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REAL TIME
By JASON FRY
A Changing Map for Digital Music
An Announcement From Apple and EMI
Goes Far Beyond DRM-Free Downloads
April 9, 2007
A week ago, EMI and Apple set the digital-music world buzzing with news from London. No, the Beatles weren't coming to iTunes just yet. Rather, EMI had broken ranks with the rest of the major labels and decided to offer its catalog to music retailers without digital-rights-management software that restricts consumers' ability to copy files and transfer them between devices.
That was the biggest headline of the day, but not the only news. The DRM-free songs would be ripped at a higher bit rate, giving them improved sound quality. They would cost more -- $1.29 per song, though albums would cost the same in both formats. And lower-quality, 99-cent DRM-protected songs weren't being phased out, just making room for the new offerings.
A lot to take in, even without the strains of "Got to Get You Into My Life." Put together, it adds up to a lot of changes for the digital-music world. Right now those changes are more interesting than epochal, but just wait.
First off, some perspective: Digital-music sales account for just 15% of recorded-music sales in the U.S. Granted, some percentage of those CDs sold become digital files, and some percentage of those escape onto peer-to-peer networks. But contrary to what the wired may think, people still do go to record stores and buy CDs. (And even some records.) That said, digital music is clearly the future of the music industry. And the arrival of DRM-free files from a major label (eMusic has long sold DRM-free MP3s from indie labels) marks a potentially big change in the digital-music landscape, for a host of reasons.
First and most obviously, a major label is finally treating its customers like customers, instead of regarding them as likely shoplifters who should be given as few rights as possible.
"We've always argued that the best way to combat illegal traffic is to make legal content available at decent value and conveniently," EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli said in his appearance with Apple's Steve Jobs, striking a welcome note of sanity and realism in an industry known more for suing its customers of late. "We take the view that we have to trust consumers. The fact that some will continue to disappoint us and choose to steal the music is inevitable."
Second, Apple's use of FairPlay DRM had been criticized as a method of locking customers into its iTunes/iPod ecology -- songs bought from iTunes won't play on other music players unless they're first copied to an audio CD and ripped back into MP3s to remove the DRM. While I never understood why some expected Mr. Jobs and Co. to blithely give up a business advantage (the bleatings of EU bureaucrats most definitely included), it's refreshing to think of Apple competing without DRM as a disincentive to switch. Here's betting Apple will continue to dominate without a crutch it doesn't need -- iTunes and the iPod are head and shoulders above their competitors on their own, let alone in combination.
One wise move is that your extra 30 cents will get you not just DRM-free music, but better-sounding music. Paying extra money just for the privilege of not being treated like a common thief would have got both companies pilloried. And in offering better-sounding songs, it was also wise to jump the bit rate from 128 kbps to 256 kbps instead of only to 192 kbps, generally considered CD-quality. As before, that would have just bred complaints that Apple's 128-kbps bit rates were too low to begin with. Granted, most people can't hear the difference between 128 kbps and a CD, as Slate explained here, but that doesn't matter: All good marketing requires is that customers know which number is bigger.
It was also refreshing to hear Mr. Jobs acknowledge that "audiophiles can still tell the difference between [an iTunes track] and the original." I'm no audiophile -- the louder the better, thanks -- but iTunes tracks have always sounded slightly muddy to me, an unfortunate exception to Apple's usual high standards. (And no, I'm not imagining I can tell the difference -- or at least I wasn't in a blind test four years ago. Apologies that the links in that article no longer work.)
A key question: Will consumers pay the extra 30 cents? Where price points are concerned, a dollar is magic. You don't complain if your soda costs that much, you understand the bartender gets a single for each beer handed across the bar, and there's a reason it's not called the $1.29 Store. Whether your purchase is the stuff of routine or whim, a dollar isn't much worth worrying about -- even if you're online where that dollar is just bits rearranging themselves somewhere. But go higher than a dollar, and you start doing math.
That's a question Mr. Jobs seems to have thought through -- Apple appears to be in a win-win situation pricewise. If $1.29 downloads sell well, that's evidence he was right in arguing DRM has held back digital-music sales. And the improved audio quality makes the restricted downloads look even worse, ratcheting up the pressure on the other three major labels to follow EMI's lead. (Hence Mr. Jobs's confident estimate that half of iTunes' catalog will be offered in DRM-free versions by the end of 2007.) And if the DRM-free downloads don't do as well as 99-cent, restricted downloads? Then Mr. Jobs will have knocked the legs out from under the music industry's calls for tiered song pricing, without yielding the point or putting iTunes' sales at risk.
