Tag Archives: music

How recorded music might limit social action

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iPod headphones are ubiquitous on college campuses and many other places. What effect such devices and more broadly, recorded music, might have on modern society is explored in this essay that includes references to sociologists Sudhir Venkatesh and Pierre Bourdieu:

Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh’s answer was the iPod: “In public spaces, serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants. Congrats Mr. Jobs for impeding social change.” Venkatesh’s suggestion was glib, tossed off—yet it was also a rare reminder, from the quasi-left, of how urban life has been changed by recording technologies.

Later in the essay, Bourdieu is presented as the anti-Adorno, the sociologist who argued that music doesn’t help prompt revolutionary action but rather is indicative (and helps reinforce) class differences:

In the mid-1960s, [Bourdieu] conducted a giant survey of French musical tastes, and what do you know? The haute bourgeoisie loved The Well-Tempered Clavier; the upwardly mobile got high on “jazzy” classics like “Rhapsody in Blue”; while the working class dug what the higher reaches thought of as schmaltzy trash, the “Blue Danube” waltz and Petula Clark. Bourdieu drew the conclusion that judgments of taste reinforce forms of social inequality, as individuals imagine themselves to possess superior or inferior spirit and perceptiveness, when really they just like what their class inheritance has taught them to. Distinction appeared in English in 1984, cresting the high tide of the culture wars about to hit the universities. Adorno had felt that advanced art-music was doing the work of revolution. Are you kidding, Herr Professor? might have been Bourdieu’s response. And thus was Adorno dethroned, all his passionate arguments about history as expressed in musical form recast as moves in the game of taste, while his dismissal of jazz became practically the most famous cultural mistake of the 20th century.

This is an interesting analysis. Sociologists of culture have been very interested in music in recent decades. One line of research has insights into “omnivore” behavior, those high-status people who claim to like all sorts of music. (See an example of this sort of analysis here.)

But this essay seems to tap into a larger debate about technologies beyond just recorded music: do computers, laptops, iPods, cell phones and smart phones, Facebook memberships, and other digital technologies serve to keep us separated from each other or do they enhance and deepen human relationships?

Head in the cloud

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Amazon launched its Cloud Player yesterday which, as Wired explains,

can stream your music library to any web browser or Android mobile device. Cloud Player also allows you to download files and create playlists through its web-based interface.

So Amazon lets you store your music on a remote hard drive and stream it to local devices?  Sounds pretty straightforward.  Of course, the record labels don’t think so.  From Ars Technica:

We wondered aloud how Amazon managed to strike such an impressive licensing deal with the record labels, given the fact that Apple seems to still be working out the details for its own digital locker service. It turns out that Amazon hasn’t struck a deal, and seems to be hoping that the record companies will be the ones to blink.

“[W]e do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive,” Griffin added in an e-mail to Ars. “The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes.”

That’s certainly not what the music industry seems to think, though—at least in regards to Cloud Player. In an interview with Reuters, Sony Music spokesperson Liz Young said the company hoped for a license deal but that it was keeping its “legal options open.”

Amazon certainly has made a gutsy play here.  The major labels are currently embroiled in a lawsuit against MP3tunes for providing essentially the same service as Amazon.  According to an amici curiae brief (PDF) in that case, the primary legal issue turns on whether or not Internet streaming necessarily constitutes a “public performance” (which would violate copyright owners’ rights unless licensed).  There is a powerful argument that it does not:

MP3tunes does not transmit music to the general public, nor to all of its subscribers. A particular work in a particular locker will only be transmitted to a user who has placed it there—in other words, after he or she has averred to MP3tunes that she either legally owns the file and have uploaded it to her locker, or that she has legal authorization to access the file on the Web and has sideloaded it into her locker. The subset of MP3tunes users who have uploaded or sideloaded any one particular track (and thus have stated to MP3tunes that they are authorized to do so) still falls far short of the “public” required by the transmit clause.

Of course, the simple fact that it has become necessary to make this legal argument illustrates just how broken copyright law is.  The statute is long, complicated, and muddled enough to lend at least some plausibility to virtually any argument imaginable.  Even an argument claiming that storing one’s own music on a private, password-protected server for convenience violates the letter (if not the spirit) of copyright law.

Stay tuned…

Updated 3/31/2011: Ars Technica has a follow-up piece today that quotes from their interview with MP3tunes’ CEO Michael Robertson (bio from his blog):

The word “streaming” and the word “download” are nowhere in copyright law.  It may be a very logical, common sense position, but all that matters is what the law says. Can you store your own music? Can you listen from anywhere? What if your wife or kids want to listen to it? All those things are completely unchartered [sic] territory.

