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.
Free Symphonies!
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (or the RCO to their cool friends) are offering 10 free symphonies to download in honor of their 120th birthday. They are adding a new one each day until the 24th of October. Here’s the list:
Franz Schubert – Symphony no. 8 ‘Unfinished’ (15-10-08)
Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony no. 2 (16-10-08)
Felix Mendelssohn – Symphony no. 4 ‘Italian’ (17-10-08)
César Franck – Symphony in D minor (18-10-08)
Gustav Mahler – Symphony no. 1 (19-10-08)
Antonin Dvorák – Symphony no. 8 (20-10-08)
Camille Saint-Saëns – Symphony no. 3 ‘Organ’ (21-10-08)
Jean Sibelius – Symphony no. 2 (22-10-08)
Anton Bruckner – Symphony no. 8 23-10-08
Johannes Brahms – Symphony no. 2 (24-10-08)
You can download them here.
Lossless Classical Music, We Have Arrived!
Finally! DRM free, lossless classical music downloads are here! Today Passionato, an online classical music download store was launched in the UK. They are offering music from Universal Music and EMI Classics, as well as Naxos, Chandos, etc. In other words their catalog is frickin’ huge. You can download either in high quality 320kbps MP3 (like the DG store) or lossless FLAC. The latter is identical to a CD.
This means that you can instantly download and then burn an exact duplicate of what you would purchase in a store. You previous quality naysayers should now be satisfied.
Currently they have only launched in the UK, so you have to pay in pounds. Also, they seem to be a tad more popular then anticipated: the site frequently is spitting out “too many users” type messages at the moment. This means you might have to wait until late-at-night GMT before being able to explore and download stuff properly.
Despite these initial hiccups, this is great news for the classical music world.
UPDATE: it looks likes you get a whole bunch of free music just for signing up, although most of these tracks are individual movements it includes a complete performance of Saint-Saens symphony No. 3.
The Further Demise of Physical Media
Continuing the saga of the slow demise of CDs is this poll of the online readers of Stereophile magazine, indicating that only 45% use CDs or SACDs as their primary method of listening to music, compared to 50% who use either an MP3 server or iPod.
I was previously unaware of Stereophile magazine, but it’s one of those magazines targeted at people with more money than sense audiophiles, which reviews things such as these $2999 interconnects using language like:
Silences and spaces between notes and sonic “images” weren’t even black: They were just dead-empty. Tunefulness, rhythm, and musical flow were all superb.
Although to be fair, the author does blatantly point out that it is a ridiculous price.
Regardless of how prodigal the publication is with their praise for expensive audio, the point is that their readership is well-biased toward the audio snob — not the casual top-40 downloader — and these guys are now more inclined to play via hard-disk than CD. I think with both of these ends of the audio listening spectrum covered, storable-audio is well on the way to completely wiping out physical formats.
In fact, the only time I use CDs these days is in my car stereo… and those are only for storing MP3s on. I kinda miss the collection browsing, but don’t miss the dust and taken up space. How about you? Do you still have a collection of CD jewel boxes cluttering up the shelves?
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.