One more piece of the equation: The music industry is clearly worried about the album. Late last month, Apple introduced the Complete My Album feature; the latest announcement included word that full albums from EMI will be $9.99 in both restricted and unrestricted formats (which raises the question of why on earth anyone would buy the former).
To me, the fall of the album is the real problem that confronts the music industry, more than piracy and the difficulties of navigating the transition to a digital world. Before digital music, consumers bought full-length CDs (and, once upon a time, records and tapes) to get the songs they wanted. But consumers came to dislike the album format -- complaints that most CDs are too expensive and contain just a couple of good songs far predate iTunes. Once digital music gave consumers a chance to abandon the album, they did -- whether it was by stealing individual songs off Napster or buying them off iTunes.
Nothing about the rock album is sacred -- it only dates back to mid-period Bob Dylan or the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's". (There's that band again.) And the music industry is adjusting -- witness this New York Times story about Candy Hill, a rap trio signed to a two-song deal by Universal. But at the same time, the industry is trying to buy whatever time it can. I doubt it can do more than protect its retreat -- I think the album model is too far gone to save. That said, it's far from certain that music fans will like the change they've ushered in. Labels are criticized for not giving artists a chance to develop a following now, but today will look like an era of rare patience in a world where two-song deals become the norm.
Finally, some dissections of the Apple-EMI deal seem to have missed just how much has changed since the iTunes store opened its virtual doors four years ago. It's easy to say consumers got nothing because DRM-free downloads should have been the rule in 2003. But four years ago, getting the big labels to offer downloads with relatively flexible restrictions was rightly seen as a major coup. Then, bit rates were as much about file size as audio quality; today, exponential growth in storage capacity has made audio quality paramount. The digital-music world has changed, and will keep changing, in ways I doubt anyone can predict -- not even a strategist as canny as Mr. Jobs. Whatever happens, the goal should be for consumers to get technology that's easier to use and better choices. When you strip aside all the conspiracy theories and currents buffeting the music industry, that's what happened last week.
Will you upgrade your iTunes downloads? Will you buy the higher-quality downloads? What do you think digital music's future holds? Write to me at realtime@wsj.com. If you've got something to say but don't want your comments considered for publication, please make that clear.
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I think it’s a great move and a welcome change in attitude. I think the digital sales system has given artists the ultimate level of feedback. If you see the same 4 four songs selling or being downloaded then you know that’s what your fans want. You don’t have to surf biased reviews or spend you time reading forum posts about your music and career. You check your digital sales and see what joints are liked and that’s it. You either make an album of quality songs and singles or only sell a few songs per album. I think it also allows you to push and release music that stands alone (and pushes the envelope) without risking the big project down the line. The higher quality format takes some of the sting off for the all-digital releases. I used to cringe at the idea of having an album only exist as MP3s. I also wonder what this means for Windows Vista which I heard was going to have all sorts of media protecting software built in.
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It was also refreshing to hear Mr. Jobs acknowledge that "audiophiles can still tell the difference between [an iTunes track] and the original." I'm no audiophile -- the louder the better, thanks -- but iTunes tracks have always sounded slightly muddy to me, an unfortunate exception to Apple's usual high standards. (And no, I'm not imagining I can tell the difference -- or at least I wasn't in a blind test four years ago.