Of course, as we routinely point out around here, “logic” and “common sense” have absolutely nothing to do with the current state of U.S. copyright law.

Status update: P2P still in litigation

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Nate Anderson at Wired reminds us that “the first file-sharing case in the US to go all the way to trial is still going”:

Filed on April 19, 2006 and progressing through a remarkable three trials, the recording industry case against Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas-Rasset continues to burn through cash and judicial attention.

Thomas-Rasset was at first hit with a $222,000 fine in 2007, which was set aside in 2008. Another jury trial in 2009 ended with a $1.92 million judgment, which was set aside in 2010. In November 2010, a third trial ended with a $1.5 million verdict, which the judge is unlikely to allow (his previous orders suggested that a few thousand dollars per song would be the maximum permissible damages). At the moment, both sides are still arguing over the appropriateness of that $1.5 million damages award.

Almost five years.  Three trials (so far).  What a colossal waste of economic, judicial, and personal resources.

The quality of music in a post-Napster world

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David K. Levine over at Against Monopoly pointed me to a recent paper (PDF) by economist Joel Waldfogel at the University of Minnesota titled “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music since Napster”.  As the title implies, Waldfogel investigates the effects of Napster (and its file-sharing progeny) on the music industry:

Economists generally agree that monopolies are bad. Governments grant some of the basic textbook examples of monopolies for intellectual property, in the form of patents and copyrights. Their bad effects – allowing prices above marginal costs and therefore restricting the supply of output – are thought to be justified by their incentive effects on production. But apart from introspection and anecdotes, we don’t really know much about the effects of remuneration incentives on production in the music industry.…Does the prospect of greater rewards bring forth more music? If so, then the past decade, when the ability for sellers to generate revenue from recorded music has fallen as much as half, should be a dry period for music. This is the question we address in this study. [emphasis added]

Noting that other studies have found undiminished musical output (in terms of volume) in the post-Napster world, Waldfogel attempts to measure musical quality using “a time-constant quality threshold based on critics’ retrospective lists of the best works of multi-year time periods”:

Using indices collectively covering the period since 1960, we document that the annual number of new albums passing various quality thresholds has remained roughly constant since Napster, is statistically indistinguishable from pre-Napster trends, and that album supply has not diverged from song supply since iTunes’ revival of the single format in 2003. We also document that the role of new artists in new recorded music products has not diminished since Napster. [emphasis added]

Waldfogel’s findings will unquestionably prove controversial in many circles.  And, to be sure, copyright policy may be based on considerations other that mere economic efficiency (e.g., John Locke’s labor theory or artists’ moral rights).  If Waldfogel’s findings are verified and generally accepted on their own terms, however, the economic policy implications seem clear:

It is easy to see that file sharing simply increases welfare. Producers lose, but their losses – when consumers steal things they used to pay for – are all transfers to consumers, who now enjoy greater surplus (the price they had formerly paid plus the former consumer surplus). In addition to the transfers from producers to consumers, file sharing also turns deadweight loss – circumstances in which consumers valued music above zero but below its price and therefore did not consume – into consumer surplus. In a purely static analysis, eliminating intellectual property rights benefits consumers more than it costs producers and is therefore beneficial for society.

Quick Review: 21 by Adele

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Even though I listen to a good amount of music, it is still somewhat rare to find an album that really captures my attention. The latest new album to achieve this status is 21, is the recently-released album from British songstress Adele (Adkins). The album has been on the Billboard charts for three weeks since its release, peaked at #1 and now sits at #2 in the Billboard 200. A few thoughts about this album which I have been listening to non-stop for a week:

1. The overall theme of the album is heartbreak – but it sounds like a soulful, engaging sort of heartbreak, the kind you actually might want to hear about over and over again.

2. I particularly enjoy several of the songs. The two songs to open the album are quite good and will make good radio singles. But two songs in the second half of the album are also quite good: Track 7, Take It All, and Track 9, One and Only. Track 7 is just Adele and a piano. Track 9 adds some other instruments but still is just Adele and her feelings.

3.  The arrangements on these songs, similar to the first album, are set up to showcase Adele’s voice. Even when she deviates from the melody, it doesn’t sound like she is preening or showing off.

