Bill Gates has said that prognosticators often overestimate the amount of technological change that will happen in a year, but underestimate the changes that will take place over a decade. With the Zeroes coming to an end this week, and Steve Guttenberg's recent column questioning the viability of recorded music in 2020 as inspiration, here's my pick of 10 trends in music and technology that will shape the next decade.
Will the original iPod become an object of fetishization in 2020, like vinyl records are today?
(Credit: Apple Computer, via Wikimedia Commons)
Songs instead of albums
Musicians will always find ways to record their music--it's a fundamental drive, like painting for a painter or writing for a writer. But I agree with Guttenberg that fewer musicians will release suites of songs organized around a common theme or sound. As much as I love my long-playing records, they arose out of economics rather than art--they were a convenient way for companies to bundle multiple songs (particularly songs that might not have sold as singles) in an affordable package. With digital files already taking the place of physical recordings, there's almost no economic reason for the album to persist. By 2020, the concept of the album will be an anachronism with a few vocal adherents--like vinyl records are today--but most music will be released and consumed as songs.
Streams instead of downloads
Where did we get the idea that digital music has to be downloaded? It started with the CD and file-trading networks--content owners wouldn't sell us music in a form that could be consumed on our computers, so we ripped our own and swapped the files through Napster and its brethren. But now, every time a new song or album comes out, or we rediscover an old act, we have to rip or download the recordings, then transfer them to whichever device(s) we want to play them on. There's got to be an easier way!
If you had access to every song ever recorded, on any device, from any location with an Internet connection, wouldn't you rather pay for that service than buy a new CD or two every month? People say they want to own music, but when it's just a digital file, what do they want to own--a collection of ones and zeroes sitting on a segment of their hard drive? Why bother?
I think the real problem is that today's streaming services don't give you every song ever recorded and don't work on every device, and broadband data access--particularly wireless--is not ubiquitous. Those flaws stem from business problems (licensing, DRM, format incompatibility, and insufficient broadband infrastructure) rather than technology problems. And the business problems are gradually being resolved--look at the introduction of Rhapsody and Spotify for iPhone, and Apple's acquisition of streaming music service (and music locker) Lala. By 2020, most professionally recorded music will be consumed as on-demand streams and people won't pay by the track.
In the cloud rather than on hard drives
Some songs will never be available on demand--think of tracks from friends or obscure independent acts, or live covers (where licensing can be incredibly complicated, involving multiple performers and songwriters). But as users become accustomed to listening to more professionally recorded music on demand, they'll expect their personal collections to be available in the cloud as well. After all, who wants to spend time backing up a 120GB music collection on an external drive, or choosing particular recordings to eliminate in order to clear space on a cell phone?
This is where Apple's Lala acquisition really makes sense--imagine if iTunes served not only as an on-demand music service but also as a locker for songs you'd previously downloaded, ripped, or obtained elsewhere. Suddenly, the 16GB of storage on an entry-level iPhone would seem generous instead of paltry.
Fidelity rather than file size
Once our music lives in the cloud, we'll no longer have to worry about running out of space on our local drives or devices. Microsoft's SkyDrive already offers 25GB of online storage for free, and I could easily see that increasing one-hundred-fold by 2020. That's right: free terabytes of storage. It'll take a little bit longer, but eventually bandwidth--even wireless bandwidth--will increase to the point where streaming lossless digital files makes sense. Listeners will rediscover what they've been missing--detail in the midrange, and tons of information at the low and high ends of the spectrum--and the era of the MP3 will be looked back (and down) upon as the dark ages of audio quality.
Extras become standard
Again, with concerns over storage gradually disappearing, what's to prevent artists from packaging their music with artwork, lyric sheets, video outtakes, and even interactive applications? Today's artist-specific iPhone apps will become standard. Casual fans will stream a couple songs for free. Hardcore fans will pay to download the entire app and pore over it obsessively.
