Digital Noise: Music and Tech

The economy took its toll on digital audio in 2009, with CD sales continuing to decline (even as vinyl makes a resurgence), digital start-ups going bankrupt or disappearing after takeovers, and labels expressing dissatisfaction with would-be digital saviors like MySpace Music. Even so, there was actually quite a lot to cheer this year. The following five products aren't necessarily the best, but to me, they did the most to move the state of digital audio forward in 2009.

Outside the tech press, the Zune HD didn't get the love it deserved in 2009.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Windows 7. Microsoft appears to have recovered from Vista with a new OS that runs efficiently, looks good, and satisfies users. Released on October 22, the latest version of Windows also includes some important new features for digital audio lovers. I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft's decision to support for Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which is the default format used by Apple's iTunes. With this simple move (along with native H.264 video support), Microsoft has finally acknowledged that Windows Media isn't taking over the world any time soon, and will hopefully move to the much more sensible strategy of making Windows a sort of "Swiss Army knife" of digital media. In addition, the new Remote Media Streaming feature lets you access the media library on your hard drive from any PC over the Internet, reducing the need for third-party solutions like JukeFly or online music lockers like Lala. Plus, for professional audio recording, Windows 7 is much more stable than Vista was at launch. Love it or hate it, Windows is still the OS used on more than 95 percent of computers worldwide, and Windows 7 is probably going to be around for a long time--like XP was--so these advances, however overdue, are major news.

Spotify and Rhapsody on iPhone. Music fans have been waiting for the celestial jukebox--the ability to listen to millions of songs on demand from anywhere--for years. In 2009, the music industry finally started coming around to the idea that on-demand access to millions of songs could be the digital business model that saves it. Nowhere was this clearer than in Apple's decision to approve iPhone apps from Spotify in August and Rhapsody in September. These two subscription services--Rhapsody in the U.S., Spotify in Europe--give iPhone users access to millions of songs, on demand, for a few bucks a month. Single-song downloads have been great for Apple, helping iTunes become the top music retailer in the U.S. starting in 2008, but the company may be coming around to the idea that subscriptions--or at least on-demand streaming--represents the future, as evidenced by its acquisition of Lala earlier this month. When Apple finally takes the plunge, Rhapsody and Spotify subscribers can be smug, knowing that they've been able to stream songs to their iPhones since 2009.

Sonos S5. I've been singing the praises of Sonos's multiroom home-audio system for a couple years now. There's no other equivalent system that offers such easy set-up, solid sound, reliable streaming (thanks to its dedicated wireless network), and slick user interface--including an iPhone controller. The only drawback has been its relatively high price of entry, especially compared with cheaper competitors like Logitech. The release of the Sonos S5 this November (read the CNET review) is a major step forward in affordability, giving you single $399 device--receiver, amplifier, and speaker, all in one--that lets you get started down the Sonos path. You'll still need a $99 bridge if you have a wireless home network and want your S5 to be in a different room than your router, but the S5 is Sonos's most affordable product to date, and a move in the right direction for multiroom digital audio.

iConcertCal for iPhone. For live music fans, nothing's more frustrating than missing a show because you happened to miss the listing in your weekly paper. This year saw the release of several iPhone and iPod Touch apps for finding and tracking local gigs, but my favorite remains iConcertCal, released in July for $2.99. (It was briefly removed from the iTunes Store earlier this month to fix a bug, but it's back now and working fine.) Unlike other gig-finding apps, iConcertCal doesn't require you to enter a list of artists you want to track--instead, it grabs all the artists whose music you have on your iPhone. If you want an even bigger selection, you can download the free iConcertCal desktop add-in for iTunes (useful in its own right), link it to your iPhone with a user name and password combination, and the iPhone app will then track every single artist you list in iTunes. You can also use it to see all local shows happening in the next couple of days.

Zune HD. At last! The latest version of Microsoft's portable music player, released in October, has everything its predecessors lacked. Classy industrial design. Touch screen. Gorgeous on-screen interface that makes it easy to find favorite songs or music you've recently added and scrolls through images of artists as you play their songs. Well-designed PC client software that does everything you've come to expect from iTunes and looks way better doing it. It's not perfect--the browser and lack of app store are kind of weak, and I'm still bothered by what sounds like a bass roll-off and lack of oomph in the midrange--but the Zune HD has so many features that iPods still lack, like wireless sync, a built-in subscription music service (with 10 permanent monthly downloads to boot), and the ability to add songs to a currently playing playlist, that it makes my iPods seem a bit out of date. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Zune brand is still tarnished by its initial weak launch, and outside the tech press, the Zune HD didn't get the love it deserved. Perhaps when (if?) Microsoft moves these features into the next version of Windows Mobile, we'll finally see Microsoft considered as a viable competitor to Apple's mobile music juggernaut.