4. Speaking of the songs, I read a review (or a couple) that mentioned how a lot of the songs sounds alike. I can kind of see the point: once you get past the first two songs, the rest mine similar lyrical ground and primarily feature Adele. This is not an album that has a lot of twists or turns with multiple styles of music or words. My thoughts on this are that the album doesn’t deviate from what Adele does well. To get something different, we’ll have to wait until the next album.

5. One thing I like about the the whole album is that it is unified and does seem to fit the title, a reference to Adele’s age when much of this was put together. This is exactly the age in which you would expect to hear about these upfront and raw emotions. I hope Adele can continue this age-related trend on future albums; this would give us a sort of lifecourse approach. While I think many musicians do this (check out how the themes and styles change as musical artists age and are no longer the young stars they once were), Adele’s first two albums have been more explicit about this. So can the next album, presumably something like 23 or 24,  examine the quarter-life crisis?

(According to Metacritic.com, this album gets “generally favorable reviews” with a composite score of 76 out of 100 based on the thoughts of 29 critics.)

(A side note: I believe the next music album I will review is Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. While I have heard a lot about this band in recent years, I bought this album, the first one I have purchased, on the same day I bought the Adele album. There are two reasons I want to listen to and review this particular album: the band gets good reviews and the subject matter, suburban life, is right up my alley. As far as I know, there are not too many rock albums that explicitly address the suburbs.)

Musical innovation

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As I noted in passing a few days ago when discussing the Brittney Spears’ dispute with the Bellamy Brothers, pop songs are pretty much all alike.

The same goes for music labels’ business models.  Commenting on a recent Financial Times article, paidContent suggests that “new” music services reportedly in development by Apple and Google — allowing individuals to store music on a “hard drive in the sky” — seem to be less “innovation” than “more of the same”:

The idea sticks closely to today’s à la carte, per-track model of buying individual tracks, which itself replicates yesteryear’s model in which music was packaged up in to individual plastic units of consumer product.Growth in this method of buying digital music has basically peaked in the U.S.. Will a hard drive in the sky give it a lift? Unlikely. Some now think that illegal music consumption is so tempting that the industry should effectively mimic this “music like water” approach legally.

Of course, Rhapsody has an all-you-can-eat model, has been available in the U.S. for years, and is a bit player.  Maybe it’s time to start coming up with some actually new ideas…

Oh Canada

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I’ve made the point here before that the music industry inexplicably declines perfectly good revenue sources simply because they are “less” than what they are expecting.  At the risk of Monday-morning-quarterbacking their business model, here’s more proof from north of the border, courtesy of Michael Geist:

Pandora, the popular U.S. online music service filed for an initial public offering last week, provided new insight into hugely popular company that spends millions of dollars in copyright royalties. Pandora users listened to a billion hours of music in the last three months of 2010. Given U.S. laws, the Pandora prospectus notes that it paid for the privilege of having its users do so, with the company spending just over half of its revenue on copyright fees – $45 million in the first nine months of 2010.

The numbers are striking since it points to a growing source of revenue that is largely being missed in Canada. Millions of dollars are now generated from online streaming royalties in the U.S., yet many companies are avoiding the Canadian market. The reason, as Pandora explained last year, are the royalty demands of the major record labels. As Tim Westergren stated last fall, “as long as rights societies take this approach, they will prevent Pandora from launching to Canadian users.” While CRIA tried to claim that the decision to avoid the market was a function of Canadian copyright law, Pandora indicated that it is the fee demands, not the laws that are the stumbling block. With millions now being paid for streaming music in the U.S., it is notable that Canadian interests would seemingly prefer to receive nothing rather than the millions that could potentially be on the table.

Nobody’s a hero here

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The thrill is gone:  today we find out that there will not be another Guitar Hero release anytime in the foreseeable future:

Activision Blizzard will close its music-game business division, laying off hundreds of employees, and cancel the Guitar Hero game that was in development for 2011, the publisher said in a conference call Wednesday.

The drastic move comes after significant industrywide declines in the music game business. In 2007, Activision sold 1.5 million copies of Guitar Hero III in its first month of sales. Last year, Activision only sold 86,000 copies of the latest game in the series, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. Slowing sales of chief competitor Rock Band led Viacom to sell maker Harmonix and close the MTV Games publishing division.

