Posts tagged music industry
Ping Off, Please
Yesterday, I wrote that I’m not falling for Steve Jobs’ Ping trick. Today, after making sure it wouldn’t make me upgrade my 3G to iOS 4, I finally downloaded iTunes 10, to see what the fuss (and mostly boos and hisses) was about for myself.
Being an Apple fangirl, I can’t exactly say I’m happy about this, but I have to admit that I was right: Ping is useless. There are two people I’m following on Ping, both of whom I know in real life and already know what they’re listening to since I also follow them on Twitter, Tumblr, and Last.fm. There is not a single artist I would like to like from Apple’s recommendations, but considering the five (obscure) albums I have actually purchased on iTunes that they’re using to judge my entire musical listening habits, that’s hardly a surprise.
And what, exactly, is so social about it? I can’t share my playlists - something I can do in Spotify (not to mention stream music, but that’s a whole different argument). I can’t recommend non-iTunes artists to my friends. I can only follow mainstream artists who hardly need any more publicity. Yeah, very useful.
In general, if Ping were an independent social media start-up rather than an add-on to an already heavily populated platform, it would go the way of countless other failed experiments on the market. And it still might.
Also, here’s the ultimate irony: I can “like” my own band’s album on iTunes, but it won’t show up in my library as I didn’t buy it on iTunes… even though I’m the one who submitted it to iTunes. Way to go, Apple. And as Zoe Keating has pointed out, if you’re not a major artist, you have no way to make an artist page for your band at the moment, as artist profiles are made “by invitation only”. Which is why you only have major (read: mostly shitty) artists on Ping right now.
One way I could see Ping being useful (and I can’t believe Apple didn’t think of this) would be if it were a general media-sharing social network, rather than one just based on music. Because my guess is that most people buy more films and TV shows than music from the iTunes store, not to mention subscribing to podcasts and iTunes U videos that you would actually want to share with your friends.
Hell, it could even just be an app-sharing social network and it would be far more relevant. After all, unless you have a jailbroken iDevice, ALL of your apps come from the App Store, and I, for one, love showing off the mostly useless but fun little apps I find.
So for now, I’m going to forget about Ping, and let my vision adjust to the new oh-so-dull grey icons, while I wait for something interesting to happen with their service. But it’s hard to hide my disappointment when Apple has begun following a pattern of releasing broken or incomplete products only to fix them in a month or two with an update. I wonder if they’ll include a free virtual bumper case for iTunes 10 until then?
Don’t Ping me
Oh, I see what you did there, Steve Jobs, but I’m not falling for your Ping trap…
…probably.
I say probably, because first of all, I still haven’t downloaded iTunes 10 as I can’t get an answer on how it will affect my jailbroken and unlocked iPhone 3G 3.1.3, which I really do not want to upgrade to iOS 4 due to the horror stories of its performance on 3G phones, and a crippling fear of losing my unlock again.
But back to Ping.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m a fairly average iTunes user: about 99% of my iTunes music library comes from sources other than iTunes purchases, and the few things I have bought on iTunes (Zoe Keating’s album, for example, and the occasional single) do not accurately reflect my overall listening habits.
And this is where Ping is genius - or evil - depending on how you look at it. Because over the years, social music sharing sites, last.fm being the best example, have made it big by correctly betting on the principle that what you listen to does not matter nearly as much as what your friends (and perfect strangers) think you listen to. These social music sharing sites have made us constantly self-conscious of what we’re playing, even if we’re alone in our homes with headphones on.
Of course, I’m guilty of this as well. I’ll turn on my last.fm scrobbling when listening to the latest cutting-edge dubstep artist, just to prove I know what’s going on in that genre (hint: I don’t. Luckily, I have friends who do and share), but then I’ll hit the “pause submissions” button when I turn on the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack for the 20th time this month (what can I say, Bear McCreary helps me work).
And now, Apple will capitalize on this in the simplest way possible: by encouraging you to build up yet another public persona, with the money going straight to them as you buy yet another record that you otherwise wouldn’t, so you can show your friends just how interesting and worldly your listening habits - and by extension, you - are.
But I’m not falling for it, oh no. You can keep your Ping, Mr. Jobs, and I’ll keep my last.fm…
…probably.
“ But even Lester, who is keen on the idea of getting paid £5 each for the 30 or so new bands he listens to each day, reluctantly has to concede that the site looks “incredibly tacky”. In response to complaints from journalists, the list of publications has replaced a list of individuals. As James Sherry, a rock PR, puts it, having a price next to your name is “really not a good look”. If bands are in desperate need of good PR, perhaps freelance journalists need it even more.”
Website pays music journalists to review bands | Media | The Guardian
Very telling article, but perhaps an even more important part is a comment by the Guardian’s film and music editor:
However, budgets are tight here and I am no longer able to use freelance album reviewers (all our reviewers are either on staff, or have contracts to write for the Guardian). That means I have lost some specialist knowledge - where once I would commission Alex Macpherson to review UK urban and R&B, or Angus Batey to review hip-hop, those options are no longer open to me.
One of the greatest losses to modern journalism is the death of the specialized journalist, now confined to infinite Blogspot fan blogs (in the case of music journalists) or the unemployment office in the rest of the business.
As for the actual subject of the article, this is not the least bit shocking for someone with any experience in the music business. Hype begets hype, and every band is hoping that by some miracle the right influential journo will fall in love with their basement-recorded, CDR masterpiece. But realistically, there’s no chance for that to happen anymore, due to the sheer volume of music being produced every second.
So I don’t blame bands who are turning to this method, as shady as it seems. I do, however, blame the industry for not having a better filtering process in place.
Digital albums, vinyl made a comeback in '09 while CDs slide
Why is this a surprise? This is exactly what I predicted last year, and will predict again - CDs are on their way out, and digital or digital + vinyl will become the new standard.
Why do people even buy CDs anymore?
With services such as Bandcamp or iTunes allowing you to download lossless .wav or .aiff files, there goes the argument of buying CDs for sound quality.
What’s that, you say - you like the pretty artwork? Well, take a look at a full-size booklet, or perhaps a poster, or a beautiful, frameable front cover which is a part of vinyl packaging, any of which will put that tiny CD booklet to shame.
Granted, not all releases are available on vinyl today. But hopefully artists will be the ones to push the market in that direction by being the first to abandon the CD format.
Personally, I’m someone who cannot afford to be a collector, partially for financial reasons, but mostly for spacial ones: I simply have no room for excess stuff. When you pack up all of your belongings into two suitcases and move across the globe, suddenly carting all of your music on hundreds of plastic discs in plastic containers makes no sense at all, especially when 2.5” hard drives exist. So I now opt for digital only, being content with iTunes viewer versions of artwork. Am I losing some of the aesthetic value of the album as a product? Yes. But am I still getting the most important part, the music, at a high quality? Absolutely.
And I make it up by telling myself that one day, when I’m done shuffling from continent to continent, I’ll get that vinyl player and start a proper collection once again.
But no CD will ever grace my shelves.
“ Murdoch startled the publishing world when he uttered a few sentences that were as simple as they were revolutionary, such as: “Quality journalism isn’t cheap.” That led to his decision to start charging for online use of his many newspapers around the globe in the coming months. If Murdoch has his way, the days of free culture on the Internet will be numbered.”
I think this, and the paragraph that precedes it in the article, show more than anything that Rupert Murdoch’s days are numbered - the same goes for all of the people that think like him and don’t understand the role of “free” as the business model for this century.
Murdoch reminds me of an aging record company exec, shaking his fist at those “rapscallions” that he thinks will be the downfall of the music industry. What he doesn’t realize is that journalism, just like the music industry, is not going anywhere - it’s just transforming. The problem is that while no one knows yet what it’s transforming into, those like Murdoch are trying to hold on to the old ways, completely ignorant of what’s actually going on.
Murdoch underestimates the power of those of us who have grown up barely remembering a time before the Internet (or even the younger generation, who really don’t remember a pre-WWW existence). As this generation comes into power, these old models will be thrown out the window, no matter how hard those like Murdoch cling onto them.
“ My admittedly strange opinion is that we need to try harder with print. We can’t just give up on it. Inevitably there will be some loss of newspaper readership, but even that will stabilize. Not everyone wants all their news online. Do we all want to look at screens from 8am to 10pm? There’s room in the world for both online and paper. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. I guess that’s one of the things that’s always frustrating to hear, that the rise of the Internet means the death of print. There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality will be more nuanced. I think newspapers that adjust a bit will survive and still do great work. But we do need to give people reasons to pay money for the physical object. The landscape right now does require that we in the print world try harder. We have to think of the things that print does best, and do those things better than ever before. We need to use the paper, maximize the physical product.”
Maybe because I’m involved in both worlds, but again and again I can’t help but grasp the parallels between the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like in this quote by Dave Eggers, I can clearly see one way the latter can go.
Mp3s did not kill the CD. Hell, the CD didn’t even kill vinyl like everyone said it would. Sure, sales of both have gone down, which was inevitable when a non-material format was introduced that could be replicated indefinitely for free. But people buy vinyl for the sound, buy CDs for the artwork, buy either because they’re collectors or because they want to get the band’s autographs at the concert or for any number of reasons that translate to sales of physical products.
The same can be said for newspapers and books. How many people bought a copy of their local paper the day Obama was elected? Hell, mine is still hanging over my desk at work. How many people buy a new copy of a book they already own because a new edition has come out with a different cover and new forward by the author? Maybe not enough to single-handedly keep the industry afloat, but enough to ensure that print will not simply disappear overnight.
Like the obsessive record collector with shelves of alphabetically arranged vinyls, the obsessive bookworm will continue purchasing books. The obsessive news junkie will keep savoring the daily trip to the newsstand. But the industries need to adapt to a model when these people are a minority, not the majority. They need to be profitable, to be able pay musicians and journalists and editors based on a digital model, while still producing the physical objects for those who want to purchase them. It’s never going to be black or white, print or digital - the model needs to encompass both, but in different degrees than it has ever done before in the past.
