- Saturday, 21 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
Wi-Fi is as secure as your virginity in the Zone, in Old Taipei - Charles Brown
Music industry plans new digital format
FOUR OF THE WORLD'S biggest music companies are trying once again to steal Apple's thunder by introducing a new format for downloadable digital music.
Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI are all collaborating on CMX, a media bundling system that will deliver not only music tracks, but sleeve notes, photographs, videos and lyrics. Those of you old enough to remember vinyl LPs from the olden days will no doubt be getting all nostalgic for gatefold covers and information on the music you are listening to that doesn't require a magnifying glass to be of any use.
But it seems that the lumbering giant that is the music industry has failed to learn anything from the past ten years of MP3 mayhem. Most importantly, that generation XYZ has a pathetically short attention span.
People just don't want to buy entire albums these days. We now live in a world where consumers are no longer forced to buy 11 sub-standard filler tracks just to get their hands on the one song they actually like... you know... the one off the car ad on the telly that goes, deee doo doo da dee dum dum.
Apple at one time tried forcing people to cough up the cash for unwanted goods with album-only Itunes purchases, but the Cupertino company soon caught the whiff of an ill wind coming from its customers and scrapped the idea. And the move away from album sales into single track browsing has totally changed the way music is created and marketed.
In fact, the whole way in which people listen to music has changed on a cultural level. Thirty years ago, your average groovy young hipster would have come home from Woolworth's with the new Emerson Lake and Palmer opus clutched in his sweaty mitts, donned his enormous headphones, and sat cross legged on his patchwork beanbag absorbing every word of the copious – and in most cases totally undecipherable – sleeve notes.
Today's bright young things barely have the attention span to read the heating instruction on their doner kebab-flavoured pot noodles whilst they listen slack-jawed to the latest sub-karaoke TV talent show discovery, let alone absorb the intricacies of a 20 minute guitar solo, or wonder who played the triangle on track seven.
The real issue here is, however, tied up in the fact that the mighty Apple was given the opportunity to become one of the companies involved in the development of CMX, but politley declined. Then it promptly sloped off to quietly develop its own 'music plus' format, currently codenamed Cocktail.
The sad truth of the matter is that Apple is such a huge player in the music download market that any format not compatible with either Itunes or the annoyingly ubiquitous Ipod is doomed - if not to fail - then at least to struggle along in perpetual second place. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
I'm not exactly a young-un (mid-30s) and after decades of buying music and throwing most of it away after years 'cos I've not listening to it after a couple of weeks and have no real intention to, I not longer want to buy music for "keepsies". It's a waste of my own money to buy a cd or download that I may listen to a dozen times so costs a pound a listen. Unlimited downloads for a set fee is the only way I'd pay for music, it's the only way it's worth my listening pattern. It's just really subscription radio on-demand. Surely me paying a tenner a month or whatever for that would make more revenue that what they'd get from me listening to radio station. If the idea of free-to-air radio was proposed now I reckon the music industry would balk at the idea. It's just been so long engrained in their business plan that the accept it and see the benefits of it.
Coming from the group that recently announced their paying customers should not expected DRM encumbered music to work indefinitely, their follow up announcement of yet another new format surely isn't inspiring any confidence.
[silly]
that all the INQ writers have to hate Apple? When the bias goes away for a moment, it just gets confusing.
[/silly]
epic failure.
remember mini-disc?
For years now we have been hearing about the "value adds" that liner notes an album art brings to some nonexistent view of music listening. You know what? NO ONE GIVES A CRAP ABOUT ALBUM ART OR LINER NOTES. That stuff might have been vaguely interesting before everyone had unlimited access to a band's web site, but now it's all just garbage. The only utility in the art is that it shows a nice icon on my ipod. That's not something worth paying for, and no way in hell people are going to drop mp3 or aac just to get them.
i think the writer is correct when he says that most people just want 1 track from an album, my wife is always like that, she just gets one track at a time. but for me listening to music is more than just putting something on in the background. thats why i never get mp3s, because the quality is useless. i like the event of putting my vinyl on, and seeing it spin. hearing the organic tone from and old disk.
i think anyone who downloads music wont be interested, and anyone who "listens" to music wont be interested cus they get stuff in flac or buy the cd.
end thought
aka if you can remember the sixties you weren't there
whereas we saddo intraverted IT types were busy buying the latest album from the peeled grapes, or whatever they were called, remember the pilots log book from "In Search of Space..." if you were to dive into the music charts of any period when _you_ thought _you_ were listening to the cutting edge, everyone else was listening to Millicent, Englebert Humperdink, or that spanish bloke and waiting for "Now that's what I can music volume 470" or its antecedents
MP3s as a concept, rather than technology, are identifiable from the beginning of popular music.