Tomorrow, I'll follow up with the five least welcome digital music products in 2009.

Star 6 is a fun beat-making iPhone and iPod Touch app from Agile Partners--makers of the incredibly useful Guitar Toolkit and Tab Toolkit for guitarists. First introduced last August, Star 6 offers five families of electronic drum beats in categories like Drum and Bass and Electro. You can also download many more free beats from the Star 6 Web site, or upload your own through your Web browser. (Your device has to be on the same wireless network as the computer you're uploading through.)

The six triangles at the top of the screen let you switch between beats. The six triangles below them let you control various tonal qualities by tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch toward and away from you.

Once you've picked a family of beats, you can switch among six individual beats, control the speed, and add wacked-out effects like delay and reverse by touching various icons on the screen. It also lets you manipulate tonal qualities such as pitch and gate by tilting the device backward and forward--it uses the iPhone's built-in accelerometer. (The "speed" setting controls the playback speed of the individual sample, not the beats per minute, or BPM, of the entire track.) You can create and name sessions to recall later, and all sessions are automatically saved in the state you left them.

It's a lot of fun to play with, and could be useful in certain professional situations: you could plug your device into an amp or a PA and use it as a simple drum machine, or to fill the gaps between songs in a live or DJ gig, or simply as an audio backdrop for a party.

Version 1.1. of the app, which became available last Friday in the iTunes App Store, adds a number of important usability improvements. First and foremost is something called "quantizing," which helps you switch between rhythms directly on the beat. Before, you had to hit the button at the exact right time, which could be pretty hard when playing a rave track at 170 BPM, otherwise you'd get an awkward transition. The BPM controller is now on the main screen, and has a new feature that lets you slide the rate quickly up and down. You can also have the BPM affect the pitch, in case you want your samples to sound like they've been inhaling helium as you increase the speed of the track.

It's currently available for an introductory price of $6.99, but will go up to $9.99 on January 18, 2010. So if you're interested, jump on it now. For what it's worth, I get a lot of iPhone apps to test out, and this is one of the few that I'll be keeping.

Start-up company Gigzee recently updated its free gig-finding iPhone app. I love live music, and I'm always happy when there's another iPhone app to help me find out what's going on. But Gigzee's competing in an already crowded space, and it doesn't have much to set it apart from its competitors.

The concept's familiar enough: Gigzee uses the iPhone's GPS transceiver to detect your current position, then lists live music gigs happening in the next two days, within a certain distance (the default is five miles). You can also enter a ZIP code to get gig listings for another area, view gig locations on a map, and customize the date range to show all gigs within the next month, for example.

Gigzee enters the crowded field of gig-finding iPhone apps.

(Credit: Gigzee)

Unfortunately, that's about all there is. There's no way to track favorite artists, which means it falls short of the free JamBase iPhone app. JamBase lets you track favorites on its Web site, then link the iPhone app to your account to see a list of gigs only by those artists. (My absolute favorite app in this category, the $2.99 iConcertCal, saves you this manual process by automatically pulling favorite artist information from your iTunes library, but apparently it has a bug and has been removed from the iTunes store for now, and I can no longer get it to open on my iPhone. Bah humbug!)

More importantly, these apps are only as good as their databases of concert information, and here Gigzee appears to fall short. In a quick test, the JamBase app showed me six live gigs happening within five miles of my location tonight. Bandloop, which is also free, showed me a remarkable 12 gigs. (But Bandloop can only show gigs in the next two days--there's no way to get a longer-duration list, which is why I don't use it.) Gigzee? Only three.

I've spoken to Gigzee founder Anurag Jain, and he's a big-time music fan with lots of interesting ideas, like letting artists link their MySpace profiles and automatically post gigs to the site. But so far, the service still looks like a work in progress.

Amidio makes some heavy-duty musical apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch; I was particularly impressed with StarGuitar, which gives you a virtual guitar with a bunch of preset rhythms, letting songwriters create quick sketches of ideas when they're nowhere near a guitar.

