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October 26, 2005

Home Taping is Killing Music

After two and a half years of delay, yesterday marked the launch of the iTunes Music Store, ocker edition, complete with all your latest masterpieces from Missy Higgins, Eskimo Joe and Powderfinger treats (but nothing on Sony). I've been looking forward to this for years, but now that it's here, i find myself completely underwhelmed.

One of the advantages in living in a backwater country such as this one is that we get to watch genuine cultural shifts from afar and decide whether they're really for us before we jump on the bandwagon. As an Australian Mac user, I'd pretty much given up on the world of legitimate digital downloading, and have made something of a fun hobby of roasting recording industry representatives who come on to my radio show to complain about piracy and parrot about victories over insignificant has beens like Kazaa. If the music industry really thought they'd made a dent in illegal downloading by killing off Kazaa in 2005, I guess they know their own industry even less than I thought. While Sony/BMG were holding back the launch of the iTMS because they wanted a much higher price per track, they continued to lose more potential sales (potential, not actual) to the Soulseeks and Bittorrents of the world. And we Australians adapted to a new way of experiencing and buying music. Now we have most of the majors and a healthy smattering of the larger indies (including Inertia and Shock) available a click and a credit card swipe away in iTunes, I wonder how things will change.

Perhaps I should explain how I currently buy music. Hosting a three hour radio show (and more) every week, I have to keep pressure on myself to at least vaguely keep up with what's coming out. This usually means subjecting myself to bitchy snobbishness and elitism of the drably predictable internet journalism type, and slightly better written but even more meandering fan writing. Lately I've also fallen under the spell of last.fm (see the top 10 in my sidebar over there) and its magical methods of deciphering things I'd probably like, not based on what's cool, but based on what other people are actually listening to that have similar tastes to mine. When something strikes me as interesting, I rummage around on illegal download sites until I find it (usually takes no more than five minutes), and hit download. Once the music's in my iTunes library (with a decent bittorrent download, this'll take no longer than half an hour), it ends up in a "recently added" playlist. Often I'll also find legit free downloads from places like Salon.com, Better Propaganda or Epitonic.

From there, it becomes a game of Survivor, where killer choruses duke it out to win the immunity bracelet (fetching on both rock gods and twee indie goddesses alike). If something gets played more than a few times -- that is to say, if I think I might want it to be a proper part of my musical life, it goes on a "to buy" list. I then vaguely attempt to remember that list next time I'm in a music store or rummaging through InSound. One could argue that if it doesn't get bought, I should delete it from my hard drive, but I don't -- often things can show up on a shuffle play months later and surprise me, forcing me into a purchase I could never have expected. Usually by the time I play something on the radio, I've bought it. And hopefully also encourage other people to buy it -- many obscurities unearthed in this way have resulted in countless radio station phone calls wondering how to get hold of what I'm playing.

The end result of this is that I buy more music than I ever did before I knew how to run a search in Soulseek. The music I buy is more diverse and exciting, and I find sounds I may never have discovered before, save in the eloquent descriptions of half decent music journalists. And I'm not alone there. While I have many friends that simply never buy music any more, I have just as many that spend more than they ever have before, despite having easy access to abundant free tunes. It's not like giving us libraries killed off the publishing industry, is it? (I never did see the Publishing Industry Association of America's campaign against photocopiers, did you?).

Now, I'm old fashioned and still find it hard to let go of the idea that music should come with a tangible physical object to hold on to when I buy it. I run a graphic design company that's worked on artwork for what must be closed to 100 releases by local and international artists. I still buy vinyl sometimes just for the feel of the sleeve. I know I'm a dying breed, but a little jpeg in the corner of the iTunes window just isn't the same as real cover art. But, in the Baudrillardian sense of things, the disc was no more accurate a representation of the music than a digital file is, so the postmodernist in me can accept defeat without feeling any less of a purist.

The Australian's article on the iTMS says that the files are of a quality "equal to or better than" CD. Aside from being blatantly false, this is a little sinister. Even to my non-audiophile ears, the lack of range in a 128kb AAC file is obvious. It's certainly better than an equivalent MP3, but it's not great. What the geniuses at Apple know better than I do is that their files aren't perfect, they're good enough. While the industry boffins have been squirreling away for years trying to improve on the CD with technologies like SACD (six channels!) or DVD Audio, us consumers out here in the real world have been busy not caring. I can say that the moments when I've put on Transformer or Marquis Moon and thought they would sound much better with a full 5.1 digital mix are, well, few and far between. Most people just want the music. Personally, I wish the iTMS files were of a better quality, and I also wish they weren't rights protected, but the vast majority of the population aren't going to care a jot.

