Digital Noise: Music and Tech

This summer's concert season has been brutal for the music industry, with cancellations and discounting galore. Blame the economy, blame the lack of marketable big-name artists on tour, but whatever the reason, concert ticketing giant Ticketmaster (which is owned by concert promoter and venue owner Live Nation) is responding.

In the inaugural post of Ticketology, the new Ticketmaster blog, the company has announced the end of a longstanding annoyance: service charges that get tacked on to the ticket price late in the buying process. Now, when you select a ticket on Ticketmaster's Web site, service fees are included in the up-front price. So, for instance, if I want to buy a ticket to the Arcade Fire's September 29 show in Seattle, I can see immediately that the actual price is $50.71--that's $38.00 for the ticket and $12.71 in various fees. Shipping and other fulfillment charges still can't be included until you complete your transaction, and some venues aren't participating yet.

The other changes include interactive seat maps for some venues, so you can home in on available tickets in precise areas (check out this sample), and a three-day return policy at Live Nation venues (up to one week before showtime) in case you change your mind.

The blog post also hinted that the company is going to be experimenting with pricing in hopes of reducing both scalping (which happens when good tickets are too cheap) and unsold inventory. I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of flexible pricing scheme like the airlines have used since time immemorial.

Music fans love to beat up on Ticketmaster--I certainly have--but these are steps in the right direction, and I hope to see more of this kind of innovation.

This month's U.K. edition of GQ Magazine contains a fairly substantial article from U2 manager Paul McGuinness in which he blames Internet service providers and technology companies directly for the falling sales of recorded music. As he notes in the article, he made a speech on this subject about two years ago and was roundly criticized by various "anonymous bloggers." I've never been anonymous, but I did point out some of the factual inaccuracies and weird assumptions in his speech at the time.

I can't speak for anonymous bloggers everywhere, but I've never said that recorded music should be free. It shouldn't! What I have said is that the recorded music industry must come to terms with the fact that it's competing against free. That's reality, and no amount of wishful thinking or legislation will change it. The problem didn't arise with the Internet. It arose with the Redbook CD standard, which didn't have digital rights management or copy protection built in. It has for a long time been trivially easy to rip an audio CD to a non-protected format, then share the resulting file--not only through the Internet, but through simpler methods like exchanging flash drives and CD-Rs.

The other big problem: McGuinness still seems to believe that many broadband customers signed up primarily to download and share digital content. As he asks in the GQ article, "Do people want more bandwidth to speed up their e-mails or to download music and films as rapidly as possible?" The assumption that the latter is true grossly oversimplifies the scope of the Internet. Has he heard of Facebook? Ever try uploading family photos via a dial-up connection? What about Skype--how does that work via dial-up? Video chat? Online gaming? There are 25 million Xbox Live users now. Does he think that most of them signed up for broadband primarily to download free content?

This is all hair-splitting because, as I said last time, I agree with his solution. The only way the music industry can survive is by embracing subscriptions and working with ISPs to offer subscriptions bundled with broadband and/or mobile access.

This is a very easy thing to propose. But it's going to be insanely hard to get done. The system of calculating and paying royalties is absurdly complex--here's a simplified graphic view, and it's still mind-boggling.

There's also a dirty little secret that the industry seldom acknowledges: a system that compensates artists based on how often people actually listen to them will create a different set of winners and losers than a system that compensates them based on CD sales. Think of all the CDs you've purchased for one song, then shelved after a month or two. Those artists (and their managers, record companies, publishers, limo drivers, and so on) liked the old system. They still want to collect $18 from you for that song--or at least $1 if you download it via iTunes or Amazon. So how do you convince them to embrace a new system that pays them a few cents per stream?

Customers will pay for music, but only if it's more convenient or otherwise better than the methods through which they get free music today. iTunes is successful because it's the most convenient way to get new music onto an iPod or iPhone. Create a better system and we'll embrace it!

However, when I look at the state of subscription music services today, I'm not optimistic. Certain popular artists (the Beatles, for example) are missing, and others (like Pink Floyd) might pull their songs as soon as their contracts expire. Some services aren't available on all mobile platforms, so I can't necessarily switch cell phones and keep my subscription; others (such as Spotify) aren't available in all geographies. Sound quality on streaming files is often noticeably worse than the already crummy MP3s we've been downloading since 1999, and streaming is subject to interruptions depending on the vagaries of your wireless coverage (although on-device caching is starting to solve that problem). Song data and album art is often incomplete or missing entirely.

These are not easy problems to solve. But the companies and people who find a way to do it over the next 10 years will be among the new winners in the music industry.

It's been more than a year (!) since I first tested an early alpha version of the Grooveshark app for iPhone, and now the company has finally jumped through the necessary hoops to get it into the App Store.