I created a nice vocal loop from the new Beach House single, then dropped it into Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine." It took me about five minutes.

On Tuesday, Apple approved a new Amidio app, called TouchDJ, for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and it's both very impressive from a technical standpoint and a heck of a lot of fun. The iPhone can only play one audio track at a time, but TouchDJ essentially fools it into placing two MP3s side by side for simultaneous, real-time manipulation and playback. It's like a two-track digital DJ setup right on your iPhone.

You get a crossfader to control the balance between the two tracks, plus individual controls for each track's volume, pitch/speed (which aren't independent from one another, unfortunately), equalization (three bands), and effects (the built-in real-time effect sounds like a kind of flanger, and there are several lame samples of a low-pitched robot voice, but you can upload your own). Each track is represented by simple waveform images that use a different color for the bass, which helps you match beats more effectively. A tempobend effect, which lets you quickly bend the speed up or down on either track, also helps you get in sync.

The looping functions were most impressive--you can create a cue and loop mark at any point in either track, then return to the cue with the rewind button, move to the loop mark with the fast forward button, or create an endless loop between the two points. All of this is in real time. If you've got an audio splitter, you can even create a separate cue track for your headphones--for example, to set up a loop in your second track while the first one is playing, without exposing your experimentation to your audience--although this requires some serious processing power, and is recommended only for an iPhone 3GS.

There are a couple caveats.... Read more

If you work in the music business, you probably already know the name Donald Passman. For the uninitiated, his book "All You Need to Know About the Music Business," which was first released in 1991 and comes out in a seventh edition today, is the book on how the music industry works. If you ever wanted to know how major and indie label deals are structured, the different types of royalties that musicians can earn and how they're calculated, what a personal manager does for a band, how much money artists make on tour, where your ticket fees go, or any of countless other nitty-gritty details, this is the book. Music industry people sometimes call it the bible, and they're not joking.

The seventh edition contains numerous updates since the last release in 2006, including the final resolution of the battle over Internet radio royalties, details of how royalties are calculated for iTunes and YouTube, and the latest developments in label deals. I had a chance to talk to Passman on the phone on Tuesday morning about the changes he sees in the music industry and where he thinks it's going.

Q: Since the last edition of the book was published in 2006, what's the biggest change to the industry?
Donald Passman: 360 deals [in which record labels get a cut of the artist's revenue from touring, merchandise, and other sources apart from record sales] are a tectonic shift in the way record deals get done. There was a smattering of them three years ago, but now it's become the norm. Early deals with Madonna and other established artists were really banking deals, where everybody knew the artist's track record and they were making a bet on what the future would be. Deals with new artists are quite different. The labels are saying that they're the only ones really willing to spend money on a new artist's career, and they can no longer make money just in the record business, so they need a cut of this other income.

We're also starting to see some industry patterns in how royalties and payments are calculated for digital music. So far, none of the business models have made a lot of money. Even iTunes doesn't make a huge profit. But part of the problem three years ago was that if you started a streaming music service, you had no idea what you were paying. Now we're starting to see industry patterns.

Do you still think it's worth an artist's time to pay or find funding for a professionally recorded demo in a big studio? Or would you recommend that artists invest that time and money in buying a computer and other home recording gear and learning how to record themselves?
Passman: There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The software that's available now is better than what professional studios used to be like 10 years ago. You can create an extraordinarily good demo in your house. The key is to create a demo that sounds like a hit so they don't have to use their imagination to hear it. People will tell you they can hear a diamond in the rough; they can't.

Do you think the rise of do-it-yourself online services like CDBaby, Tunecore, and Sonicbids will lead to a new thriving "middle class" of musicians--folks that aren't signed to a label, but spend most of their time recording and touring and make a decent living doing it?
Passman: It's a reality today. If you're a niche-type artist and you don't mind staying in your niche, you can make a perfectly good middle-class living that way. If you're more mainstream, you can use those techniques to build buzz and attract a label. Nobody's yet had a major career without a label behind them. I'm certain that's going to change, but for bands that want to be truly international and mainstream, they still need a label.

