Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
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Ligeti’s maximal minimalism - Visuals by Kubrick
“Minimal”
Musica Ricercata (1951-53): “The first uses almost exclusively just one pitch class, A, heard in multiple octaves. Only at the very end of the piece is a second note, D, heard.”
“Maximal”
Atmosphères (1961): - “It opens with what must be one of the largest cluster chords ever written - every note in the chromatic scale over a range of five octaves is played at once. