I tuned into Thursday's conversation between Microsoft's Robbie Bach and financial analysts at CES. Bach is the president of the company's Entertainment and Devices division, which includes Xbox, Windows Mobile, retail channel relationships, and most of the other fun stuff. It also includes the Zune, which, given its lack of financial impact on the company, didn't merit much of his time.
Toward the end however, one analyst (not identified on the recording) suggested that the company's foray into MP3 players had been a waste of time. Today, Microsoft talks about providing software and services on "three screens"--the PC, the TV, and mobile devices. So why did Microsoft make a foray into hardware, which alienated its device-maker partners (remember PlaysForSure?), and probably cost the company tens or hundreds of millions so far.
Bach insisted that music was a required component of the "three screen" experience, and that Microsoft had to be a leader rather than a mere technology provider in this space. If Microsoft hadn't built the Zune, it wouldn't have been able to create the Zune software and Marketplace, which have become pretty solid after a couple false starts. But he admitted that if the company were to enter the space again with perfect hindsight, it would do things differently.
How, exactly? He didn't say. But he did say that regardless of whether Microsoft had built its own MP3 player, it would have changed its relationship with every OEM and "caused just as much disruption." In other words, the Windows Media strategy wasn't working. Consumers didn't want a confusing array of devices and stores and formats and DRM schemes that didn't always work together. They didn't want to think about this stuff at all! They just wanted to rip their CDs, maybe buy a few tracks online, and take all this stuff with them.
My guess: PlaysForSure would have been just as dead. Microsoft would have created a new music brand, a new logo program, new hardware specs for the devices, new client software to replace the Media Player for syncing and library organization (like the Zune client), and a new store that could only be used with this new software and these new devices (like the Zune Marketplace). In other words, there still would have been a clean break between old and new. The only difference is that Microsoft wouldn't have manufactured and marketed the actual Zune devices, and consumers might have had a greater choice of hardware from the get-go. This might have led to quicker innovation--for instance, some forward-thinking OEM probably would have created a touch-screen "Zune" by now.
The only question: after the PlaysForSure debacle, who would have gone along? Which is probably why Microsoft built the Zune hardware in the first place.
Bill Gates skipped the Consumer Electronics Show this year, leaving the coveted opening-night keynote spot to CEO Steve Ballmer.
While Ballmer's always an engaging and funny speaker, the company didn't have much to say: a couple long-rumored deals for Live Search, some Windows 7 features that have already been shown at the Professional Developers' Conference and reviewed all over the Web (the beta will be publicly available by the end of the week), and Kodu, a Microsoft Research project moved to the Xbox 360 (pretty cool, but it's been around for a couple years).
But no Zune for Windows Mobile. No Zune news at all, in fact. And not much on the mobile front, either. I guess we'll have to wait for the GSMA Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona, Spain, in February.
Correction 5:35 p.m. PST: This blog gave an incorrect last name for the head of EMI Music's digital business. He is Barney Wragg.
Because I had to leave Las Vegas on Wednesday, I was only able to catch the first two sessions of the one-day Digital Music Live conference, a conference about technology and the music industry co-sponsored by Billboard and the Consumer Electronics Association (who's behind CES). Nonetheless, the morning speakers had some interesting thoughts.
(Credit:
CEA/Billboard)
First up was Gregg Latterman, president of Aware Records, whose company manages multimillion-selling artists The Fray (which had already been signed to Epic by the time Latterman began managing them) and John Mayer.
Despite the rejection of traditional promotion and distribution by everybody from the youngest MySpace bands to the most-established rockers, Latterman argued that the old ways--terrestrial radio and major label marketing and distribution--are still necessary for artists to sell more than a million records. He acknowledged that it's harder to create million-sellers from scratch--a few years ago, he claimed, a label could put $1 million into promotion and radio and almost guarantee a million album sales--but he noted that many critically acclaimed independent acts just aren't selling in big numbers, citing Bright Eyes (whose last album sold 189,000 copies, according to Latterman) as an example.
He also pointed out something I noted when Radiohead first revealed its tip-jar pre-release download plan for In Rainbows: without EMI, the band might never have built the huge global audience that allowed it to perform this experiment and sign distribution-only deals for the actual full CD.
My favorite insight, however, came in a discussion of how digital downloads are becoming a larger proportion of sales:"it's not fun to buy a record anymore." He didn't expand, but I imagine he was thinking of big-box stores and $18 retail prices.
The next session was a five-person panel on the current state of the industry. EMI Music's head of digital business, Barney Wragg, claimed that moving to DRM-free downloads revitalized the label's sales of digital full albums, as opposed to singles, contradicting the industry's fear that users would cherry-pick fewer tracks in the iTunes age, leading to less revenue per sale. (He didn't reveal exact numbers, but hinted they were significant enough to change top executives' thinking on the subject.)