Production rather than consumption
Digital technology has already democratized the recording process--what used to take tens of thousands of dollars and a professional studio can now be accomplished with a laptop and a free program like Garage Band or Audacity. The results usually don't sound as good, but the experimentation process is fun, and sometimes a gem emerges. Digital technology and the Internet have also made promotion and distribution far easier than they were a decade ago. By 2020, music fans will spend almost as much time creating and sharing recordings with their friends as they do listening to professionally recorded music. Don't believe me? Think of this: 10 years ago, writers were a comparatively rare breed. Now, everybody's got a blog, or at least a Facebook page. In another 10 years, everybody will be a musician--or at least a recording artist.
Suggestions rather than searches
In a world of on-demand music in the cloud, search will become vitally important. Users will want to be able to find songs not only by title, album, or artist, but also by a few snippets of lyrics, or even by humming or playing part of a melody. (Imagine a combination of the voice search function available on Google Mobile with an advanced version of technology like Shazam, which can identify recorded music from a few snippets.) But search is only part of the question--once everything's available, how will users decide what to listen to? By 2020, personalized recommendation services, like those provided by Pandora, Slacker, and MOG, will become even more important than search, and will have to be integrated into any on-demand music service that hopes to survive.
Festivals rather than big concerts
Live music is already a long-tail world--with the exception of old, established acts and the very occasional pop sensation, very few bands can fill large arenas or football stadiums. This trend will accelerate as the last bands from the golden age of radio retire, labels take even fewer big promotional risks, and the market continues to fragment under the explosion in recording releases. In 2020, no single act will be able to sell 50,000 tickets at Qwest Field like U2 hopes to do this summer. Instead, the only shows that will pack large arenas will be festivals, where listeners can pick and choose among dozens of acts and classes of entertainment--just like they'll be doing online.
Spectacle rather than personality
With recording revenue plunging, bands must draw fans to their live shows in order to make a living. The common wisdom today dictates that musicians need a personal connection with their fans. They must blog, tweet, maintain their MySpace and Facebook profiles, and generally act like your next door neighbor who's always pestering you to see his band. There's a word for receiving "personal" messages from your favorite 100 bands--it's called "spam." Eventually, this cloud of self-promotional noise will dissipate, and will be replaced by old-fashioned word of mouth. Only acts that put on a great show--not just singing and playing songs, but entertaining in the old-fashioned sense of the word, with video and stagecraft and humor and spectacle--will cut through the noise. Bonus points for the first act that somehow integrates an audience-accessible game console into their act.
Retro takes on a new meaning
In 2020, the original iPod will be almost 20 years old. As the music world is overtaken by a nearly infinite selection of high-fidelity music, streamed over super-fast wireless connections to increasingly inexpensive portable devices, hardcore nostalgists will drag out their first-generation iPods and fill them with treble-heavy 120kbps MP3s. Meanwhile, grandpa will still be down in the basement with his collection of LP records and his lava lamp.
Susan Boyle's first appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" tallied the most worldwide views on YouTube for 2009, the video site said Wednesday.
The video of the once-unknown singer captured more than 120 million views.
Her video was followed "David After Dentist" (37 million views), "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" (33 million views), "New Moon Movie Trailer" (31 million views), and "Evian Roller Babies" (27 million views).
YouTube also looked specifically at which music videos tallied the most views for the year.
Pitbull's "I Know You Want Me" had more than 82 million views this year. That was followed by two Miley Cyrus songs--"The Climb" and "Party in the U.S.A"--with 64 million and 54 million views, respectively. The Lonley Island's "I'm On a Boat" and Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down" rounded out the top five.
You may notice that Michael Jackson videos, surprisingly, didn't capture more views than the top clips of the year. According to YouTube, the pop star's "Thriller" video was one of the fastest rising searches but it failed to acquire enough views to push it into the top five most-viewed videos.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
About 81 percent of Web users leave an online video page if they encounter mid-stream rebuffering, a new study from video analytics firm TubeMogul has found.
Rebuffering has become a major issue for most Web users. And even though TubeMogul found that just 7 percent of streaming video is slow-loading, it said Web video still can't quite match TV-quality viewing.