Most people didn't give a shit then, and they don't now.
We just know this is going to be:
1. Crap - the music will not be DRM (too much poison there now), but instead will be a custom format that will only play in their player (that is within a hairs breath of a rootkit)
2. Crap quality - they just don't get that a 400meg lossless download is nothing now., so it'll be lossy at 128-160k
3. Overpriced. I'm guessing $/£11.99 an album.
Instead, i'd like:
1. Individual albums £5.99 .. or less (this will still give them more $€£ than they get from a CD sale to Tesco)
2. Subscription option - I'd pay £20 a month for unlimited access across all of the labels, offer 5 or 10 a month for £9.99 too
3. Codec on demand - let people choose mp3/aac/flac/flac 24x192. And don't try the silly +£4 trick if you want lossless
4. Make the art stuff a +50p/£1 extra, I (and most people as a guess) don't want it.
Why don't these morons adopt Ogg & FLAC file formats?
They're open source they don't need to pay roylaties to any company or anything.
Sell them on USB drives or memory cards etc.
They can't stop the music from being ripped anyway.
The new format is gonna get cracked within days so why even bother with a new format?
This is completely retarded.
These morons should just stick with CD's at least it would sound better than this new crappy format.
... with Sony involved you trust the track record. Sony has a long history of making good hardware but not quite so with formats to play on them. Beta, those mini disk things, ATRAC. I include Bluray here because I see the future of video as being online and on demand, not some expensive DRM infested, easily scratchable optical disk that we already have too many of. I hope Hitachi doesn't waste too much money chasing this illusion.
Some people in here seems to be thinking that they dont want to buy albums..
Some songs it really takes a few listens to really connect and enjoy that particular song.. many albums have some hidden gems that didnt get repeated 3.000.000 times over the radio but is still excellent songs..
Personally I like Albums!!
Also to the person saying (cover)art is crap and not worth paying for, I for one would like cover art if possible..
now ive ripped all my own cds to flac but havnt bothered to buy a scanner and scan all the art.. or even tried to download it from the internet.. but it would sure be nice to have with the files.
It would also be nice if the record companies atleast listened a little to its customers, by using something standard as .flac and without using draconian drm.
Perhaps .flac files and a .pdf with album art and linear notes..
or something as easy and standard as a .zip file with .flac and .jpg files inside for easy extraction if the user feels like it.
Fortunately, not all of the youth of today are brainwashed radio loving young fools.
I know at least two 16 year olds.
WAVE is where it's at. When I'm driving the car to and from work for up to 2 1/2 hours every day, I have high standards for not just the quality of the music, but for the quality of recording and reproduction through the car stereo.
Even a 320kbps MP3 has nothing on WAV. My stereo doesn't play FLAC, so there's no point me using that one, and I like OGG less than I like MP3.
At least with WAV files, you're still getting what you would have if you were playing the CD itself.
I say, let the brainwashed radio lovers have their crappy, DRM corrupted formats. If they want to listen to music that sucks, then punish them for it. At least people like me, who listening to artists who can, in fact, write a complete album worth listening to, can still go and buy a CD, rip all the tracks to WAV, put them on a portable drive, and listen to them at will on the car stereo.
CMX is a band. It stands for Cloaca Maxima. The great sewer in ancient Rome.
I guess they know where they pulled this one from.
No? Nothing to see here folks.
This is a typical music business stunt: a bunch of senile old men try to force a 50-year old marketing concept on "the youth of today", because they're too stupid or too lazy to find out how 21st century consumers use the product. What next, a virtual joint-rolling game for your virtual gatefold?
