The economy took its toll on digital audio in 2009, with CD sales continuing to decline (even as vinyl makes a resurgence), digital start-ups going bankrupt or disappearing after takeovers, and labels expressing dissatisfaction with would-be digital saviors like MySpace Music. Even so, there was actually quite a lot to cheer this year. The following five products aren't necessarily the best, but to me, they did the most to move the state of digital audio forward in 2009.
Outside the tech press, the Zune HD didn't get the love it deserved in 2009.
(Credit: Microsoft)Windows 7. Microsoft appears to have recovered from Vista with a new OS that runs efficiently, looks good, and satisfies users. Released on October 22, the latest version of Windows also includes some important new features for digital audio lovers. I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft's decision to support for Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which is the default format used by Apple's iTunes. With this simple move (along with native H.264 video support), Microsoft has finally acknowledged that Windows Media isn't taking over the world any time soon, and will hopefully move to the much more sensible strategy of making Windows a sort of "Swiss Army knife" of digital media. In addition, the new Remote Media Streaming feature lets you access the media library on your hard drive from any PC over the Internet, reducing the need for third-party solutions like JukeFly or online music lockers like Lala. Plus, for professional audio recording, Windows 7 is much more stable than Vista was at launch. Love it or hate it, Windows is still the OS used on more than 95 percent of computers worldwide, and Windows 7 is probably going to be around for a long time--like XP was--so these advances, however overdue, are major news.
Spotify and Rhapsody on iPhone. Music fans have been waiting for the celestial jukebox--the ability to listen to millions of songs on demand from anywhere--for years. In 2009, the music industry finally started coming around to the idea that on-demand access to millions of songs could be the digital business model that saves it. Nowhere was this clearer than in Apple's decision to approve iPhone apps from Spotify in August and Rhapsody in September. These two subscription services--Rhapsody in the U.S., Spotify in Europe--give iPhone users access to millions of songs, on demand, for a few bucks a month. Single-song downloads have been great for Apple, helping iTunes become the top music retailer in the U.S. starting in 2008, but the company may be coming around to the idea that subscriptions--or at least on-demand streaming--represents the future, as evidenced by its acquisition of Lala earlier this month. When Apple finally takes the plunge, Rhapsody and Spotify subscribers can be smug, knowing that they've been able to stream songs to their iPhones since 2009.
Sonos S5. I've been singing the praises of Sonos's multiroom home-audio system for a couple years now. There's no other equivalent system that offers such easy set-up, solid sound, reliable streaming (thanks to its dedicated wireless network), and slick user interface--including an iPhone controller. The only drawback has been its relatively high price of entry, especially compared with cheaper competitors like Logitech. The release of the Sonos S5 this November (read the CNET review) is a major step forward in affordability, giving you single $399 device--receiver, amplifier, and speaker, all in one--that lets you get started down the Sonos path. You'll still need a $99 bridge if you have a wireless home network and want your S5 to be in a different room than your router, but the S5 is Sonos's most affordable product to date, and a move in the right direction for multiroom digital audio.
iConcertCal for iPhone. For live music fans, nothing's more frustrating than missing a show because you happened to miss the listing in your weekly paper. This year saw the release of several iPhone and iPod Touch apps for finding and tracking local gigs, but my favorite remains iConcertCal, released in July for $2.99. (It was briefly removed from the iTunes Store earlier this month to fix a bug, but it's back now and working fine.) Unlike other gig-finding apps, iConcertCal doesn't require you to enter a list of artists you want to track--instead, it grabs all the artists whose music you have on your iPhone. If you want an even bigger selection, you can download the free iConcertCal desktop add-in for iTunes (useful in its own right), link it to your iPhone with a user name and password combination, and the iPhone app will then track every single artist you list in iTunes. You can also use it to see all local shows happening in the next couple of days.
