It’s a fish/barrel/shotgun scenario, really, but a couple more examples of minor irritants that are troubling in the context of the customer expectations that digital distribution enables.
First up, this scenario became inevitable in the same moment that the “partial album” was brought into being:
Brian Gossett’s Heist series of mixes are exactly the kind of thing content systems need to evolve to allow: a fabulous concept (who doesn’t want retro location-themed soundtracks to imaginary heist movies?), brilliant execution, and (every bit as important) gorgeous custom cover art:
I am a huge fan of heist films. They exude a sense of excitement and wonderment. The recipe for a great caper is a seemingly impossible score, specialized team members, exotic sports cars, gadgets galore, globetrotting, beautiful yet conniving women, a dash of good humor, and an impeccable musical backdrop. The latter brings us to my latest series of mixes, The Heist Series. I have chosen artists who have scored classic and modern heist films. To add color to these mixes are complimentary tracks that flavor the ambience of the narrative. Each subsequent mix to follow, will personify a city in which our fictitious caper takes place.
We Datachondrians have been worrying about what’s going to happen at parties now that digital media is rendering shelving obsolete and with it the joy of browsing and passing casual judgment on every party’s hosts. So far we’ve had only a bright idea or two about what might replace shelves full of CDs or books in this very strange but important social space.
We’re still coming up short of anything exactly equivalent to being interrupted while deploying the next tactic in the strategic seduction of the girl in your building who you’ve run into in the laundry room enough times to have made possible an invitation to this very happening shindig of yours by your guffawing brother-in-law waving your copy of REO Speedwagon’s greatest hits.
Today Apple released iTunes 8.1 and with it a feature they’re calling iTunes DJ. On the surface it looks like all they’ve done is rename the Party Shuffle smart playlist but they’ve also added functionality that allows the playlist to be manipulated by anyone with the remote app for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Not only can your guests browse your entire music collection as judgmentally as ever, but they can also vote for the next song to be played — and if they really can’t stand the present state of tunage they can interrupt the song currently playing.
I’ve held off from the iPhone for a while now, but with the way Apple keeps adding fun new ways to use the device I can see it might soon be time to give in.
Not the music itself, mind you (though I could moan about the loudness war some other time) — just the format that’s become widely preferred among teenagers and young adults. Standford researcher Jonathan Berger has been testing his students’ format preference for the past 6 years, having them listen to a recording in a number of formats, from low resolution MP3s to “ones of much higher quality”, (SACD?) and found some disappointing results. As Dale Dougherty of The O’Reilly Radar puts it:
each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.
Dougherty goes on to argue, persuasively I think, that people gravitate to the medium that they grow up with, playback artifacts and all. People who grew up with LPs, for example, like the background analogue noise and naturally limited frequency range of vinyl.
If you were 13 years old in 2004, when the iPod mini came out, you grew up with MP3s and probably prefer their sizzly upper register (and not paying for music, but I digress). Me, I’ll always go for a very clean open sound because I grew up on CDs — though I have an innate fear of being sold old recordings that haven’t been remastered properly.
But consider this: the ubiquity of the iPod and digital music means boomers and their kids, will have approximately the same degree of hearing degradation at the same time.
Music-listeners brought up on MP3s like recordings with lots of extreme high frequencies are in for a big let-down relatively early on. As a person ages, their ability to perceive exactly those frequencies diminishes significantly. And this process is accelerated by listening to music loudly, which has become a lot more common since carrying around your entire music collection became not only possible, but more convenient than it was for me to carry around just a couple of CDs (and the batteries to ensure I’d be able to listen to them all) just 15 years ago. People now spend hours at a time with music blasting into their ear canals in all kinds of noisy settings that require them to use high volume settings to hear their device.
With the combined buying power of boomers and their kids should we expect recordings to start to be produced to sound good to their damaged ears?
When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.
We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves — to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we’ve undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections — consciously or unconsciously — to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.
What’s true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books — just like prominently reading Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway — is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.
What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?
This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element — the ability to have one’s music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?
Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It’s been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.
Bolt a high endvirtual surround source to the screen, and you’ve got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you’re already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.
Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.
It’s the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us — about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time — and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.
Today Apple released iTunes 8.1 and with it a feature they’re calling 