I actually made my first ever completely digital purchase two days before the launch of the iTMS. I'd finally accepted that there were some songs I only ever listen to on my laptop, and on discovering the awesome bleep.com, online outlet for Warp Records and friends, my excitement at finding a digital download site that treated the purchaser like a customer they were happy to have, rather than making out like they were begrudgingly dealing crack to street urchins off to onsell it to children, meant I bought the new Boards of Canada for about 16 dollars Australian. Bleep sell their music as entirely unprotected MP3s, produced from the masters with the best possible encoder settings (the exact same ones I use when ripping music myself, the nerdarific "lame" encoder at its standard preset). The purchase was extremely smooth and the tracks came with a free screensaver and a couple of wallpapers, which was a nice touch to make up for the lack of tangibles. I wouldn't do this for every album, but given that the process was even easier than an illegal download, I saw something of the future for the music industry in there somewhere. How's this for a crazy transaction: I give you money, you give me music, we both go on about our lives. The album, incidentally, is amazing.

Back in iTunes world, I must authorize any individual computer I wish to play the tracks on, which involves a process of sending keys back and forth to an Apple server. Sure, I can burn tracks for my friends same as ever, but any individual playlist can only be burned seven times. I can't import the music into other programs if I wanted to, say, create a little video cutup over some found footage, purely for fun. That would be illegal, see. Compared to Bleep (a site run by and for several independent record labels who know how important it is to embrace the new digital age of music properly), iTunes provides me with files loaded with restrictions at a lesser quality. Now that I've embraced the digital download thing, I've been poking about and noting that many of my most favourite labels are beginning to offer high quality unrestricted MP3 purchase of their tracks. It's the majors that still seem scared.

I thought I would be excited to finally have the iTunes store available to me, but it's here now, and I'm struggling to find much I'm willing to spend money on with that quality and those restrictions. To test the waters, I bought the first album by The Hold Steady, and admittedly the process is super smooth and easy. But it just doesn't feel like my music (_our point exactly!_, cries the recording industry). So now what I'll have to do when I want to buy music online is first rummage around and see if the music is available somewhere that has respect for me, and if not, I'll think about buying it at iTunes. Both of those options still come after CD in the list of preferences, of course (and let's not even get into the fact that in Australia, it's still technically illegal to rip your own CDs into your computer -- that's a dumb copyright issue for another day).

What are the morals if i pay for a protected version of an album from the iTMS and then either strip the protection or download some much higher quality MP3s from a high quality download site? Nobody's missed out on royalties and no music or artists have been killed. I've done the right thing by the artist, and have in my possession music that's no more likely to be pirated further than if I had bought an (equally unprotected) CD. I can keep the tracks on my laptop, work computer and loft server thingy and play them on any portable device I like that's not my ipod (which stopped working about six months ago). Of course, it's violating several laws and license agreements -- this is why the unrestricted nature of sites like Bleep is so refreshing. I couldn't really find much of anything on the iTunes store that I would be willing to buy in its restricted form.

Is the music industry in decline? Another topic, for another day. Whenever I walk into JB Hi-Fi, the queues to the till are massive, regardless of the time of day. The people lining up to buy music look exactly like the people that are supposed to be downloading it. The indie stores might be doing it harder, but I would argue that that is more due to the relaxation of parallel importation laws, and the ability of the big chains such as JB to get ridiculous bulk discounts and onsell at miniscule profit per unit. The teen-focussed singles market may be licking its wounds (and hey, did anybody actually buy Hey Ya?), but up here in grown up world where none of us would be buying singles anyway, the only real difference I can see is that independents find it much easier to compete on an even footing with the majors, and it's the majors that are hurting like hell.

I'd like to get a real sense of what the next few years are going to be like in the Australian music industry. I'm a tech savvy geek with the ability to find and purchase unrestricted music, legally or illegally. I know how to manage playlists and have been nurturing a digital music collection for years. I get a lot of music for free anyway (as do most of the people in the industry that harp on about the fact that you should be paying -- promo discs are almost as prevalent as cocaine in the business). I'm also a hopeless music obsessive. I know I'm not the target market for the iTunes store. How do you buy/steal/obtain your music? Do you care even a tiny bit about copy restrictions and low bitrates? Do you buy things you've already downloaded? Does the iTunes store matter to you at all? Or will you never stop being the shy shuffling kid who really really hopes that the cute girl at the record store will comment with approval and a little bit of flirtation on your purchase of the latest Sufjan Stevens on import?

My latest download and soon to be purchase is the new Arab Strap album, The Last Romance. Just who the fuck let Aidan Moffat grow up? My favourite misanthrope, while still drunk and in hate with the world, seems desperately ready to fall in love, and he's brought a horn section. With lyrics like "there's no better journey than me on my way to you" and "not everything must end", this is a million miles away from the band they used to be, but all the better and more mature for it. The epic final track, "There Is No Ending", is like a fucked up Glaswegian "When I'm 64", with pills. For full effect, best accompanied by a healthy pouring of cheap blended whisky and a lifetime of regret.

Technorati Tags: music, itunes

Posted by patrick at October 26, 2005 5:58 PM

Comments

Posted by: marty at October 26, 2005 7:30 PM

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