, but their selection is too thin to make them my main source.

I have not been tempted to use P2P file sharing. I’ve been amazed at the rationalizations used by that crowd to convince themselves that what they’re doing is not wrong. It’s striking how an adolescent sense of entitlement can energize such creative thinking. A few file sharers admit what they’re doing is illegal but try to ennoble it as a kind of civil disobedience for a greater cause. I can accept a civil disobedience argument in support of a great moral struggle – say, ending Jim Crow or apartheid, or achieving Indian independence. But civil disobedience in the cause of pampered American or European teenagers getting more free stuff is too much of a stretch.

Amazon MP3 Report Card

Last spring iTunes announced they would start selling non-DRM’ed AAC’s in addition to their DRM’ed (Digital Rights Managed) tracks A few months later Amazon.com followed suit, offering MP3’s. This announcements was greeted by a combination of hope and skepticism –

Hope: MP3’s are the only extant technology for playing our music wherever and whenever we want. I can play my MP3’s on my boombox, my car stereo, my cellphone, my Windows PC, my PDA, my Linux box, my Sonos system, and every portable music player ever made. There’s a reason why most people refer to portable music players, generically, as “MP3-players”. Even the best-meaning DRM schemes straitjacket the customer into playing his music only on approved devices and only with specific software. Plus, the various DRM schemes are incompatible with each other: music that can be played on a Zune can’t be played on an iPod, for instance.

Skepticism: The major labels are stuck in some Currier-and-Ives, Norman Rockwell timewarp where the Beaver Cleaver clan all sit down around the family phonograph and bask in the warm glow of the tubes listening to Lawrence Welk, while that juvenile delinquent, Eddie Haskell, skulks outside the window with a thumbdrive of stolen MP3’s that will land him in reform school. There’s no way the industry would release their good music in a non-DRM’ed format.

I know it’s still early days but I decided to run a preliminary test. I’ve been building up a “Jack Radio” playlist for my Sonos system and iPod (see this entry for a description of “Jack Radio”) and I wanted to fill in a few holes in my collection. I identified thirty songs from about 1970 through the 1990’s that I wanted to add. They were all major hits by major bands and all are still in print as CDs. Examples ranged from from Genesis “Land of Confusion” to Phil Collins “In The Air Tonight” to “Tom Sawyer” by Rush to “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys to “Barracuda” by Heart.

My requirement was that the track had to be the original hit version by the band in question, not a later live or acoustic version (unless, of course, that WAS the hit). I looked on Amazon.com for my MP3’s and, as a control, checked for the same songs in non-DRM’ed AAC on iTunes.

The results: Amazon.com had six; iTunes had one! I’ll give Amazon a “C-“ and iTunes an “F”.

So the golden age of legal, DRM-free music distribution has clearly not arrived. Whether this is just because it’s still too early, or whether it’s because the record companies are withholding their best stuff is unclear. In support of the former hypothesis is that fact that there’s such a disparity between iTunes and Amazon – if it was just a case of labels not allowing their music to be DRM-free then I would expect both services to have access (or lack thereof) to the same music. On the other hand, if the labels aren’t withholding their best stuff then how to explain why secondary versions – live, acoustic, tribute-band, and karaoke tracks - of big hits are all for sale? If it was just a feverish rush to digitize a fat library of songs why start with those?

Pandora, Part 1

I recently bought a Sonos system to distribute our music through our house. Sonos is an amazing integration of wireless music distribution technology that will be the subject of some future entries on Music4Peter but I mention it because our Sonos package came with 30 day subscriptions to a pair of online music services, Pandora and Phapsody. Here is Part 1 of my review of Pandora:

Pandora is a little difficult to describe because it is unlike most other music services, internet radio stations or online music stores. It is based on the Music Genome Project, the brainchild of Tim Westergren, a pianist and former film composer, and it attempts to identify a set of traits or “genes” to describe music. The set of traits used is quite large – over 400 – the Music Genome Project does not officially publish the whole list, but diligent amateur investigators have uncovered most of the traits and they may be seen on Wikipedia . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Music_Genome_Project_attributes

The diverse range of musical “genes” can be seen by examples such as “Accordion playing” “Angular Melodies” “Bowed Strings”, “Duo Rapping”, “Lyrics by a Rap Icon”, “Punk Roots”, “Use of Horn Accents”.