Zune HD. At last! The latest version of Microsoft's portable music player, released in October, has everything its predecessors lacked. Classy industrial design. Touch screen. Gorgeous on-screen interface that makes it easy to find favorite songs or music you've recently added and scrolls through images of artists as you play their songs. Well-designed PC client software that does everything you've come to expect from iTunes and looks way better doing it. It's not perfect--the browser and lack of app store are kind of weak, and I'm still bothered by what sounds like a bass roll-off and lack of oomph in the midrange--but the Zune HD has so many features that iPods still lack, like wireless sync, a built-in subscription music service (with 10 permanent monthly downloads to boot), and the ability to add songs to a currently playing playlist, that it makes my iPods seem a bit out of date. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Zune brand is still tarnished by its initial weak launch, and outside the tech press, the Zune HD didn't get the love it deserved. Perhaps when (if?) Microsoft moves these features into the next version of Windows Mobile, we'll finally see Microsoft considered as a viable competitor to Apple's mobile music juggernaut.
Tomorrow, I'll follow up with the five least welcome digital music products in 2009.
It's year-end time, and the critics are weighing in with their year-end lists, from the maddening mix of obscure and popular at Pitchfork to the back-and-forth over at Slate.
I'm not a music critic, so I don't get to listen to hundreds of new CDs for free. That means I've missed plenty of the music on these critics' list, though I know I hate No Age and am indifferent to Girl Talk.
Even so, without checking the data, this year seemed pretty good: TV on the Radio, Beach House, and Portishead all made strong impressions, and I like Fleet Foxes quite a bit, though not as much as Pitchfork. But looking back at my master list, I've only got 9 recordings that were released in 2008.
That's my lowest total-by-year since 1995, which is probably my least favorite music year ever. I know the year's not out yet--I have hope for some LPs under the tree--but I'm curious what everybody else thinks. Was 2008 a dud year? Or am I missing some great entries?
Update 8/7/09: Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavilion" is my favorite album of 2009 so far, and I don't imagine that will change. By the rules of the game, I can't have two Animal Collective records on the list, so I changed my 2004 entry to Arcade Fire's "Funeral." I also made some other changes to recent years' favorites.
I stumbled across an excellent post on Google on Nick Carr's blog today, and scrolling through past entries, found this intriguing list of his favorite album from every year since he was born. A couple other bloggers posted their own lists around the same time.
I'm late to the party, but I couldn't resist--especially since last week in my post on '80s music, one commenter accused me of being in my 40s, and therefore naturally drawn to music of my "teenage" years, the '70s. Close, but not quite--I was a little kid in the '70s and graduated high school in 1987.
The rules are one album for each year, and each artist can only make one appearance.
1969: Miles Davis, Bitches' Brew
1970: The Who, Live at Leeds
1971: Funkadelic, Maggot Brain
1972: Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
1973: Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
1974: The Velvet Underground, 1969 (This may violate the spirit of the game, but this live album is VU's best record, so who cares if the band had broken up years before? I listen to this album more than any other released in 1974.)
1975: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
1976: Bob Dylan, Desire
1977: Fela Kuti and the Afrika 70, Zombie
1978: Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo
1979: The Clash, London Calling
1980: Talking Heads, Remain in Light
1981: The Police, Ghost in the Machine
1982: Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
1983: Tom Waits, Swordfish Trombones
1984: The Replacements, Let it Be
1985: Love and Rockets, The Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven
1986: R.E.M., Life's Rich Pageant
1987: Roger Waters, Radio K.A.O.S.
1988: Jane's Addiction, Nothing's Shocking
1989: The Pixies, Doolittle
1990: Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Ragged Glory
1991: Ministry, Psalm 69
1992: Faith No More, Angel Dust
1993: Sisters of Mercy, A Slight Case of Overbombing (A compilation, and thus slightly unfair, but it's the only album from that year I listen to anymore.)
1994: Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
1995: Morphine, Yes
1996: Butthole Surfers, Electric Larryland
1997: Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
1998: Calexico, The Black Light
1999: The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin
2000: Modest Mouse, The Moon and Antarctica
2001: Radiohead, Amnesiac
2002: Godspeed You Black Emperor, Yanqui U.X.O.