Shame that everything is recorded in digital now.
The best model would be to buy a physical media, LP would be the best and as the other option you could download selected tracks or full album in either FLAC or Apple Lossless.
But since there are no analogue recordings anymore (new ones) i don't think that producing a LP would make much sense.
But for all old music pleas re-release them on LP :). Can't help but i've got few different versions of King Crimson on CD, different remasters and relaeses and still when I play original release on vinyl i want to cry, suddenly or colours, bodies of instruments details all that what's missing on cd is there. Yes i do collect a lot of music but only music which i come back to i buy on LP if possible, the rest i just buy CDs rip them in Apple Lossless and that's it.
Can't be bothered with any compressed format as all of them suck and with current prices per GB of disks there's no point anyway.
Whatever they come up with i hope it won't be compressed and won't have any sort of silly DRM.
...it works on my Nokia 5800, 5310 and Ubuntu laptop, without needing any extra software or updates.
Otherwise I'll just stick with MP3 - it works on everything (the most important thing to me at the moment).
I currently use:
- 7digital - for buying (legal) MP3's (from £3 per album, £5 for chart / 50p-80p per track)
- Spotify - for (legal) streaming (ad supported for free / 99p for no ads for 1 day / £9.99 pcm for no ads at all)
All works on everything - no hassles.
Please let this be a higher quality format.
At least 24 bit and a higher sample rate.
I'm with roger and M - I actually read the liner notes, and I enjoy having the whole album as a 40 - 60 minute performance piece (which admittedly works better for some bands, less so for others).
But I can't say I'd touch a new format if it were DRM'd, and otherwise, the 'directory full of individual tracks' format works perfectly fine as a storage mechanism, just toss in a playlist and the album/art liner "metadata" if necessary.
Sounds like the studios are still looking for gimmicks to get users to swallow DRM (here's an entire album in one file?), and these particular 'extras' sound like an opportunity for each purchase to 'phone home' as well - at least in the form of a web bug, if not worse.
Music delivery will never go back to the past. The mass market has moved on and will not stand for the technical care and requirements of previous formats, record cleaners, tone arm adjustments, rewinding reel tapes, the sheer space all this stuff takes up in your home. The mass market does not care about tonal quality, accurate rendition matching the master. All they care about is something loud enough to thump them into a long enough coma to get them thru the day.
We only bought gatefolds to sift the seeds from your weed. Can't roll a joint on a cd cover.
Getting beyond......recorded music was about the album. And too often one song ruled and the rest was just filler. So the solution is not to sell one song at a time but to market the album again, with better production quality and artistic integrity. I want to hear what the musician has to say for 45 minutes or so. Not just a 3 minute radio bit.
anyway that's my 2 cents
This new file format is the most unnecessary move I've ever seen. There is no reason not to distribute music as an MP3 file in a folder with the liner notes and cover art as JPG files. This is how it's already done by the most popular distribution channel in the world - P2P.
The only reason I can think of to create a new file type (when there are already an over-abundance of excellent file types in existence) is to introduce some level of control (read: DRM). Much like BluRay was created with an eye towards eliminating piracy, the only reason to create a new file type is to help the RIAA's of the world prevent downloading (or more nefariously, to report back to the RIAA who is pirating their products). I don't trust this one bit.
I agree with Tony. Matter of fact, this is a big reason why P2P swapping is so popular. First, it's the only way to get some music (older jazz, for example) that's just not out on CD. Second, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) gets in the way of legit use. I can take any music CD and play it in any CD player, including my Linux or BSD computer. I can't do that with DRM-infected iGoons or Winblows Media. I know people who bought music through iGoons and went to the Pirate Bay to download the MP3 version 'cause they can play it anywhere. Consider that point, these people *bought* the music...and had to go to an "illegal" channel to actually use it on their non-Apple device (car CD player, for example). That ain't good.
Now to the "compressed or not compressed" issue. Hard drives are huge, true. But portable music players aren't yet. Mine's a 4GB flash-based device that plays Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, and a couple others. The WAV versions sound great, but on a 4GB device, they're H-U-G-E. I prefer Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, but MP3 will certainly do the job if it's a decent bitrate (256k or higher).
--SYG