The Music Genome Project doesn’t apply the same traits of to all musical genres, so each individual genre gets its own subset. Currently, the supported genres are Pop, Rock, Jazz, R&B, Hip-hop/Rap, Country, Folk, Electronica/Dance, New Age/Ambient and Latin/Brazilian

The Project has a staff of specially-trained workers whose entire job consists of listening to music and discerning these characteristics. A California newspaper, The East Bay Express, had a fascinating article on the process they use for each piece of music

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2006-01-11/news/pandora-s-box

The result of all that intricate work is a huge database of songs and their traits. And whether or not you buy into their theory that this represents a “genome” of music, there is no denying that if you specify a song you like, they have an uncanny ability to hand you a list of other songs you will also like.

The front end to that music discovery experience is called Pandora, and it’s the subject of my next entry.

New Dealer on the Corner

A sage once observed, “Give a man a reefer and he’ll be high for an afternoon; give him some seeds and a Growlight and he can kick his dealer back to Tijuana”

No one owns anything anymore - we rent, we borrow, we pay through the nose every month to the dealer on the corner, who sports the logos of Comcast, Verizon, Ford, and Countrywide. People lease their cars; they take out interest-only mortgages, they rely on cable for their TV reception. I recently decided to subscribe to Verizon’s excellent VZ Navigator for my GPS service instead of buying a dedicated receiver. It was cheap, it was one less device to carry around, and its map database gets updated automatically.

At the moment I have a job. But what if I got fired and couldn’t make the monthly payments? If I don’t own anything I don’t have anything. No more GPS while I’m trying to navigate to my next job interview. But at least I can listen to my music, thanks to my 1300 CD collection, now ripped to MP3, and thousands of other MP3’s I’ve bought online or otherwise acquired.

The music industry wants to change that; they want to be our next dealer, or maybe our next pusher, given how addictive and necessary music is. CD sales are drying up faster than George Bush’s political future. Online track sales aren’t making up the difference. The industry sees salvation in addicting us to a steady stream of services provided by them, for a monthly fee, of course.

I’ve been experimenting with two subscription services – Rhapsody and Pandora – and in upcoming entries I’ll report on my experience. But I’ll tell you now: they are both very good and represent a real threat to the idea of personal music ownership.

Jazzed Banjo

Let me first admit that I hadn’t been paying attention. I knew Bela Fleck played banjo, and that I’d heard him on Folk Alley and on Folk On WGBH. Also he’s appeared once in awhile on my David Grisman Pandora “station”. So I guess I expected something folksy or blue-grassy when I went to see him and his Flecktones at the Summer Music Series at Boardinghouse Park in Lowell, Massachusetts on Friday.

If I’d been paying attention I would have known that the Flecktones won Grammys for best Contemporary Jazz Album in 2001 and 2007. Nor am I complaining - Bela Fleck and the Flecktones on Friday performed one of the best live concerts I’ve heard in years. Resembling at times Weather Report, (ironic considering I’d spent all day looking for weather reports to see if the predicted showers would force a venue change) they produced a smooth electric fusion sound that ranged from hard and high energy to ethereal and almost meditative.

My wife and I showed up 45 minutes before the concert started and still had to sit way in the back row just before the sidewalk. So when I saw the drummer, “Futureman” (Roy Wooten), walk on stage wearing a tricorner hat and playing an instrument that resembled, from the distant vantage point, a cross between a guitar and bagpipes I had to leave the concert. But only long enough to run back to the parking garage and get my binoculars from the car, to better see what the hell that thing was!

