Digital Noise: Music and Tech

I've been reading good buzz about Spotify for several months now, but the noise seems to have reached a fever pitch with recent coverage by music industry blogger Bob Lefsetz and Sunday's announcement that the new U2 album, "No Line on the Horizon," is available on Spotify in several European countries right now--a week before its official worldwide release date of March 2.

Some quick background: the promise of Spotify is music, on-demand, from any computer with an Internet connection. Which sounds a lot like Rhapsody, Napster, Microsoft's Zune Pass, or any other of the countless subscription-based services that have come and gone...except that there's a free ad-supported version. Sort of like what Qtrax was promising, only with streams instead of downloads (and actually available instead of merely promised). Or perhaps sort of like Imeem, only without the confusing attention-deficit-disorder interface.

Or--let's be honest here--like all the dearly departed P2P services of yesteryear, only legal with partners including the four major labels plus independent digital distributors CD Baby and The Orchard. Songs are encoded in the Ogg Vorbis codec, which offers higher quality-per-bitrate than MP3, and distributed on demand using the Torrent protocol.

But of course there's a catch: Spotify is only available in some European countries, and the free version is invite-only, which has made me skeptical. It's like hearing stories about some magical land far away where fairies deliver golden music directly to your earbuds.

Where else are you going to find a bunch of Scientist tunes for free?

My curiosity got the best of me, and I finally wrangled an invitation to the beta version of the free service. I'm happy to report it works exactly as advertised and is unquestionably the best music service I've ever used.

Apart from finally delivering the promise of on-demand music that I've been waiting for since the first time I listened to an audio stream over the Web in 1996 or so, the Spotify designers must be praised for designing a beautifully simple and functional piece of software that combines the best of online and offline so you don't know (or care) which is which.

Somebody in the U2 camp has been paying attention to recent album releases by Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne and Brian Eno, and Paul McCartney's The Fireman project.

Like these forerunners, U2 is kicking off the promotion for its upcoming album, No Line on the Horizon, by offering the first single as a free online stream, and will offer the album in five packages at different price points--from the superfan box format with a CD, DVD, poster, and hardcover book at $66.49 (if you if you preorder from Amazon, otherwise it's close to $100) to the mere standalone CD for a very reasonable ten bucks.

Choices, choices.

(Credit: U2/Amazon.com)

This makes perfect sense: U2, like these other artists, is well-established but past its peak of popularity. By reaching out to its most highly engaged fans--the ones who checked out the single the second it went on sale and will spring for the box set without hestitation--U2 might be able to get them to spread the word to more casual once-fans or younger listeners who think of U2 as their parents' music. (Wow, it hurt to type that.) The old promotional channels--radio, MTV, mass-market billboard campaigns--just don't have the pull they used to, so this is becoming standard practice for album releases by big acts.

To me, U2's last few albums to sound like they were written by committee rather than a band, but the new single has an interesting Moroccan motif that kicks in during the chorus--the band started recording in Fez, Morocco--and the album cover's pretty cool, although U2's not the first artist to use that photo.

In a speech at the Midem music trade show, U2 manager Paul McGuinness claims that Internet service providers bear a portion of responsibility for the sales decline in recorded music. It's so laughable on so many levels that I can't let it pass without comment:

1. File trading's not the sole cause of lower sales. McGuinness, like the RIAA and IFPI and other recording industry bodies, assumes that piracy on P2P networks is the main driver of the decline in music sales. This ignores several studies that have shown that heavy P2P users are also the heaviest music buyers (although those studies themselves are controversial). More to the point, this argument ignores other ways users are getting music for free. I'd guess that friends ripping CDs and swapping music on flash drives account for a fairly large proportion of purchase-replacements--I'm not going to buy a whole record for a song that I heard once on the radio if my friend's already got it and I can just rip it from him. And that's the other big problem: radio. It used to play new music and break new acts. But consolidation has led to exceptionally narrow, lowest-common-denominator playlists, and radio's become irrelevant to hard-core music fans, who drive popularity of new acts.

2. Net neutrality and safe harbor. As Mathew Ingram of The Globe and Mail argued very eloquently, it's absurd and unreasonable to expect ISPs to monitor all traffic traveling their networks for pirated content. Safe-harbor laws ensure that an ISP's not held responsible every time somebody uses their pipe for something illegal--imagine if victims of traffic accidents caused by drunk drivers could sue the state for building roads, or if victims of telephone scams could sue the phone companies. And monitoring is uncomfortably close to giving preferential treatment to content providers in exchange for an extra fee.

An aside: he shows his misunderstanding of the entire situation when he says: "There are many other examples that prove the ability of ISPs to switch off selectively activity they have a problem with: Google excluded BMW from their search engine when BMW started to play games." How is Google an ISP?

3. Broadband demand isn't driven by P2P. McGuinness' assumption that the main driver of ISP fees is P2P music shows the music industry's myopia. As he puts it, "Kids don't pay $25 a month for broadband just to share their photos, do their homework, and e-mail their pals." True, kids don't. Their parents pay the bill--and have been paying since long before P2P music networks became mainstream. People do a lot of things on the Intertubes--read, shop (eBay? Amazon?), blog, send IMs--and all of those things are much faster and more convenient with a broadband account.

4. The hippies cashed out long ago. The funniest and weirdest part of the speech is when he blames counterculture values coming from the West Coast of America for the tacit assumption that music should be free. He may be right that a lot of early techies came out of that community--Steve Jobs attended Reed College, and we all know that Stewart Brand deserves some credit for early online community The WELL--but Silicon Valley's been driven by the profit motive almost since its inception. And it's not like the Grateful Dead was ever a charity organization.

The thing is, I actually agree with his overall thesis: the best future business model for the recorded music industry I can think of is adding a few bucks to ISP fees, watermarking content, then splitting that revenue among rights holders based on how often a particular piece of content is played. The problem is that mandatory fees are unfair to those who couldn't care less about music and might not be legal, while voluntary fees work only if you have some sort of policing mechanism. But these interesting ideas deserve a spokesperson who's a little more familiar with the underlying technology.

(One last dose of vinegar: I can't dispute that U2 has had a lucrative career as a live band, but I saw them on the Zoo Station tour in 1992 and say with confidence that their live show is the weakest part of their act. Great props, great singer, but little variation. Even the ancient Stones swap songs frequently and occasionally stretch out a jam. Flame away.)