2003: The Postal Service, Give Up
2004: Arcade Fire, Funeral
2005: Wilco, Kicking Television
2006: M Ward, Post-War
2007: Battles, Mirrored
2008: Portishead, 3
2009: Animal Collective, Meriweather Post Pavilion
A couple days ago, NPR's All Songs Considered asked listeners to vote on which year had the best music. (The poll is here--you have to answer it to see overall results.) Unsurprisingly given NPR's demographic, the 1960s scored high, with top year 1969 figuring in 9 percent of all responses. More surprisingly, the 1990s also did quite well, with 1991 (grunge) and 1994 (alternative) both scoring 4 percent. There was also a little uptick in 1977--the year punk broke for the first time scored 4 percent. But the 1980s were a bleak wasteland, however, with all years scoring 1 percent or less except for 1987, which scored 2 percent. The ASC folks tried to convince listeners that the '80s had some bright spots, highlighting bands like The Replacements, Talking Heads, Minor Threat, and, um, Escape Club.
The number of albums in my record collection by year.
I had a hard time answering the question. Certain albums stick out--I know that the Beatles' White Album came out 1968, Who's Next was 1971, and Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica was 2000. But a best year? Impossible to say.
So I decided to look at the empirical data. Because I'm a music nerd, I keep a running spreadsheet of every album I own (vinyl and CD), including the year they were originally released. (You fellow music nerds know exactly what I'm talking about--don't pretend otherwise.) First I scrubbed the data, making sure that things like greatest hits albums and movie soundtracks, where the release date was years or decades away from the actual recording dates, were not counted.
Then with Excel's useful COUNTIF function, I discovered that 1970 is my personal winner, with 30 albums. By decade, the '70s were tops with 216 albums, followed very closely by--gasp--the '80s with 195 albums. Next up were the '90s (156), the '00s (112 with only seven years and eight months gone), the '60s (94), the '50s (9), and the '40s (1--can you guess which album it was?).
So no, the '80s didn't suck. You just have to dig a little deeper.
I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.
DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, and eMusic has become the second-most-popular music download service (after iTunes) thanks in part to its longstanding insistence on selling DRM-free MP3s. A year from now, DRM will be irrelevant and hardly used in digital music. All four labels will agree sell their songs without DRM on Amazon. Nearly every iTunes audio (but not video) file will be DRM-free, and Apple will get rid of the "Plus" designation. Some music subscription services like Rhapsody and Microsoft's Zune Pass might retain DRM so that users can't cancel their subscriptions and keep the songs they've downloaded, but they'll be the last holdouts--and some of them might try eMusic's approach of limiting monthly downloads rather than limiting compatibility and usage with DRM.
3G iPhone and iTunes. A 3G iPhone is a fairly safe prediction, given that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson already let it slip, but I think there'll still be a small surprise embedded in the announcement: iTunes 3G, a service that will come with the phone and give users anytime-anywhere downloads of any audio content in the iTunes Music Store. Impulse buying will go through the roof.
No Zune phone. Microsoft won't release an iPhone competitor this year--at least not one with hardware designed by Microsoft. The company might release some sort of software update or client application that allows Windows Mobile users to play songs from the Zune Marketplace and transfer them from the Zune PC client software to their phones, but even that probably won't happen until 2009. And it'll sink like a lead balloon against v3 of the iPhone, at which point Microsoft will bend to the inevitable and start building its own phone from scratch.
GarageBand will win a Grammy. Not the program itself, but somebody will make a record using Apple's Garage Band--which comes included with every Macintosh sold--as their primary recording and mixing tool, and that record will win a Grammy award. There's already been a critically acclaimed movie, Tarnation, made exclusively with iMovie, so now it's time for all those bedroom musicians to get into the do-it-yourself spotlight.
Mashups will go mainstream. Have mashups already jumped the shark? The controversy about The Grey Album, in which DJ Danger Mouse combined lyrics from Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' untitled white album, is almost four years old. There was a burst of experimentation from big-time artists like David Bowie and Beck around the same time, but not much since 2005. Nonetheless, I predict that artists and even some labels will begin re-releasing their back catalogs as standalone instrumental and vocal tracks, and fans will recombine like crazy using programs like Garage Band and Splice. At least one mashup will get significant radio play, with the complete approval of the original artists. (Although you might say that Puff Daddy accomplished this 10 years ago.) They might even be incorporated into video games like Rock Band--imagine the challenge of having to sing Abba while the rest of the band plays Judas Priest. By the end of 2008, putting a mere song on your social-networking profile will seem hopelessly old-fashioned.
