The Age of the Personal Soundtrack
Sometimes I would give my left leg — well maybe just a little piece of it, perhaps just the slimmest sliver of a pinky toe — to be able to instantly conduct some piece of market research all the way back through history. For example, I would love to see a graph which shows what activities people were mostly doing while listening to music, plotted all the way back through several thousand years. This piqued my interest after I listened to the third movement of John Adams’ Grand Pianola music on the walk into work last Friday, and the music crescendoed in sympathy with cresting the hill:
A flock of birds had been busy on the path, and as they scattered, and the slope evened out, the music provided a perfect accompaniment. That made me start to think about how in modern times we have the luxury of personal soundtracks. I bet that most music is now listened to on MP3 players, while people are walking, or running, or sitting on the train. It’s pretty obvious that if this is true, it must only have become true within the last thirty years or so. That’s amazing. If you wanted to walk or run somewhere with a soundtrack before around 1980 (when the Walkman was invented), you basically needed a marching band to be running alongside you.
That’s mind-blowing — and something I usually take completely for granted, as I’m sure does everyone else who was born on this side of 1980.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Use iTunes
The subject of where to get one’s non-CD music from (because that’s the way we roll these days) has come up several times before. In the last edition Dennis commented on his surprise that more people hadn’t left the mostly still DRM encumbered and low quality lands of iTunes for the emerald pastures of Amazon (which offers 256Kbps audio, DRM free). Over at Electronista today they have a post on exactly that issue.
A recent industrial research survey by the NPD group shows that only 10% of Amazon’s users are converts from iTunes, and iTunes also only holds 6% of the total market share of music sales in the US (compared to 19% for iTunes, 15% for Wal-Mart and 13% for Best Buy) which is actually a decrease in relative market share from 6.7% last spring.
Maria commented last time that she though the average iTunes user probably was just buying a couple of songs they heard on the radio, and likely doesn’t care about 128Kbps bitrates. I think that’s bang on. The thing about Apple is that everyone and their mom recognizes the brandname instantly. I would hazard a pretty whopping guess that the majority of people do not distinguish between “iPod” and “MP3 player” or “online MP3 retailer” and “iTunes”, let alone caring about the difference between 128Kbps and 256Kbps or AAC vs. MP3. They just want to get a copy of “Soulja Boy” they can play on their pink iPod Nano.
In fact, since most of the music purchasing audience probably doesn’t give a crap about technical specifications at all, it’s not terribly surprising that more companies haven’t pushed ridiculously-high-quality (specifically, lossless) digital recordings. The increase in users this would attract versus the expenditure is probably negligible for outlets which make most of their money from mass-market sales.
On the other hand, this is probably why DG is very smart to have 320Kbps audio available. Classical listeners are stereotypically extremely concerned with audio quality, and a classical store offering higher quality recordings will poach a significant fraction of classical downloaders from other sources. I would guess the same is true for jazz as well, another genre with more than it’s fair share of audiophiles, but since I can’t stand jazz I dunno if there are any specialty high-quality retailers out there.
In the end, there has to be a financial incentive for a company to offer high quality recordings, and currently there is no widespread public demand for this. Joe Consumer is far more concerned with having a pretty interface than downloading DRM free music. I suspect this will only change when either Amazon becomes a real threat to iTunes, or when seamless transferral of music to relatively high quality reproduction systems (see: not listening through crappy earbuds) is commonplace. Or perhaps music will get dragged along with the demand for HD video transmissions.
Here’s to the day when we can download lossless HD music in glorious 50.1 surround sound. Until then I am pretty content with 320Kbps.