"The technology just isn't there yet to have a TV-like experience," David Burch, marketing director at TubeMogul, said in a statement. "And if it's an advertiser hosting video on a branded site or distributing it across the Web, people are just clicking away when they see that spinning wheel."
TubeMogul conducted its study by sampling 192 streams from leading content delivery networks--Akamai, Limelight, Edgecast, and Bit Gravity to name a few. According to TubeMogul, the services it tested "help to power video across thousands of sites." But they aren't quite doing as nice a job as some users had hoped.
TubeMogul found that Limelight performed best out of all the services it tested, experiencing slow load times just 4 percent of the time. It was followed by Panther Networks, Akamai, Edgecast, and BitGravity, respectively.
Although slow load times are still a problem on the Web, it's not stopping people from attempting to view streaming content. A recent Nielsen study found that online video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the last quarter, compared to a year prior. Now the CDNs just need to catch up.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Yet another wireless technology has been finalized by its backers, this one promising even faster speeds than current Wi-Fi specs.
The new WiGig standard has been finalized by the Wireless Gigabit Alliance, a group comprised of such heavy hitters as Intel, Dell, NEC, Toshiba, and Microsoft. WiGig promises speeds as fast as 7 gigabits per second, about ten times quicker than Wireless N (802.11n).
But don't get ready to throw out your existing Wi-Fi network. WiGig will only work over short distances, for instance, within a single room. So it's not designed to replace 802.11, but rather supplement it.
As such, its backers see WiGig as the right technology to wirelessly connect home media equipment, such as PCs, mobile devices, TVs, and video and audio players. Its speed could make WiGig the ideal platform for wirelessly streaming high-definition video to TVs and computers. It's also backward compatible with existing Wi-Fi standards.
"When we launched the WiGig Alliance in May, we announced our plan to complete the industry's first unified 60 GHz specification by Q4 2009, and we are proud to deliver on this promise to the industry," said Dr. Ali Sadri, president and chairman of the Wireless Gigabit Alliance. "We're rapidly paving the way for the introduction of the next generation of high‐performance wireless products--PCs, mobile handsets, TVs and displays, Blu‐ray disc players, digital cameras, and many more."
WiGig will run over the 60GHz spectrum, an unlicensed frequency relatively unused at this point. The spec joins an already growing superfast streaming WiFi playing field that includes WirelessHD and Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI).
Launched in May with 15 members, the WiGig Alliance has since doubled in size with four new companies joining this past quarter. Nvidia has been added to its board of directors, while AMD, SK Telecom, and TMC have jumped on board as contributor members.
The group said the WiGig specification is now ready for member review and is likely to be available to members who want to push it out by the first quarter of next year.
For a while, some believed that the Web and social networks would limit the amount of time people spend consuming video content. But Nielsen's latest A2/M2 Three Screen Report has found that people are actually consuming content on more platforms, thanks to digital video recorders and the Web.
According to the report, which looks at content viewing on television, the Web, and several other platforms, online-video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the third quarter. DVR use was up 21.1 percent, the study found. Surprisingly, 99 percent of video content that's watched in the U.S. is done on a television. So, while Web use is on the rise, it still has a long way to go before the television is supplanted as the "go-to" for consuming video content.
Nielsen shows off video viewing by demographic.
(Credit: Nielsen)Nielsen also looked at how much time the average American spends consuming video content on their TVs, from the Web, or via mobile devices. The company found that the average person watched 31 hours of television per week during the third quarter of 2009. Just 31 of those minutes were spent in playback mode on their DVRs.
Web use, while higher than it has been, was still much lower than television use. Nielsen said that the average consumer spent four hours on the Internet during the third quarter. That user watched an average of 22 minutes of online video per week. Meanwhile, mobile-video consumption was lagging far behind in the third quarter, accounting for just 3 minutes per week of the user's time. Unsurprising to some, teens watched the most video content on their mobile phones, averaging seven hours of mobile-video consumption per month.