The campaign--don't call it "marketing"--that preceded Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero release will become the gold standard for building audience engagement for tours, albums, or new artists.
Year Zero will become the precedent. On the plane trip home from visiting family over Christmas, I read Eric Davis's analysis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album, part of the 33 1/3 book series. While a lot of it seemed like a stretch--as is the case with any highly intellectualized deconstruction of rock music--it did remind me of a certain sensation created by certain artists and albums, a sense that the listener is more than a mere consumer, but is in fact an active member in a secret club that only other members fully understand, a sort of musical Masonic society. Think of that Zeppelin album, the Grateful Dead, the Residents, or Secret Chiefs 3. In 2007, Trent Reznor, working with 42 Entertainment, took this kind of mystical clubbishness and updated it for the digital era. USB drives with leaked tracks from the upcoming Year Zero record were surreptitiously placed in bathroom stalls at concert venues. Phone numbers with frightening secret messages were encoded in bursts of static or out-of-phase audio signals. Cell phones were distributed to fans who figured out some of the clues; a phone call placed to those phones summoned them to a secret concert. In 2008, we'll see more of these kinds of musical events that use digital technology to break down the wall between audience and artist.
The world's best offline record store will go online. There's nothing else like Amoeba Records. Its three locations in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offer unsurpassed selection--including cellophane-packaged vinyl I've never seen anywhere else--and seem to be curated by music fans with amazing depth and breadth of knowledge. In 2007, Amoeba took its first tentative steps into digital distribution, releasing exclusive recordings from Gram Parsons and Brandi Shearer in both MP3 and CD formats. In 2008, I predict Amoeba will finally go online in a huge way, offering an unsurpassed quantity of MP3 downloads from every imaginable source: major labels (like Amazon MP3 and the other high-profile stores), independent labels (like eMusic), and do-it-yourselfers (like CDBaby). Look for the nascent Amoeba label to offer distribution on terms never before seen in the recording industry--more of a non-exclusive commission model like CD Baby than a typical all-inclusive marketing-recording-publishing-distribution deal like most labels have favored--and for several high-profile artists who've recently quit their labels to sign on.
The loudness wars will end. It's been repeated so many times, it's become a cliche: today's recordings are mastered too loud, eliminating dynamic range and making it hard to listen to a complete album. In 2008, artists and producers will finally begin to demand a return to proper mastering, and radio stations and record execs will be in no position to contradict them.
The concert business will follow the recorded music business down. It's a bad time to be a big rock concert promoter like Live Nation. According to a recent story in Pollstar, the concert business actually declined in 2007, despite high-profile reunion tours by The Police and Van Halen and David Lee Roth--two acts with so much internal strife that nobody expected to see them on stage again. I say the 15 percent drop in ticket revenues from 2006 to 2007 will be followed by the same or greater drop next year. Music fans are fed up with exorbitant ticket prices, false scarcity, and quasi-legal scalpers, and there are only so many more nostalgia acts to trot out. Where are the young bands that can sell out 20,000-seat arenas for the next 5, 10, 20 years? (And before you call me out on the Arctic Monkeys, let me just counter with Oasis. Huge in the U.K., briefly popular in the U.S., and irrelevant to all but the die-hardest of fans 10 years later.) In other words, the concert business is about to suffer from the main problem that's hurting the recording industry--not MP3s, not piracy, but lack of interest and investment in artists with long-term (as opposed to instant) commercial potential.
Led Zeppelin will play again, but not tour. Speaking of nostalgia, it won't be 1973, but the reunited Led Zeppelin will play a handful of shows in the U.S., focusing on a multi-night stand at New York's Madison Square Garden timed around Robert Plant's 60th birthday on August 20.
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