Grooveshark's Web site has for several years offered on-demand streaming of just about any song in existence, and it remains one of my favorite destinations. The iPhone app is also free, and it gives you a 30-day free trial, after which you'll have to sign up for a VIP subscription. Still, that subscription costs only $3 a month or $30 a year. That's less than a third of the monthly fee you'll pay to competitors like MOG, Rhapsody, Thumbplay, and Rdio (which just launched last week.)

The app is dated August 5, but Grooveshark began publicizing it on Wednesday, following the company's legal settlement with Merlin, which handles digital distribution for small labels such as Beggars Group and Rough Trade. Grooveshark has previously settled a lawsuit with EMI, but it still faces one from Universal Music.

In my past conversations with Grooveshark, the company has claimed that users post all content to the site, after which it tries to work out any necessary licensing deals with content owners. This has never seemed like a legally airtight strategy to me, but the company has managed to survive for several years and release regular updates and improvements, so it's not like it's sitting around waiting for the axe to fall. Neither should you--if you have an iPhone and love music, there's no better way to see the power of a subscription service.

I downloaded the app and have been checking it out for the last hour or so, and they seem to have fixed the search engine, although it still displays results in an annoyingly random order, and the user interface bugs are gone. It compares favorably on a feature-to-feature basis with other subscription services on iPhone, with features like queuing (so you can add a search result to your current playlist) and a radio function that picks songs similar to the currently playing selection so you don't have to do the work of building your own.

The only place where it doesn't quite stack up is song selection. On one hand, because content is posted by users, it's got songs that don't always show up on other subscription services--full complements of Led Zeppelin and Radiohead, obscure gems by Roy Harper, various one-hit wonders of the 1960s, and even a few clandestine Beatles songs. At the same time, there are occasional gaps: only one song from Pink Floyd's "Animals" album showed up, for instance.

But you don't have to take my word for it: the Grooveshark iPhone app is a free download, the 30-day trial is free, and it doesn't require a credit card.

Every major rock festival now features an iPhone app to help you navigate the grounds and find out when your favorite bands are playing, but Lollapalooza, which happens this weekend in Chicago, has a couple of unique wrinkles.

The Coachella iPhone app that I used earlier this year had a friend finder and the ability to post photos, but AT&T's network had trouble sending regular SMS messages, so I didn't even bother trying to use these data-intensive features. To try to get around this problem, the Lolla organizers have teamed up with AOL Lifestream to provide 100 acres of free Wi-Fi access in Grant Park.

The Lollapalooza iPhone app itself boasts integration with Facebook, so instead of having to add friends via e-mail addresses, you can simply use your Facebook log-in and add friends that way. You can also post photos directly from the app to your Facebook wall. The festival doesn't have its own radio station like Bonnaroo, but Slacker Radio has programmed a Lolla station featuring songs by all of the performing artists, and you'll be able to listen to it through the app as well. Maps, artist info, and a customizable schedule are also included, and for those of you who don't smoke or forgot your Bic but still want to show your appreciation in the old-fashioned way, there's a virtual lighter built in.

The iPhone app is available as a free download. There's also a free Android app available for download with most of the same features, minus the radio station.

By the way, Spoon and Devo were both personal highlights of this year's Coachella, and Mavis Staples put on a great set at JazzFest a few years ago. Check them out for me.

Are you fed up with the antics of the big-time concert industry? The continually rising prices? The huge service charges? (Not that this is entirely the fault of the ticket sellers--a percentage is usually kicked back to the artist.) The quick "sell-outs" of all decent seats, followed by the mysterious appearance of marked-up tickets on scalper sites?

Then here's some good news. In June, The Pixies teamed up with digital-music marketing agency Topspin Media to perform an interesting experiment in London. The Pixies--who didn't have an e-mail list before they started working with Topspin--sent an e-mail message to their fans advertising two upcoming gigs at a venue called The Troxy. All tickets cost the same--30 pounds--and were available from a special one-time Web site. At the venue, fans presented their printed tickets, and staffers scanned the barcodes on those tickets using their iPhones.

Here's the brilliant thing: the show had no promoter and no ticket broker. No service fees, no big markups. Topspin explains the details in a blog entry and video posted Thursday morning.

Concert promoter and venue owner Live Nation, which bought Ticketmaster in 2009, is already having enough problems this year--ticket sales are down, and the company recently received some well-deserved scorn for implying to investors that future acts would be able to go from first recording to sold-out concerts in a matter of months rather than years. (I know a lot of bands who could use some of that magic formula, please!)

Direct-to-fan ticketing isn't going to take over right away: artists planning massive stadium tours will probably still need to use a ticket broker like Ticketmaster to serve large numbers of customers quickly, and Live Nation does a lot of marketing to build demand. But in five years, I wouldn't be surprised if most touring artists are using platforms like Topspin's to sell their tickets directly to fans, no middlemen required.