A few other interesting tidbits of information: TV viewing followed closely with age. Those aged 65 and older watched an average of 43 hours of television each week, while the average person between the ages of 18 and 24 watched 22 hours of television each week. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 watched the most video content online, averaging 35 minutes per week.
Click here to see the full Nielsen study.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Update 1:32 p.m. PST to include some of the reasons sources say Apple is interested in Lala.
Apple is close to acquiring digital-music service Lala, according to two sources with knowledge of the discussions.
Talks are very advanced, the sources said Friday. One said that the sides have already agreed on terms and have only to sign a final agreement. (Update 6:21 p.m. PST: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are reporting that Apple and Lala have struck a deal.)
Steve Dowling, Apple's spokesman, said the company doesn't comment on rumors and speculation. A representative from Lala was not immediately available for comment.
Lala is a streaming-music site that sells songs for 10 cents apiece and enables users to store their music libraries on the company's servers. But it has gone through multiple iterations and was once known as a CD-swapping service before reinventing itself as a streaming site.
Exactly what Apple intends to do with Lala remains unclear. Right now, Apple is the largest music store online or offline and has made more money than any other music service by selling downloads. CEO Steve Jobs could start a streaming service, but my sources told me Friday that Apple managers are very interested in working with Lala's engineers, who have come up with "a payment and fulfillment system that could save Apple millions of dollars a year."
In addition, Apple wants Lala's founder Bill Nguyen to come over as part of the acquisition, another source said.
Nguyen is a well-known and respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has tried for years to find a music service that is both popular with users (meaning cheap and easy to use) while also generating profits.
According to music sources, the affable Nguyen is also considered my label insiders as one of the more popular figures from the tech sector. Nguyen has typically focused on generating profits as much as whiz-bang technology, which is not always the case with many of his competitors, the sources said.
That said, Lala is not believed to be profitable.
If the deal goes through, it would be the third acquisition of a digital-music site in recent months. MySpace acquired iLike in August and sources said last month that MySpace purchased Imeem.
If Apple is planning some kind of streaming service, the public has shown an appetite for streams that are free of charge and ad-supported.
Many music fans have also clamored for a better way to store music. Right now, most music libraries can be found on an owner's computer hard drive, which can malfunction and potentially destroy thousands of songs. Lala enables users to store songs on the company's servers and access them from Web-enabled devices.
YouTube, which is already trying out the movie rental business, wants to get into TV, too.
Google's video site has been trying to convince the TV industry to let it stream individual shows for a fee, multiple sources tell me.
YouTube already lets users watch a smattering of TV shows for free, with advertising. Now it envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable.
Sources say the site's negotiations with the networks and studios that own the shows are preliminary. But both sides seem optimistic, since models for such deals already exist. No comment from YouTube.
The biggest stumbling block may be consumers. That's because Google is talking about streaming the shows, instead of letting consumers download them to their computers, as both Apple and Amazon do. But the networks and studios, who control pricing, will want to sell the streamed shows at the same price as downloads--they fear that offering them at a different price will force them to go back and rework their existing deals.
Executives at YouTube and TV insist that the disparity is simply a perception problem, and cite studies that show that most people who download TV episodes only watch them once, anyway. But that's a tough sell.
It's also possible that YouTube may skirt the issue by launching a TV rental business without the big hits that Apple and Amazon offer. One possibility: It could start by moving immediately to long and mid-"tail" shows and videos that aren't available other places, and don't have to match existing prices.
No matter how it does it, YouTube is likely to be just one of several outlets trying to get consumers to pay for TV on the Web in 2010.
Among others: In addition to its a la carte offering, Apple is trying to create a monthly subscription service. Hulu, the free TV site co-owned by News Corp.'s Fox, GE's NBC Universal and Disney's ABC, is expected to launch a subscription service of its own. And cable operators like Comcast will be launching different versions of "TV Everywhere" services, which give subscribers expanded access to online shows.
TV executives are generally enthusiastic about all of the above, since they are meant to create additional revenue streams without threatening the industry's existing business. That is: They're supposed to protect it from the digital disruption that has ravaged music, newspapers, etc.
