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.
Google has often been seen as a competitor to traditional newspapers, but the search giant is now teaming up with two major papers for a new experiment in presenting news online.
Google announced on Wednesday "Living Stories," an experimental new feature designed to deliver news stories, updates, editorials, and multimedia focusing on specific topics, all on one single Web page.
Each Living Story, whether it's on health care, global warming, or the war in Afghanistan, has a permanent URL that you can follow. That page displays everything from headlines to summaries to in-depth articles on that subject. By clicking on the various links on each Living Story page, you can read the articles, view photos, watch videos, and access a time line for an historical view of the topic. As new stories and updates are posted, you can read them on the same page.
The Living Story keeps track of your activity, so it alerts you to updates you haven't yet seen and grays out or collapses older news that you may have already read. You can also subscribe to e-mail updates and RSS feeds of your favorite stories, so you don't need to return to the Living Story page to grab the latest news.
Since Living Stories is a new experiment in the Google Labs sandbox, the number of topics is limited. Google is working with just two media partners to start--The New York Times and The Washington Post. The newspapers decide which topics appear on their own Living Story pages. But Google has plans to develop open-source tools so other outlets can create their own Living Stories. If the concept takes off, it might prove a money maker for other publishers, according to the Times, as they could sell ads on their own pages.
Newspapers have been hit by declining business as more people have flocked to the Web to grab their daily or hourly news fix. In some corners, Google has been seen as the enemy to traditional print outlets. Media maven and Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch has even accused the search giant of stealing his content and threatened to remove his sites from Google listings.
Responding to such concerns, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently wrote an editorial in the Journal in which he argued that his company could actually help newspapers boost their business. And in the face of lower revenues, many news outlets have started to embrace the Web rather than compete with it.
From its perspective, The New York Times seems optimistic that the Living Stories experiment could lead to bigger and better things.
"It's an experiment with a different way of telling stories," said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company, in a statement. "I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting."
Record label EMI this week announced that it will begin selling on-the-spot recordings of concerts.
The name of the initiative, Abbey Road Live, is a bit misleading--it doesn't have anything to do with the Beatles album or the recording studio after which it was named.
Rather, EMI is using its Abbey Road brand to indicate that these aren't low-quality bootlegs but professional multitrack recordings, mixed and mastered on the spot, and sold on CDs, DVDs, or flash drives to fans at the venue. EMI also said on Wednesday that it plans to make the recordings available as streams or downloads, so fans can access them from home.
Instant concert recording isn't new: EMI sub-label Mute Records has had a similar program in place since 2004--according to the press release, 10 percent of fans at a recent Blur concert downloaded the show afterward--and Willie Nelson has been selling flash drives with on-the-spot concert recordings for several years.
But having a large record label like EMI on board legitimizes the practice. It's a no-brainer way for live acts to earn some extra cash--and great for fans as well. I can think of many concerts I've attended, after which I would gladly have paid another $20 for a recording. This should become standard operating practice in the next couple of years.
Drew Olanoff has drawn a short straw. But he wants to make it into a long one.
He started raising money by launching Blame Drew's Cancer, which lets you accuse his pesky Hodgkin's Lymphoma of being the cause of everything that is wrong in your life.
His latest charitable poke in the eye to life's vicissitudes is to auction his Twitter name. You see, Olanoff was clever enough to declare himself to be @drew in the microblogging macroworld.
And there can be few places in the world more replete with munificent egos than Twitter.
So it is heartening that Drew Carey, a very funny man who, in real life, doesn't look like Drew Carey (he was a fellow pupil at a screenwriting course in Vegas a few years ago), has already put some large chips on Orlanoff's craps table.
He has bid $25,000 to upgrade himself from the somewhat shameful address of DrewFromTV to the rarefied air of just Drew. The Twitter Drew.
Carey, the genial host of "The Price Is Right" has, however, vowed to up the ante. He will offer $100,000 (the money all goes to Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong Foundation) if he has more than 100,000 followers by November 9, the closing day of the auction.
At the time of writing, Carey has 24,000 followers, which is some 11,000 more than when he made his initial offer.
So which other twittering Drews might give Carey a bike ride for his money? Sports agent Drew Rosenhaus has at least as much money as ego, so surely he might bid. He already has 30,000 followers. Yes, more than Carey.
Then there's New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. He has almost 24,000 followers and, so my very fine spies in Brees's home town of Austin, Texas tell me, he is a very fine, upstanding chap.