This part of the article represents a lot of what is really wrong with music distribution today. Let me explain, from my point of view: When people in general talk about "audiophiles" they think eccentric, analytical, anti-social people who complain that they can't hear what most of us consider "irrelevant" details in music, so the message here is "Hey, if you're one of these crazy *** folks, then yeah, you will hear a difference." I did a "blind test" of my own, on my wife. I took one of her favorite Nina Simone CDs, ripped the tracks off the CD and saved the files as 320kbps MP3s. We went somewhere and I loaded the CD in the player while she was getting little man in the car seat so she didn't notice it was a CD-R. minutes later, she says "I think we need to get a new CD, this one's starting to sound bad." I've read many things on the web where "professionals" do such tests and I've read a spectrum of opinions, from "I can't tell the difference" to "I can totally tell the difference" so knowing my own perception would be biased, I decided to try it on someone who could care less about MP3 vs. CD. "I'm no audiophile -- the louder the better, thanks"
"audiophiles can still tell the difference between [an iTunes track] and the original." Pretty stupid mentality, for starters there are studies that show that listening to music at loud volumes actually makes you want to listen to the music LESS, the surprising thing is that people actually purchase releases that have a saturating quality (probably due to other factors in marketing) and a CD version of a song is not necessarily "the original" if the "original" was recorded and mixed in a higher-quality format than the CD, such as 2" tape or 24bit digital. Compare ANY MP3 file to a 24bit recording (play them back to back on your DVD player) and tell me if you hear a difference between the two, but enough of that, the recording industry has done an effective job on people to forget the real issue, and the real issue is how much the recording industry has "duped" the consumer; two key points: 1) Ever since cassette tapes became a household item, the recording industry has tried to stop people from making copies of the music consumers purchased. Look it up, they even tried to make it illegal for people to buy an LP, then make a copy to listen to it on a cassette. The consumer won that battle and the courts ruled that you can make copies of the LPs for your own use. Not to get on a conspiracy tip, but the moving force has been - "How can we distribute music that is cheap to make and keep the consumers from making copies of it." Think of the cost of making a vinyl record, then a CD, then an MP3. The cost of "making" an MP3 is merely manpower hours, versus materials involved in making LPs and CDs. More people are required to manufacture an LP, less to make a CD and only one person (without very much technical training at all) to make an MP3. Then with iTunes came the copy protection thing that the recording industry has been trying to develop for some time, and sure, most of us here can get around it by making an audio CD (with the low-quality files) and then ripping them off the CD and saving them to .MP3 and other formats, but my wife, who can do shit with TiVo I've never imagined possible, can't do what I just said, and isn't much into computers to try to figure it out (and the recording industry knows there are millions of people like here out here). So, now consumers will be paying a little more to be able to do what they've always been capable of doing with LPs and CDs, but I do understand why someone who says "the louder the better, thanks" may get excited about such an "upgrade". 2) Why not develop a higher-definition format that surpasses the CD? Because most people don't realize, CD quality (16/44.1) is good enough. It's plenty, to the point that it's more than enough, most releases are being mastered too loud, most volume knobs never make it to "9" these days. CD Quality is certainly good enough for a device that doesn't have an optimal DA converter built in, such as the iPod or any portable device for that matter. DA converters are important in the translation of data and audio, and to have the best ones, it costs a nice chunk of dough, definitely not cost effective for an MP3 player, so please believe, they've studied this avenue. They would love to give you the equivalent of HD TV for your ears (and charge you for it), the problem is, today that costs a lot of dough. If you ever get the opportunity, listen to a CD you consider is good, like Midnight Marauders (which was done before the "Squash it to death" era we are in now) through a nice DA converter, like a Benchmark DAC-1 and a pair of Grado RS-1 headphones. iPods or anything iTunes will ever sell will never sound as good. The current answer to "enhance" the quality of the material people listen to on portable devices is enhanced headphones, like those done by Bose which cost a few hundred bucks, but even with those, the lack of definition between an MP3 and an "original" CD file is apparent, so scrap that - that's not going to make the recording industry more money. The next hype is "Let's give them a little bit more quality and let them make copies of the songs, and charge a bit more for it, they'll go for the idea - what do they care, all they want is to hear things louder, hahaha!" I can already picture the greedy bastards in a meeting saying exactly that!
L-ROX
Redsecta Mixing & Mastering
Los Angeles
www.redsecta.com
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| "Let's give them a little bit more quality and let them make copies of the songs, and charge a bit more for it, they'll go for the idea - what do they care, all they want is to hear things louder, hahaha!" Yeah, I never considered that. I once made an obsevation about RE-BUYING songs you already own for the MP3 format and how it's double the money for the time to encode it and throw it up on iTunes. I did rebuy my entiire movie collection on DVD, up from VHS so I guess I'd go for it too. I can't listen to a file and tell you what bit depth it is but side by side I will never mistake a 32bit mixdown with a 16bit mix. Like I said, I'd do it for just a better notch of quality. Some songs may only live as MP3s. A very good read.
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