In your book, you mention that you favor unlimited music-streaming--the "celestial jukebox"--as the most likely future business model to succeed. Do you think ad-supported free services (like Imeem or Grooveshark) will ever be viable?
Passman: I'm skeptical that ad-supported music services will work in a major way. People have had a hard time monetizing music to advertisers because the music is so diverse. Advertisers don't know what type of music they're going to be associated with, so it's hard for these services to get high enough CPMs [impression-based advertising rates]. YouTube's had the same problem: you don't know what kind of video's going to pop up next to your advertisement. Free services will probably be a model, but I don't think they'll be the model.

Why do you think subscription-based services (such as Rhapsody) haven't really taken off?
Passman: They're not convenient enough, they're not truly cross-platform. For me, the ultimate would be anytime-anywhere access to any music for one subscription. On my computer, in my car, on a connected device, whether it's an iPod or something else, on an airplane when I don't have an Internet connection. Not just tied to one or two devices. I'm personally a believer in subscription services. People don't think twice about paying for cable, and when you stop paying it goes away. But with music, there's a kneejerk reaction because we're used to owning it.

We hear a lot of doom and gloom about the death of the music industry. Are you still optimistic?
Passman: I'm optimistic in the longer term. Not for the next few years. I think it'll probably get a little worse, and then we'll bump along the bottom for a while. I don't think we've hit bottom, and that's because I see the trends that are happening now. CD sales are declining and will eventually disappear, and retailers are making it happen. They're cutting back the floor space they devote to CDs, which means less CD sales, which makes them cut back more.

But the digital opportunity is huge. We can sell music to people who've never gone into a record store, people who never listen to music because they stopped listening to the radio at a certain age will now have access. Unfortunately, we're not there, technically or legally. The more pain the industry feels, the easier the legal side gets. The better the technology gets, the closer we get to delivering an experience people want.

If you listen to music on your iPhone or iPod Touch while you're driving, you probably don't exercise much control over your playlist--skipping and pausing songs without looking down at the screen is almost impossible. Fortunately, there are apps for that.

One of many background and font choices that come with SongVoo.

SongVoo, which released version 1.1 last week, is my latest discovery in this realm. It's similar to PlaySafe in that it places a skin on top of your iPhone's music player, superimposing the artist, song, and album name in large letters, and lets you control music playback with simple hand gestures that don't require you to look at the screen--in the case of SongVoo, you touch anywhere on the screen to pause, touch twice to fast-forward to the next song, and touch three times to reverse.

It has several advantages over PlaySafe, however. With PlaySafe, you have to choose songs or playlists and add them to the app before you can start using it, and it can take a little while for PlaySafe to index them. With SongVoo, this process is much more efficient--it added all 800-plus songs on my iPhone in under five seconds.

Alternately, you can begin playing your music from the normal iPod music app and then open SongVoo to superimpose SongVoo's skin on top of it. SongVoo also offers tons of backgrounds and fonts, and lets you switch among them simply by shaking the device. There are also smaller finger-buttons for setting your playlist to shuffle, to loop songs or the entire playlist, and to see detailed song information.

Version 1.1 of the app adds a couple of features that seem geared toward the attention-deficit-disorder set. You can preset the app to skip the intro and/or outro of every song (you set it by time length, such as 25 seconds), and post updates to your Facebook page simply by drawing a "W" on the screen with your finger. (By default, it posts "I am dancing to..." and the name of the song and artist, but you can change the message to something cheekier if you like.) Useful, fun, and only $0.99.

Updated, 4:59 PM PDT: After much experimenting, I was able to access my music library remotely using JukeFly. The problem was, my songs didn't show up in search results, so I assumed JukeFly wasn't working. This assumption was bolstered by the fact that when I tested my connection with JukeFly's settings tester, it said that I needed to check my router. As it turns out, all the songs in my personal library are available under a different link, Library. They are not integrated into search results, and the debugger simply didn't work right.

One of the most interesting digital-media features in Windows 7 allows you to stream music (and other content) from your Windows 7 PC to any other computer over the Internet--essentially, it turns your home PC into a streaming-media server, sort of like Slingbox does for your TV source.

But what if you're not planning on upgrading to Windows 7 anytime soon? JukeFly, which first launched in 2008 and was updated to version 2.0 Wednesday, promises a free alternative for streaming music from your Windows PC (sorry, not Macs) to any other computer over the Internet.