But while Web users have an insatiable appetite for video, they've yet to demonstrate much interest in paying for it. If any of this is going to work, that will have to change.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.
Additional stories from AllThingsD
ComScore on Wednesday released October viewing statistics for online video. And although there weren't any surprises at the top, the figures did provide some interesting insight into how users are consuming video on the Web.
According to the research firm, more than 167 million U.S.-based Web users watched video online during October. All told, they watched 28 billion videos. Google easily led the pack, servicing a whopping 38 percent of all videos Americans viewed online, with 99 percent of those videos watched on YouTube.
In a distant second, Hulu delivered 856 million videos, accounting for 3.1 percent of the market and setting a new record for monthly views. Microsoft came in third, with 451 million videos viewed on its site, capturing 1.6 percent market share.
ComScore also took a look at the total number of viewers that consumed video content during October. The research firm found that the average viewer watched 167 videos during the month. Google sites attracted 126 million unique viewers. Fox Interactive Media followed Google, with 53 million unique viewers. Yahoo sites attracted 50 million viewers. Although Hulu didn't make the top three in unique viewers, the average user watched 20.1 videos on the site during October, representing another all-time high for the site.
Some interesting tidbits rounded out ComScore's report. According to the company, 84.4 percent of all United States.-based Web users viewed online video. The average viewer watched 10.8 hours of video in October, which is especially shocking, considering that the average online video was just 3.9 minutes long.
For the last year or so, it's become clear that the economics of ad-supported streaming music services are not good for their creators or investors. As CNET's Greg Sandoval reported last week, the acquisition of streaming service Imeem by MySpace Music for pennies on the dollar is the latest bad news for the sector, following the bankruptcies of SpiralFrog and Ruckus and the similar fire sale of iLike to MySpace.
Offering your music via Spotify might help you fill up your piggybank.
Who's left? In the U.S., we've still got LaLa, which has the blessing of the major labels and seems to be enjoying dramatically increased traffic (as measured by Alexa) thanks to its recent deal with Google, and Grooveshark, which has kept a low profile. Neither of these services is purely ad-supported--particularly LaLa, which hopes to charge customers for downloads and "permanent" streams once they surpass a quota of 50 free streams a month.
But the service most often cited as the future of online music is Spotify. It's only available in Europe right now, but it seems like everybody who tries it loves it, myself included. Spotify offers a premium service as well, which offers portability and higher-quality streams, but the free service offers unlimited ad-supported streams, and that's the service that has everybody so excited.
But there's one small problem with the Spotify-as-savior story: it doesn't pay artists very well. According to this story in a Swedish publication, as translated and explained by the TorrentFreak blog, Spotify delivered more than one million streams of Lady Gaga's hit single "Poker Face" over five months. From these streams, she reportedly earned about 1,150 Swedish kronor--about $167--from the Swedish agency responsible for paying royalties. That's not even enough to cover the cost of four tickets to her upcoming concert in San Francisco.
If this story's true, why would any artist agree to make songs available on Spotify? With these kinds of payouts, it looks like music business expert Donald Passman is right--advertising is never going to support an online music service.
I have a love song to write. I don't know yet whether it will be a tragic ballad or an exuberant ode to the triumph of happiness. But it's a love song for sure: I have fallen for Spotify, the latest buzzworthy "free music" service. After months of trying to find a great way to find and listen to music online, I believe I have met my match.
No, Spotify technically isn't available in the U.S. just yet, though the U.K.-based company hopes to bring the software stateside by the end of the year. My acceptance of an invite code sent by a generous friend therefore may or may not have been in gross violation of some international laws or statutes or regulations. But that's OK. Spotify, we can have an illicit romance for now.
