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?