Activision said that the decline of the genre, plus the high cost of licensing music and producing the games, led it to close the business. [emphasis added]

Arguably, Guitar Hero and Rock Band were fads (at least, at their white-hot sales peaks) whose time had passed.  Nevertheless, these games were probably some of the cheapest console games (from a technical/development standpoint) made in the last few years.  The real cost driver here had to be the music licensing fees.  At the right (i.e., low enough) price, these games probably could have been made indefinitely, but it appears that monopoly-imposed costs have outstripped demand and the dreaded deadweight loss triangle has destroyed the market.

Which begs the question:  why does the music industry continually insist on killing geese that lay it golden eggs? In my view, there’s a difference between profiting from risk taking (i.e., capitalism generally) and expecting other people to pay you an ever-increasing cut of the revenue stream based on the risks they took in finding and exploiting a new market which literally did not exist before.  As for the music industry’s attempt to parlay other people’s risk taking into ever bigger royalty streams for themselves, they can’t really complain when the market softens and no one can afford to pay their exorbitant fees.

(On a final, parenthetical note:  no-doubt-soon-to-be-former music industry execs should perhaps consider a career move into lottery management.  In addition to being the ultimate something-for-nothing industry, the lottery is bigger than porn, movies, and music combined. It’s also a regressive tax on the poor, a perfect money-laundering machine for organized crime, and easily rigged.)

Quick Review: How Music Works

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I like reading about music so I recently thought I would take a chance with a recently published book by British physicist John Powell: How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, From Beethoven to the Beatles. A few thoughts about this text which is intended for a general audience:

1. One of the key things this text tries to do is explain why we have the music structure today that we do. So he includes explanations about musical modes that developed in history (of which we use two today, one the major scale and one the minor scale) and how instruments, like the harp, can be configured to produce notes.

2. One of the most interesting things to me in this book was the fact that agreement about modern notes didn’t happen until a conference in 1939. Before that, an A in Leipzig and an A in Paris might not be the same sound. It wasn’t until this conference that a particular frequency (A = 440) was set so that all instruments could be set to the same pitches. And even then, Powell suggests choosing this particular frequency occurred not because it is a better sound but rather because it is somewhere in the middle and seemed good. To think that the sounds we know today are really a social construction is intriguing.

3. There are number of little discussions that a reader might find interesting about perfect pitch, the physics of sound versus noise, how we can rate sound intensity (and he does not like the decibel system), and whether there are certain keys that are happier or sadder (the conclusion: no, they all share the same patterns of notes).

4. While I enjoyed a number of these shorter discussions, I wonder whether someone with limited or no musical knowledge could take much from this book. At various points, Powell suggests one doesn’t need to know how to play or read music to understand the discussions but I think it would be difficult. To his credit, Powell does suggest that anyone of any age can learn music – yes, it takes time (and he invokes Gladwell’s rule of 10,000 hours needed for expertise) but he suggests the idea that some people are musical and others are not does not hold water.

Overall, a book with some interesting points. The discussion bogs down in places and may be difficult for those with little music knowledge but it is an interesting start in considering how music is made.

Why I can watch the Sing-Off and never watch American Idol

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I have been watching the most recent season of the Sing-Off on NBC. Here are some reasons why I am willing to watch this but have no interest in viewing American Idol.

1. The Sing-Off is only five episodes. Short and sweet. This doesn’t require much commitment on the part of viewers and it leaves them wanting more. In contrast, American Idol seems to go for ever and involves lots of weeks with minimal talent.

2. The Sing-Off seems a bit quirkier (perhaps that is the nature of people trying to make accapella music look cool?) while American Idol seems contrived. (This may be the result of time – it’s hard to remember an era when American Idol was new and exciting.)

3. I like Ben Folds as a judge. Since I enjoy some of his music, it is interesting to watch his comments and actions. I get the feeling that he really like this gig – he gets to be the nerdy judge who compliments the all-important rhythm guy or girl behind what the rest of the group is doing. And whenever he finishes his comments, he immediately sits back, crosses his arms, and smiles.

4. The group aspect is appealing. These are groups that don’t often get the same sort of attention lavished on rock stars. They seem to really enjoy what they are doing and just like having some people pay attention to them.

5. I like the song selection better on the Sing-Off. The songs picked for American Idol seem to be arranged for middle America – hinting on edgy but never really straying from the middle of the road. How many times do we have to hear something like “Bridge Over Troubled Water”?

6. The host battle is a toss-up. Nick Lachey has very little personality while Ryan Seacrest is a bit too smooth (unless he is fighting with Simon).

My prediction at this point: it comes down to Committed or the Back Beats with Committed winning America’s vote (though I think Back Beat would get the judges’ votes).