Digital Noise: Music and Tech

My brother and I used to walk up to our local drug store and buy LP records from a rack next to the candy bars. One day he bought Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and I bought the live Rush album Exit Stage Left. When we opened them, I became jealous of the stickers and posters in Dark Side, so we arranged a trade, which seemed fair because the Rush record had two LPs in it. He became a Rush fan, I became a Floyd fan, and the rest of our lives followed from that fateful decision. (Not so much, but it makes a better story that way.)

This album is totally worth $30 on vinyl. But it'd be nice to get it for $15.

It's good to know that today's kids might have the same experience: Fred Meyer, a chain of drug stores in the Pacific Northwest, and Best Buy are both beginning to stock vinyl records again. John Paczkowski can scoff all he wants, but I still collect records and am therefore excited about this news for purely selfish reasons. Big box stores stocking vinyl means economies of scale for vinyl manufacturers, which hopefully means I'll never pay $30 again for a vinyl reissue of The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. (It was totally worth it.)

Similarly, John can joke about an iPod Phono, but I've suggested several times that Microsoft build an analog recorder into the Zune software to replace that function in the no-longer-offered Digital Media Plus Pack. What better way to cater to music fans than give them yet another way to get music onto their computers?

Napster launched its Web-based MP3 download store yesterday, and it seems to be the latest digital music whipping boy, with negative reviews in several places.

Let me start with the positives. Napster claims the store has 6 million tracks, which is 50% larger than any other MP3 store out there. They do have a single download of "The Promise" by When in Rome, an obscure 1980s single my wife loves but that iTunes will only let you buy as part of the full Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack. I'm sorry, Apple, but I won't pay more than $0.99 to get that song.

Two album results...but we won't show them to you.

(Credit: Screenshot)

And of course it must be mentioned that every song on Napster's MP3 store is DRM-free, meaning it can be transferred to an unlimited number of computers and devices and will play in just about every music software program known to humankind.

But I'm afraid that Napster still falls short in interface design--a longtime complaint I've had with the company.

Oddly, the Napster home page still features the subscription service far more prominently than the MP3 store, even though the store launched today and will presumably be attracting a lot of onlookers.

When you do find the store, you'll probably recognize it: it looks an awful lot like iTunes rendered within a browser. Which would be fine if it worked as well as iTunes. Unfortunately, there are a few gaps. First, if you have Firefox pop-up blocking enabled, you have to turn it off. Second, when you get a list of search results, they seem to be listed in a random order, making it hard to find a particular item. (Perhaps they're listed by popularity? It doesn't say.) You can arrange them alphabetically, but it takes some hunting and clicking--some of the headers are clickable, some aren't.

Then, there are just some general bugs. For example, when I searched for the new Nick Cave album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig, I got a green bar showing me that two album results were available...but the screen for the results was strangely blank. (See the screenshot.) Huh? Another glitch: when I conducted a new search, sometimes it ignored the changed search terms and re-ran the previous search.

I also ran into the "this MP3 is not available" debacle that this Ars Technica reviewer describes--in this case, it was for a Pink Floyd album I was particularly excited about downloading, an obscure 2005 re-release of two songs from a 1968 movie called Tonight Let's All Make Love in London. But although the album showed up in my search results with a little "MP3" tag next to them, the MP3s aren't actually available for purchase. Insane.

When I first looked at Imeem last December, I was boggled by the site's interface--I couldn't tell if it was a social networking site, a streaming audio and video site, or a library of user-posted content for downloading. At the risk of sounding like Grandpa Simpson or Doug Morris, I dismissed the site as a symptom of widespread attention deficit disorder among the younger set.

It took me about three seconds to find a fairly obscure Pink Floyd song on Imeem.

(Credit: Screenshot)

Last week, market research firm Compete, which measures Web traffic by compiling and measuring data from various sources, reported that Imeem had surpassed Yahoo Music as the number-one streaming music site on the Web, with 58% growth in unique visitors since March 2007. I figured I must have missed something, and took another look.

I still don't understand the appeal of yet another social networking site, but I'm happy to report that Imeem's music-finding feature is 100% better than it was in December--it actually works. I conducted my usual test search for Pink Floyd, and while the results were still an array of personal homepages with widely varying themes and content, the search results listed how many songs were available on each page. Searching for the rather obscure Floyd song "Biding My Time," three results came up. The second result was obviously correct. Clicking on the "more details" tag exposed a big "play" button, so I didn't have to waste a lot of time scrolling and clicking to hear the song. Total time elapsed between search and play: about 3 seconds.

A search for Portishead's Third returned every song on the album. What about that new Scarlett Johansson album of Tom Waits covers? Any good? When I misspelled her name (with two "n"s instead of "s"s) the sponsored listings in the right column alerted me to the right spelling. Tried again, and boom, every song on the album appeared, ready for me to stream.

In other words, a little design discipline and a vastly improved search engine have turned Imeem from curiosity into a useful first stop when you want to sample new music or hear that song running through your head.

Jello Biafra likes short songs, but there's an undeniable pleasure in long songs. "Hey Jude" (7:11) was groundbreaking at the time, especially for a 45rpm single, but it's really a typical three-minute Beatles song with a four-minute outro. To me, the first true rock epic was Pink Floyd's 1971 opus "Echoes" (23:25). Unlike their 1970 record-breaker, "Atom Heart Mother" (23:44), which was four instrumental sections stitched together into a single track, "Echoes" was a real unified song with a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure--along with a really long instrumental mid-section including several minutes of whale sounds. Like all great long songs, the individual parts seem relevant and necessary to the whole, although the funk jam/guitar solo that precedes the whale sounds is a bit overdone and could be used as a bathroom break.