And what about Drew Barrymore, she of only 18,000 followers? Surely she might look toward Carey, throw a little Hollywoodian tantrum, gird her finest theatrical loins and declare: "But, soft, my liege. I am the true Drew." (I always thought Barrymore should do a little Shakespeare.)
Should you be a very rich Drew, or just want to inflate the bidding, please use the #drewbid Twitter hashtag.
May the finest and most generous ego win. And may Drew Olanoff's cancer go right back to the creepy dark hole it came from.
If you're an independent musician looking for as many ways to sell and promote your music as possible, and you or a friend has some experience with software development, you'll want to check out the upcoming Rock Band Network, for which Harmonix and MTV Games plan to begin beta testing in late August.
It's more complicated than posting a song to iTunes, but you'll get placement on a more exclusive platform.
(Credit: MTV Games)To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year.
You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game. Next, you'll have to submit your song for other creators to critique and finally to MTV Games for approval.
Once approved, the song will enter the Rock Band Network. All songs will debut exclusively for 30 days on the Xbox 360, and the Rock Band team will pick stand-out songs to make available to the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles.
Under the network terms, musicians can charge between 50 cents and $3 per song, and they will keep a 30 percent cut of all sales. That may seem small, compared with the 70 percent cut musicians get for selling their songs on iTunes, which requires much less work, but Rock Band is a much more exclusive platform--you're much more likely to stand out here than among the bazillion songs available through Apple's music store.
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RealNetworks began public beta-testing version 12 of its venerable RealPlayer today. Like the last version, the free RealPlayer SP (which stands for "social and portable") lets you rip streaming Flash videos from the Web to your hard drive. What's new: you can also transcode them into appropriate formats for playback on portable devices. If you're using an iPod or iPhone, the RealPlayer will even generously insert the transcoded version directly into your iTunes library.
RealPlayer SP adds an unobtrusive "Download This Video" box whenever you encounter a Flash-based video in your Web browser.
Then I remembered that one of the best features of Microsoft's new Bing search engine, which launched earlier this month, is its video search. (The predecessor to Bing, Live Search, had most of the same video search features as well.) There's nothing wrong with Google's video search, but I personally prefer the Bing interface, and I like the way the video is previewed right in the search results.
Using them together was a breeze--once installed, the RealPlayer automatically adds a small pop-up message to any embedded video in your browser (I tested it with both Internet Explorer and Firefox), asking you if you want to download the video. Transcoding takes a few minutes, particularly for long videos, but in the last half-hour I've managed to rip the new Grizzly Bear video, the reunited Pink Floyd's entire Live 8 performance, and a live version of Ozzy's "Crazy Train" with Randy Rhoads into iTunes in both video (H.264) and audio-only (MP3) formats. All came from different original sources, but all were available through Bing.
I'm particularly impressed with the RealPlayer's video-to-audio transcoder--my 8GB iPhone is way too small to fit a lot of videos on it, and transcoding video to audio files has been a bit of a hassle in the past. Now I can do it on the fly, as I download them. Kudos to RealNetworks on a nice piece of software.
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The new Blu-ray-enabled Vaio notebook starts at $879.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--Even as Blu-ray Disc and Blu-ray player sales are growing, Sony is looking to build out its larger strategy surrounding the company's high-definition disc products.
At a small press event here Thursday, the company introduced a new feature of BD-Live and a new piece of Blu-ray hardware.
MovieIQ will be included on some high-profile releases from Sony starting in September. It's essentially IMDb live--while a movie is playing, facts about casting, directors, production, and actors' filmographies pop up onscreen. It's powered not by IMDb, but by Gracenote, creators of CDDB, which Sony purchased just over a year ago.
It's the kind of feature intended to keep people from pausing a movie and hopping online to ask questions like, "I totally recognize that actress, but from what movie?" It's also meant to build on the inherent capability of Blu-ray players that have Internet access. Sony has tried to do this by allowing BD-Live access to exclusive trailers and some trivia games, but MovieIQ seems like something that users would engage with repeatedly, not something they'd just use once and forget about.
A senior Sony exec at the event, Tracy Garvin, called MovieIQ the "first killer-app for BD-Live." That sounded like an admission that none of the BD-Live features thus far have been all that compelling.
It's clear Sony is still in the process of fine-tuning its BD-Live strategy. ... Read more
Want to feel old? This album came out 15 years ago.
Hulu will live-stream a concert for the first time: Dave Matthews Band at New York's Beacon Theater on June 1.
The online video hub, which announced the event Thursday, will be the only place streaming the concert live, at least legally.