Microsoft's Windows business faces a real threat from Apple's iPad and the impending crop of similar touch-screen devices running Android, Web OS, and other lightweight mobile operating systems. Windows will remain relevant for years to come, but if even 10 percent of potential laptop or Netbook buyers choose an iPad or other competitor instead, that cuts more than a billion dollars out of Microsoft's largest and most profitable business.

That's right: Microsoft now earns more than $10 billion in profit--not revenue, profit--from the Windows desktop operating system every year.

What's Microsoft's answer? At a meeting for Microsoft partners on Monday, the company made its case for slate PCs, which are touch-screen devices running the full Windows 7 operating system.

On one hand, this is exactly what you'd expect from Microsoft; the company that sells hammers turns every problem into a nail. And it's easy to criticize the problems of Windows versus a locked-down system like the iPad running a lightweight mobile OS: boot time, battery life, the need to run antimalware software and install patches, and so on.

In its defense, however, Windows PCs can run sophisticated applications that would choke on a simpler system originally built for mobile apps. The Zune PC software is the perfect example. Music playback on the iPad is adequate, but you don't get many special features. The album art is static, there's no queuing, and Apple only added on-the-fly playlist creation in June.

By contrast, the Zune PC software looks beautiful, with things like scrolling images of the currently playing artist and a "Mixview" that builds a slowly changing graphic display of related albums and artists as you listen. And because it's running on a full PC, it's far more functional, as well--you can rip songs, change song data, create playlists, and so forth. If you've never used it, imagine the Windows-based version of iTunes, only more interesting and fun.

In other words, the Zune client would be a perfect consumer application for Windows-based slates. I don't know if the Zune client is touch-enabled, so that might require Microsoft to do some extra work. More problematically, Windows 7 doesn't come with the Zune client; it comes with the far uglier Windows Media Player 12, which is like iTunes, but not as good.

So if Microsoft is clever about positioning Windows slates as iPad competitors, it will compensate manufacturers such as Toshiba to bundle the Zune client and make it the default player for audio and video--just like it does with Windows Live Essentials (Mail, Photo Gallery, and so on).

A recent trend among live performers is to record a concert, immediately transfer the recording to flash drives, and sell them as fans walk past the merchandise table on their way out. I first heard of Willie Nelson doing this on a Fourth of July show back in 2007, and I saw the Pixies offer a recording of the Seattle show I attended through EMI's Abbey Road Live program last November.

Aderra, which provides turnkey services for musicians who want to record and sell their own shows on USB drives, is offering a new twist: flash drives that give users access to a continually updated stream of new content, including future live performances. The technology is called PushOvr, and its latest customer is a Los Angeles rock band called Killola. Fans can buy a $40 Killola "dog tag" at the band's shows or online. The dog tag is actually a USB flash drive containing the band's three studio albums, including a new album that won't be widely-released until August 10. Whenever the fan plugs the USB drive in to a computer, it checks an online server for new material, such as downloadable recordings and videos. On July 22, the band will stream a live concert over the Web, but you'll have to have one of the USB dog tags plugged in to watch it.

Aderra also offers other options for artists, like the ability to transfer live recordings over the air directly to a fan's mobile phone. Music fans can check out the company's client list, which has links to buy Aderra products from artists like Crowded House, David Grey, and Antthrax. And if you're a touring act and play to more than 300 people a night, Aderra might be able to get you started with no up-front costs--just get in touch.

Vinyl accounts for less than 1 percent of overall music sales, but it's been making a bit of a comeback: sales almost doubled between 2007 and 2008 and grew another 33 percent in 2009, according to Nielsen. That's only 2.5 million records out of a total of more than 370 million albums sold in all formats, but record companies don't see many growing business areas, so they're suddenly jumping aboard.

New vinyl hasn't been this abundant since the mid-1980s--you can even find it in Best Buy and Wal-Mart. I give particular props to independent labels like Merge and SubPop, which issue codes for downloadable MP3s with new vinyl, so I can get them to my iPod almost immediately. Vinyl reissues also seem to be at a 20-year-high--in the last couple of months I've picked up new records from bands I haven't heard since college, like Galaxie 500, Mazzy Star, and the Cocteau Twins.

Unfortunately, as the record industry rediscovers this glorious old format, they're not always getting the details right. For example:

Slow motion. Twice in the last couple of months, I've placed a new record on my turntable and thought that it sounded a little funny. Only when the underwater-sounding vocals kicked in did I realize that I was playing it at the wrong speed. It turns out that these double LPs--Grizzly Bear's "Yellow House" and Caribou's "Swim"--were supposed to be played at 45 rpm, the speed usually designated for 7-inch singles and 12-inch dance remixes. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem--45 rpm albums supposedly offer higher fidelity--but neither of these albums had "45 rpm" marked anywhere on the record or packaging. How was I supposed to guess?