He also acknowledged that many executives at the majors have had their heads in the sand regarding digital downloads and combating file trading, but pleaded for some tolerance, noting that a lot of artists and publishers refuse to participate in newer forms of distribution for fear it'll hurt their own bottom lines. I'd be crying crocodile tears if I pretended to be too sympathetic, but it was a good reminder that the majors aren't monolithic corporations, but actually must represent lots of parties with conflicting interests and levels of comfort with digital distribution.
There were a few other interesting points in the panel discussion, although 45 minutes seemed hurried.
Ian Rogers, VP of Video and Media Applications for Yahoo, praised the impending end of DRM, claiming that Yahoo Music had been unable to sign many deals--such as one with home automation company Control 4--because of the expense of supporting DRM-protected audio files.
Matthew DeFilippis of publishing rights clearinghouse ASCAP talked about how the organization was never interested in DRM, but cares much more about tracking usage--watermarking could be a useful technology here--and mentioned a system ASCAP is using to monitor songs playing in public places.
Finally, well-known music lawyer Fred Goldring summed up the problem nicely: empowered consumers with an unlimited supply of music directly contradicts the old industry basis of enforced scarcity. The trick is figuring out how to monetize what consumers are already doing. Unfortunately, there are no jaw-droppingly obvious or brilliant solutions at hand, although he and Nettwerk Music Group CEO Terry McBride seemed to lean toward some sort of blanket license applied on ISP fees.
John Falcone already beat me to the punch with a detailed preview of Logitech's Squeezebox Duet, but I'll second his verdict: this looks like a more affordable competitor to the Sonos multiroom digital audio system, which I got a chance to experience in a real home environment last summer. In a nutshell: you connect the base station to any stereo with RCA inputs, and it draws music from your PC over a home wireless network, and lets you control it all with a handheld remote with a color screen. It supports every imaginable digital audio format, and is significantly less expensive than Sonos, starting at $400. More information's available on Logitech's site.
The Squeezebox Duet's remote and base station
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)Optionally, you can use Logitech's free SqueezeNetwork, which automatically aggregates all of your Internet music services--subscription-based services like Rhapsody or Internet radio stations like Last.fm--and lets you listen to these stations even when your PC's off. It's one of the most interesting digital audio products introduced at CES, and I recommend stopping by the booth for a demo if you're here.
California-based Eton makes a wide range of radio-related products, but it started off as the exclusive distributor of Grundig shortwave radios in the U.S., and shortwave is still at the company's heart.
Eton: stylish booth, stylish devices.
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company is showing off the Grundig G4 World Recorder, which not only lets you listen to just about every kind of radio broadcast available (including shortwave from 3,000 to 29,999 KHz), but also lets you record those broadcasts to MP3 files. (There's also a built-in mic for voice recording.)
The device comes with 2GB of built-in flash memory, and has a slot for SD memory cards and a mini-USB port for transferring files back and forth from a PC. It's great way to archive radio information from around the world for use in any way you can imagine--and nothing quite says "international dance floor" like a sample of a news broadcast in Farsi. It'll be available in March for $200.
View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
The non-tech media's been full of articles deploring the inferior sound of the MP3 era. Apparently Pioneer agrees. At CES, the company is demonstrating technology it calls Advanced Sound Retrieval, or ASR, which promises to restore some of the signal lost when audio is compressed into a "lossy" format like MP3 or compressed WMA or AAC.
Technically, it's much tricker to restore signal than it is to cut it--that's one of the first rules of audio recording, which is why you want to get the broadest dynamic and frequency range possible, then pare it down, rather than trying to fill it in later with effects and EQ. What Pioneer appears to be doing is looking at the signal from moment to moment, making an educated guess about signals with frequencies above 15kHz that have been cut, and reinserting those signals.
Pioneer ASR
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)I didn't get to test it at real world volume, in a real car, with music I know and love, so it's hard for me to be objective. But at the booth, when I listened to an MP3 file of Rage Against the Machine with ASR on and off, I definitely noticed a lot more high end with the ASR on. But it didn't sound louder--it's not like the Loudness button you used to see on some stereos (which was basically a compressor...that's another post). And it wasn't as if somebody simply turned up the EQ on the high end. So, it does seem as if Pioneer's doing some pretty sophisticated work here, and it probably will make your compressed audio files sound better--not CD-quality, but better.
ASR is featured in 12 new automotive single-CD players from the company. According to the people at the booth, it's also included in the company's Premier line of products.
As a sidenote, a huge thanks to the person who programmed "Scratch" by Morphine into one of the Gigabeats at Toshiba's booth. Most demo music at CES is brash and trebly, so it was a pleasure to hear all this low-mid--bari sax, upright bass, and a baritone singer. It also happens to a personal favorite: it's one of the only cover songs an old band of mine used to do. It was a great way to take a five-minute break on the floor. And I still think the Gigabeat was a beautiful-sounding MP3 player that got caught in the PlaysForSure crossfire--in fact, that's probably why I enjoy listening to my first-generation Zune so much, as it's basically just a rejiggered Gigabeat.