Pop culture brush-up: the Dave Matthews Band was really, really, really huge in the '90s, known for lengthy live jams, for a Phish-like cult following that skewed more preppy than hippie, and for "Ants Marching," which was inescapable if you ever got anywhere near a frat house between 1994 and 1997. People generally loved them or hated them back then, due in no small part to the fact that they were the soundtrack of choice for the jocks rather than the indie kids or nerds.
It's a good fit for Hulu's first live concert broadcast--the site's first live streaming event was a presidential debate last October. The Dave Matthews Band's original Gen-X and Gen-Y fan base is exactly the demographic of 20- and 30-somethings--though not necessarily tech-savvy ones--who would tune into a concert stream online. And conveniently, the date of the show is the day before the band's long-anticipated new album, "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King," hits stores online and offline.
Frontman Dave Matthews was, on an unrelated note, one of the first mainstream musicians to use Twitter actively.
Hulu, meanwhile, is riding the wave of mainstream success in the wake of an edgy TV ad campaign and the big news that Disney would be joining News Corp. and NBC Universal as a partner in the joint venture.
The rumor mill has been all atwitter about a link from Seeqpod's newly sparse home page to the search page for Microsoft's Web site. (Not to be confused with Live Search, Microsoft's Internet search engine.)
Seeqpod was a playable search engine for music files--essentially, its crawlers scoured Web sites looking for MP3 files, then it transformed those MP3s into streamable audio files. It offered its own user-facing Web page, as well as APIs for third-party sites, and was used as the back-end for Songerize (which no longer works) and Bandloop. After being hit by copyright infringement lawsuits from several of the major record labels, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy last month. Now, the company is apparently seeking some big player to buy up its assets, and apparently Microsoft has expressed interest.
Microsoft is set to launch the next version of its search engine in the next month or so. I've seen some test versions, and I don't think it's giving too much away to say that one area where Microsoft hopes to gain ground on Google is by improving its specialized or "vertical" search in areas such as product search.
The rumors say that Microsoft is interested in Seeqpod primarily for people and technology. But if Microsoft really wants to differentiate itself from Google, it should integrate playable music search directly into the next version of its search engine--just as it did after acquiring Farecast, which predicts whether airfare prices for a particular trip are rising or falling.
But Seeqpod may not be the best bet for integrating music search. I think Microsoft should be looking at Grooveshark. It's delivered almost flawless results in my tests, the interface offers a lot of interesting features such as album cover art and on-the-fly playlists, and so far it hasn't been targeted by the labels for copyright infringement, although I don't know enough about law to say if it's on solid legal ground or not.
PALM DESERT, CALIF.--Why would a church live-stream in HD?
That's a question that BitGravity--which was the first to present Monday morning here at Demo 09--wants to answer.
Of course, churches live-streaming is only the tip of the iceberg for Burlingame, Calif.-based BitGravity. The company is likely to be putting most of its energy into selling its technology--which can put an HD stream (or standard-def, of course) on the Web with a delay of just seconds--to media firms, such as TV networks, that want a way to put their content online inexpensively and efficiently.
"Next month, we're going to deliver a product that we believe is truly stunning," Bit Gravity CEO Perry Wu said. "Who wouldn't want a higher clarity picture?"
During his presentation, Wu showed off a stream that the company had set up from its headquarters and which it was controlling remotely. And indeed, Wu and a co-presenter were able to change the stream easily and seamlessly--and with an apparent delay of mere seconds.
Wu said the HD-quality stream can be sent at 1.5 megabits per second, all with no client download. That means for any stream, anyone can watch anywhere on the Internet, which is certainly a nice feature for making content instantly and easily accessible.
Further, the technology is quick and simple to set up. Wu and his colleague demonstrated the ability to get a live stream (in standard-def using the built in camera on a Mac laptop) in under a minute. That certainly is impressive, though it's unclear how many people would want to pay significant money to stream live from their computer's camera.
The live stream (in standard-def) from Demo 09, as presented on the CNET News Demo roundup page.
(Credit: BitGravity)Still, the concept of simplicity, efficiency and low cost (relative to competitors) is the point, and it definitely seems that BitGravity has built something that anyone with a budget for live-streaming, whether in HD or standard-def, can afford. In fact, Wu said that BitGravity's service costs about half of what its competitors charge.
For TV networks or large organizations, this is a big factor, especially given the current economic conditions. But cost aside, the ability to get high-quality streams online in just seconds may trump even that.
For an example of the technology, check out the Demo live-stream at the bottom of our Demo 09 roundup page.