Binoculars didn’t help. It took the power of Google after the concert was over to discover that “Futch”, as he’s known, was playing the Drumitar, a guitar/electronic drumkit/systhesizer hybrid he invented. And the same spirit of innovation and musical adventure suffuses the entire band. All the musicians only nominally play what they appear to be playing: the bass guitar played by Victor Wooten (brother of Roy), the various saxes played by Jeff Coffin, who also played flute and recorder, and Bela’s banjo, were all talking (singing?) to banks of synthesizers.

But all the digital devices didn’t obscure the digits that count the most - the talented fingers of the Flecktones. The concert was a joy from start to finish, and featured long solos by every musician and plenty of high-intensity collaborative improvisation. Near the end Bela finally went acoustic on us, in a long banjo solo playing tribute to standards ranging from “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” to “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”. When the rain finally came it didn’t dampen anything but our clothes - the energy stayed high and the audience demanded and received a final encore before we let them go home. I promise to pay attention from now on.

Who Plays Everything?

I’m choosing to start my new music blog by reprising a recent entry from my personal blog “Peterography”, because it introduces my musical tastes, along with my curmudgeonly ‘tude.

In the last few decades popular music has splintered into ever narrower segments. In most big city markets you can tune to stations featuring formats such as Adult Hits, Adult Contemporary, Adult Standards, Classic Hits, Contemporary Hits (AKA “top 40”), Pop Standards, Progressive Rock, Soft Rock, Soft Adult Contemporary, Urban Contemporary, Urban Adult and Urban Oldies. Few ordinary listeners know the difference between these, but the radio industry does, and those categories matter to the executives and program directors who select the songs we hear.

Listeners who like a little variety are bored by this narrow specialization, and those who like a little music from their music stations are bored by all the yakking of the DJ’s, especially during the morning commute when many stations are now double-teaming the poor listener with pairs of happy-talk jocks blabbing endlessly about TV shows and celebrity gossip.

Some listeners are tuning out of terrestrial radio altogether, preferring satellite radio or playlist shuffles on their MP3 players. And some radio listeners are tuning into a new format called “Jack radio”.

“Jack FM” first appeared among a handful of Canadian and US stations in 2002 and the format quickly spread in both countries and is now appearing in the UK. Typical “Jack” stations play a mix of hits from the 1960’s to the present. Most “Jack” stations have no disc jockey, although they may have a canned voice promoting their format or announcing on-air contests. The moniker “Jack FM” is trademarked by Rogers Communications but competing brands are now offering “Bob Radio” or “Joe Radio” Here in the Boston area, Jack radio is called “Mike FM” – WMKK. I listen to them sometimes, especially when I’m near a radio that I can’t connect to my iPod, but Mike FM’s playlist is too small.

On my iPod I have the usual music of my generation, such as Joni Mitchell, the Clash and Johnny Cash, or Diana Ross and ZZ Top. Also, the Allman Brothers, Tori Amos, A-ha and Abba. Not to mention Leonard Cohen and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvis Presley and Elvis Costello. Also, the Bangles, the B-52’s, the Band, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Billy Idol as well as Men at Work, Men Without Hats, Moby, Bob Marley, and Martha and the Vandellas.

But Mike FM’s slogan is “we play everything”, with the word “everything” drawn out with snarky emphasis. And I beg to differ. I’ve never heard Yo Yo Ma on Mike FM, not even playing soundtrack music from “Crouching Tiger”, never mind the Bach Cello Suites. I’ve never heard Miles Davis or Sarah Vaughn or Tito Puente. I’ve never heard Brian Eno or Edward Elgar. I’ve never heard Edvard Grieg, George Gershwin or Max Graham. No Bob Wills, Duke Ellington, Billy Holiday, or Cibo Matto. No Ozo Matli, Battlefield Band, the Peatbog Faeries, the Klezmatics or Evgeny Kissin. But I listen to all those on my iPod.

Mike FM likes to capitalize on their variety by playing “mash ups” and “trainwrecks” of unlikely pairs of artists back-to-back. Their idea of a mash up is Billy Joel followed by Nirvana. You should hear my mash ups. Mike FM doesn’t know anything about “everything”.

Just what the world needs!

Another music blog! Watch this space. Music4Peter is coming soon!