View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
I stopped by the packed Nokia booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to get an update on the Nokia Music Store announced over the summer. It's already online in the U.K. (PC only), with a library of nearly 3 million songs.
Will the Nokia Music Store PC app be as attractive (and popular) as its CES booth?
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)The Web-based store looks fairly standard. But according to the folks at the booth, later this year Nokia will launch an associated desktop PC application that promises some unique features, including the ability to transfer songs directly from the store to an attached phone via drag and drop (no stop on the PC necessary), and over-the-air sync of playlists from the phone (created on the fly) to the PC. Interesting, but I still think selling DRM-protected WMA files is going to be a problem for it.
Wandering the CES floor among the audio exhibits, with no particular destination in mind, several things caught my eye.
Radiient cofounder Jano Banks, who helped invent HDMI, demonstrated the company's Roomcaster wireless speaker technology. Most such speakers use the 2.4gHz band, which is subject to interference from household devices like cordless phones and microwave ovens. Roomcaster uses ultra wideband (UWB), which operates over a broad spectrum and is less subject to interference. The demonstration featured an HDMI video connection and Roomcaster-enabled wireless speakers, and the sound was clear with no discernable latency against the picture. So far, Roomcaster's still in development, but Banks claimed that several speaker partners are signed up to begin shipping speakers in late 2008.
Dirty little secret: a lot of rock musicians can't read music. (Personal confession: my sight-reading's terrible, and I never learned to read bass clef despite playing bass as my main instrument for the last 15 years.) Piano Wizard has been around for a couple years now, and while it's marketed as a teaching tool for kids, it's a great way for anybody to make the leap from key watching to reading actual sheet music. That's not a huge problem, as most piano players learned the old-fashioned way. It's a different story with guitarists. Hence, Guitar Wizard. It was introduced earlier this year in conjunction with the Fisher Price I Can Play Guitar System, but apparently they're set to introduce a digital interface and fretboard overlay that will let Guitar Wizard be used with a regular guitar. They're demonstrating it at the US Music booth, in the back right corner of the main hall at CES. The company is also working on transferring its technology to game consoles. Imagine Guitar Hero with, like, real guitars.
All your friends could crowd onto the Boomchair Rumbleseat to play Halo 3.
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)If your surround sound system's not quite close enough, there are several companies offering chairs with built in speakers. These chairs are aimed at gamers, but I can think of more imaginative uses for the Boomchair Rumbleseat, with a built in vibrating motor that reacts to particularly loud bass sounds.
A few select reviewers got an early hand on the Ibiza Rhapsody player from Haier, but CES was my first chance and I walked away quite impressed, and wondering again why Microsoft hadn't done this much--or more--with the 2nd generation Zune player.
The 30GB Ibiza Rhapsody from Haier America
(Credit: Haier America)The devices are not exactly objects of art--the 30GB player, available now from Amazon.com for $288, is a simple metallic block, and the forthcoming 4GB and 8GB players look like smaller versions of the same design--but the screen is adequately bright and clear, and the company is offering a wide array of downloadable skins and themes to change the look of the player. But the big questions in my mind were (1) how easy is it to connect to a public Wi-Fi spot and (2) once connected, how easy is the process of streaming and downloading songs?
At the CES booth, the Ibiza passed both tests quite well. It provides an available list of Wi-Fi networks arranged by signal strength--nothing more complicated than connecting to a network on a laptop--and connects easily to the strongest one. A Mozilla-based browser lets you get through any sign-in screen, although the on-screen keyboard is a line of letters across the top, which is a bit kludgey. Once connected, searching from Rhapsody's 4-million-plus library is fairly quick (although text search is limited by that on-screen keyboard) and once a song is selected, it starts streaming within a couple of seconds. The streaming sound quality at least as good as FM radio. (I know they use WMA over the air, but not sure of the bitrate.) The song downloads in the background as you stream it, so next time you can access it from your hard drive.
I also discovered that the underlying software was developed not by Haier, but by Varia Mobile, a Seattle-based company specializing in Linux-based mobile apps. Kudos to them and RealNetworks for coming up with a workable celestial jukebox.
Tonight, Bill Gates gave his last CES keynote before retiring from Microsoft. (Prediction: he'll give a keynote again, but probably not next year). Though entertaining and occasionally educational--Windows Live Photo Gallery got some well-deserved spotlight time for its panorama feature--there wasn't much about digital audio in it.
However, the final set piece featured a Guitar Hero III battle between Gates and Microsoft Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach. Each brought in a ringer--Bach got a Guitar Hero championship who shredded the introduction to Guns N Roses "Welcome to the Jungle." Gates, never to be trumped, brought in Slash, who played the real thing on his Les Paul through a pair of Marshall half-stacks.
As you might expect, the Hero version actually sounded a lot more like the original.