Which side are we on? The term "record label" came from the physical paper label in the center of old records, which invariably had a company logo on them, usually alongside song titles. Physical labels tend to be much more artistic these days, with cryptic graphic designs or illustrations. Unfortunately, most of them don't have any number or letter designating the side. There used to be a rule of thumb for these kinds of labels--side A was the one with the picture, and side B had song titles for the entire album. But that custom seems to have been abandoned. To figure out which side to play first, I often have to squint at the tiny etching at the inner edge of the vinyl, right next to the label, and look for a tiny "A" or "B." If it's a double album, I also have to look for "1" or "2" to figure out which record comes first.

But I just turned it over! Albums with as few as 10 songs are now routinely split into double LPs, sometimes with less than 10 minutes of music per side (I'm looking at you, Sup Pop.) It's one thing for early '60s LPs and punk records to run short--they usually only had 25 minutes of music total. But taking a long album and purposely splitting it up so I have to stand up and walk to the turntable every two or three songs is strange. This isn't a physical limitation: side one of Neil Young's 1990 record "Ragged Glory" runs more than 30 minutes.

Coupon complexity. I greatly appreciate record companies that go to the trouble of offering coupons for free MP3 downloads with vinyl records. But do they really have to make me enter both the UPC code from the back of the record and the alphanumeric code from the coupon itself? I know piracy is a problem, but using two-factor authentication for free MP3s seems like overkill.

Quality control. Vinyl is a lot fussier than CDs--it warps if it gets too warm and can bend from being stacked or stored improperly. This was a real problem three or four years ago--about one out of every 10 LPs I purchased had physical deformities that fouled up the playback. The local record shops were generally pretty nice about taking them back, but one clerk confided that it was common--for instance, every copy of the Sigur Ros box set "In a Frozen Sea" that they sold was almost immediately returned because the records were warped. Quality control seems to have improved dramatically since then, but this store still finds it to be enough of a problem that they've posted a sign explaining that vinyl returns won't be accepted unless the record is broken or unplayably scratched.

Don't get me wrong: I love my vinyl, and don't want to return to the dark days of the early 1990s, when I was forced to buy new releases on CD or (gasp) cassette. I'm just hoping for a little more usability testing.

ExtensionFM is a free Chrome add-on that catalogs every free MP3 file you run across and builds a virtual library. It's an amazingly convenient way to discover and catalog new music without waiting for downloads, and may convince me to use Chrome on a regular basis.

Chrome has always seemed like a solution in search of a problem: I've had Firefox installed on my PCs and Mac for years now and it works fine 99 percent of the time. If I need an alternative I can always go with the built-in Internet Explorer (Windows) or Safari (Mac). Chrome may render some pages more quickly, and I like some of its user interface features, but not enough to switch.

But ExtensionFM actually changed how I think of Web browsing, blurring the line between offline and online in a very seductive way. The basic idea is straightforward: install the add-on, and from that point on, any time you run across a page that has a link to a downloadable MP3 file, ExtensionFM will add a permanent link to that MP3 to its library, which looks a lot like iTunes (or just about any other music player). The ExtensionFM library is always accessible from Chrome--just click the icon in the upper-right corner of the browser, and you'll launch a tab with the library. The library itself lets you organize all the MP3 links by source, artist, or album, and you can stream any song on demand or add it to a queue. If you don't like a song, you can delete it from the library.

The experience is a lot like surfing the Web for free MP3s and downloading every single one of them, except without waiting for downloads. I installed it and after about five minutes of surfing I had an on-demand library containing more than 100 songs from music blogs like Spinner and Brooklyn Vegan, as well as from a couple of Seattle bands that have made free MP3s available on their sites. ExtensionFM will continue to feed new links from these pages into its library with no further intervention on my part--every time the Spinner home page is updated with more free MP3s, they'll appear in my library.

The experience isn't perfect. Some of the listings in the library didn't link to a real sound file, and I had to delete them manually. Some listings had wrong or missing data (no artist name, or a title like "Free download"). It doesn't work at all with files that require you to launch a mini-Flash player to play. And the library could get large and cluttered quite quickly. Nonetheless, if you're constantly on the hunt for new music, this is a great way to access large volumes of free music without having to download each file yourself.

It's also the first really great example I've seen of how Google envisions the future of the Web, in which the lines between offline and online blur and the Web browser becomes the only application you need. Sure, there are plenty of Web apps today--I spend a large part of my day in them, including Google's Gmail service. But most Web apps run inside a browser window and disappear as soon as you close that window, and the application itself is responsible for storing data (usually in a back-end database, sometimes in the browser cache). ExtensionFM is a persistent application that runs in conjunction with the browser regardless of where the browser's currently pointed, and it stores only the links to data, which can come from multiple sources around the Web--the data themselves never leave their original spots. It's a subtle but fascinating difference.