You see, I needed this in my life. I had been thinking about "music discovery" of late. Last week, at the tail end of a trip in which I had been covering Google's splashy Los Angeles debut of its music search service in partnership with MySpace and Lala, I was sitting in the lobby of the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, a shameless hipster magnet designed in the manner of tacky Southwest-desert motels and which features a constant soundtrack of semi-edgy music picks from '90s-era Britpop to lo-fi and LCD Soundsystem remixes. As a parade of attractive, Sunset Strip rocker types drifted to the check-in desk, I was sitting next to a cactus, intermittently holding up my iPhone to a speaker, using audio-recognition app Shazam to find out exactly what was playing.
Considering the cooler-than-thou crowd, I probably looked awfully silly. But Shazam has been my preferred method of music discovery because I just haven't found anything else I really like. Queuing up a Pandora station makes for great party music, but I've never been enthralled by its recommendations for me. Music blog aggregator Hype Machine has very well-done charts to track the songs that are getting blogged and tweeted about the most, but they can be a little bit predictable once you've already listened to the latest mashup of Kanye West and MGMT. I use Last.fm, owned by CNET News parent company CBS, to tabulate listening-history charts, but have never found myself hooked by its recommendations or radio stations. (Sorry, bosses.)
Social music and discovery services are a mess, frankly. Some of them have terrible user interfaces, and others are slowly becoming the victim of poorly conceived business models (many of which relied too heavily on advertising strategies that have yet to bear fruit) and ill-fated licensing agreements with the major labels. Still others, in striving to get a leg up on competitors, veered into editorial curation--exclusive album-listening debuts, promotions and tie-ins, and the like. That can make for a whole lot of clutter.
Then along came my Spotify invite, and everything changed. The service makes no attempts on the surface to be an "influencer" in and of itself, instead just offering access to full-length streams of just about any song. That's daunting at first. When you first load up Spotify, you're greeted with basic top-music charts that are notably uninspiring (Black Eyed Peas? Kings of Leon?) and searches don't bring you anything other than, well, what you searched for. Social-networking features like Facebook and Twitter sharing are sparse and well-hidden. If you don't know where to look, it can be a little bit dull.
Instead, the "discovery" process is left up to third parties. Create a playlist on Spotify, and you can assign it an HTML address so that when people click on it (assuming they have Spotify accounts) the playlist will open right up. A popular U.K. music blog called Drowned in Sound has a feature called "Spotifridays," where a selection of popular music from that week is packaged into a Spotify playlist, eliminating the need to click around through various Web browsers and streaming-music embeds. A friend sent me a link to Drowned in Sound's playlist of top songs of the first half of 2009. I was set for the next 7.6 hours.
Then, this happened: My Amazon MP3 bill started escalating as my "shopping cart" filled up with songs from bands I'd never heard of before, like the Veils, Let's Wrestle, and the Big Pink. The no-brainer Spotify platform, and how easy it is for anyone to use it to create playlists and share them in a way that doesn't involve a single wacky embeddable widget, was making me buy music.
But Spotify's long-term prospects are still hazy. Its dual business models, monthly subscriptions (for ad-free accounts and access to its iPhone app) and advertising for free accounts, have historically failed to hold up in the face of the micropayments-based iTunes. CEO Daniel Ek has even acknowledged that profits aren't flooding in yet and accused the labels of inflating licensing fees. The specter of SpiralFrog, another hyped free-music service that went down in flames earlier this year, is still in recent memory.
It's also unclear as to how the Spotify service, currently available in Sweden, Norway, the U.K., Finland, France, and Spain, will fare in the U.S. when it arrives here. Google's new music search feature, which is right now restricted to the States, may give a big advantage to competitors MySpace Music and Lala as search traffic is directed there. There's also the potential money drain: Government regulations over licensing fees last year. Digital music, you could say, is an industry with a lot of emotional baggage.
Generally, when there are glaring roadblocks in a new relationship, it's a red flag that you shouldn't get too attached. But this is one where I'm willing to fight to keep it alive. I hear there's a chance I'll be shut out of Spotify entirely in a few weeks unless I tweak my IP address somehow to fool the service into thinking I'm in one of its approved countries. Or unless I cough up the money for a premium subscription.
And I'd consider that. Money can't buy me love, but it could buy me Spotify. And right now they're sort of one and the same.