Rick Wakeman eat your heart out: Neil Young's latest studio album has two tracks that top 14 minutes.

Instrumental "post rock" bands like Tortoise, Sigur Ros, and Godspeed You Black Emperor specialize in 10-minute-plus epics, and Fantomas purposely tracked their 2004 album Delirium Cordia as a single 74-minute track, although it consists almost entirely of broken fragmented bits of music (as all Fantomas albums do), plus a 15-minute outro of near-silence.

I picked up Neil Young's latest studio CD, Chrome Dreams II, for a bargain price a couple weeks ago in New York, and finally sat down to give it a straight through attentive listen last night. It's a mixed bag--I liked it a lot better than Pitchfork did, but I'm a big fan of his mid-'70s and early-'90s stuff, which this resembles. But the reason I bought it was the long songs. Neil's never been afraid of stretching a song out to six, seven, even ten minutes, but this one has two all-time stemwinders on it: "No Hidden Path" at 14:26 and "Ordinary People," which clocks in at a Neil-record 18:12. Neither is as strong as his last epic, 1994's "Change Your Mind" (14:39)--the long bent guitar note in the middle of that song is the pivotal point where the entire album (the excellent Sleeps with Angels) changes. But both of the new epics have a nice effect--they're slow and repetitive enough to have a hypnotic or meditative effect, but varying enough to capture your continuing attention. In this random-shuffle quick-twitch short-attention-span world, it's nice to sit in one place and just listen to somebody perform variations on the same theme for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Unfortunately, the music industry is inevitably moving back to a singles-driven business model, enabled by iTunes and other download services, which allow users to buy only the songs they know they like. I'm as guilty as any fan--whenever a long song comes up on random shuffle, I almost always skip to the next track. Long songs just don't fit into the shuffle paradigm--I want to be surprised, to have my mood shifted rapidly between heavy metal and 70's R&B, not sit down and listen to an artistic statement from start to finish. (I collect records for that.)

In this world, I wonder how many artists will feel encouraged to stretch a song beyond the typical three-to-five minutes that most listeners will tolerate in the middle of a playlist. It's sad, but apart from live jams, the long rock epic is probably as dated as a wanking guitar solo and paisley. Of course, there's always classical music.

The Register has an excellent article today on the compact disc, which was first pressed for commercial release 25 years ago. If you've ever been curious about terms like Red Book or 44.1, or wondered why CDs can hold 74 minutes of music, it's worth a read.

I have little to add. Except: Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms was not only the first CD that was recorded all digitally, but it was also one of the first in which the CD had different, longer versions of some of the LP album tracks. I specifically bought the CD for the extended version of "Why Worry," and it remains one of the only recordings I have in both LP and CD formats. It came out in 1985, and I remember that the DJs on my local rock radio station made a big deal out of playing the special CD versions (especially late at night). A mere five years later, I had to search high and low just to find the LP version of Jane's Addiction's Ritual de lo Habitual, which shows how quickly the format completely conquered its rivals.

By way of comparison, iTunes launched in 2003, and although downloads made up only about 10 percent of all music sales in 2006, it's conceivable that CDs could be all but dead in by 2008--the same five-year window that it took CDs to eclispe LPs.

I also like to think that the back cover of Pink Floyd's 1975 record Wish You Were Here anticipates the development of the CD--that disc that the hollow record-industry "suit" is holding out to the audience is the size of a 12" record, but has the translucent silver color of a CD. Not a bad job by album designers Hipgnosis, given that development of the CD didn't begin for another four years.

One of my former neighbors, the Captain, recently informed his sons that he intends to spend their inheritance. His eldest son, who's about my age, helped him with this task by installing a state of the art multiroom digital music system in the Captain's house.

This weekend, I went to the Captain's annual block party, and while I've seen the Sonos system demonstrated at the last couple Consumer Electronics Shows, this was the first time I've seen it in action. My friend kept the set-up fairly simple, with only two zones: Upstairs encompasses the living room, kitchen, and a set of weatherproof wireless speakers in the back yard, while Downstairs is attached to their vintage 1960s stereo system in the basement rec room. Upstairs, the system was playing a selection of Patsy Cline hits, ripped from the Captain's CD collection, for the post-60 generation. Downstairs, we 30-somethings were blasting "Echoes," Pink Floyd's 23-minute opus, featuring several minutes of whale sounds in the middle. The Captain's not a Floyd fan, but his son had preprogrammed Pink Floyd Radio from Pandora, an online service that lets users create and operate personalized online radio stations.

After playing with it in a real world environment, I'm a big Sonos fan. The LCD remote was easy enough that I figured it out in about thirty seconds, and I love the way it plugs into existing sound systems: the vintage stereo still cranks out enough volume to draw the Mrs downstairs with her hands on her hips to give us the "turn it down" glare that we remember from when we were kids. If you're into music, have a house, and like to entertain, it seems like a worthwhile way to spend a grand or so.

As for the real kids? It was Dance Dance Revolution on the PlayStation 2, all day long. It was a little alarming to see the younger kids dancing to the old J Geils hit "Centerfold," but they weren't listening to the lyrics anyway.