First, you have to download and install a piece of software called the JukeFly Personal Music Server--a process that took about 30 seconds on my Windows XP PC. Then, you log on to the JukeFly Web site and select the folder on your PC that you want to index--it was able to complete indexing more than 3,000 songs in a couple minutes. So far so good. Once complete, you should be able to log into JukeFly from any other computer with an Internet connection and stream every song on your hard drive to that device. (I say "should" because the service might not work with certain firewalls or routers, and might require manual tweaking--a problem that most users won't want to get into.)

Playing the Velvet Underground on JukeFly.

Version 2.0 adds a robust Internet-based player: if you can't get your personal media server to work, or don't want to install the software, or don't have any music on your home computer, the site will compile music from publicly available sources, such as YouTube. This also lets the service work even when your home PC, the music server, is turned off or disconnected from the Internet. So, for instance, if I search for Mr. Bungle, it returns 20 songs from YouTube and other sources, complete with lyrics and biographical information.

JukeFly would be amazing if it combined these public results with my personal collection, but unfortunately it sequesters my library under a separate "Library" link, and I can't search both sources simultaneously. Nonetheless, this is a slick application and Web site, and a great way to get access to tons of music from any PC with an Internet connection. Check it out.

Back in the dark ages before Internet access, staying on top of the coolest new music required some work. You could read about new bands in magazines and newsletters--the more obscure the better--but most music fans had a few people they trusted to be their personal music experts. Record store clerks, friends in bands, and people in the local art scene all competed to be up on the latest new sounds coming out of Austin or Detroit or Seattle, and the rest of us reaped the benefits of this competition.

Miracle Fortress, one of the recommended albums from a real live record store owner, Sonic Boom's Jason Hughes.

Panel, a new Web site and associated $2.99 app for iPhone and iPod Touch, updates this old world of trusted experts for the new world of on-demand digital music. Created by Los Angeles record producer Darius Fong, Panel will enlist a new expert every couple of weeks to recommend two recent favorite albums. The iPhone app lets you stream these albums in their entirety or on a song-by-song basis, and provides information about the album and panelist (this information--but not the music--is also available on the Web site). If you want to buy it, the iPhone app has a link to iTunes, and the Web site links to both iTunes and Amazon's MP3 store. You can even share your recommendations via your Facebook update status or Twitter feed, allowing you to pretend that you discovered this obscure gem all by yourself.

Panel's first expert is Jason Hughes, the owner of one of my favorite Seattle record stores, Sonic Boom. Future panelists, according to the company, will include Justin Gage, who created the Aquarium Drunkard music blog and XM/Sirius radio show, producer and musician Matt Bayles, who used to be part of Seattle band Minus the Bear, and bronze sculptor Peter Harper, who also runs an online Musician of the Month contest from his Web site and happens to be Ben Harper's brother.

Yesterday, I blogged about how the forthcoming Droid won't be an iPhone killer because it lacks the simple sync interface provided by the iTunes desktop application. I neglected to mention an excellent application called DoubleTwist, which offers the easy sync experience of iTunes for a much wider variety of devices, including all the Android phones currently on the market, most BlackBerrys, Sony's PlayStation Portable, and a huge range of other non-Apple products--as well as the iPod and iPhone, if you're so inclined.

DoubleTwist has a large orange Sync button in exactly the same location as iTunes.

Created in part by Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon), who's best known for helping crack the encryption system used on video DVDs, DoubleTwist is available as a free download for both Windows (including Windows 7) and Mac. Plug in any supported device, and DoubleTwist immediately recognizes it, lets you choose content to sync (pictures, videos, and either all your music or select iTunes playlists), and then begins syncing that data with a single click of a button. It also boasts integration with Amazon's MP3 store, giving you a rough equivalent to the iTunes Store. DoubleTwist also has an interesting sharing feature that lets you select any piece of content from within the program and e-mail a link to a streaming version of that content to your friends (the content itself is stored on DoubleTwist's servers). This feature integrates with e-mail address books from Gmail and Yahoo Mail if you want to spread that latest remix far and wide.

DoubleTwist co-founder Monique Farantzos e-mailed me specifically about yesterday's post, so it's a safe bet that the application will support Droid. More to the point, as phone makers continue to miss the importance of iTunes, DoubleTwist is essentially becoming iTunes for those devices. There's one crucial difference: Apple either ships a disc with iTunes with its devices, or prompts you to download iTunes when you install them. For these other phones, you have to know where and how to get DoubleTwist.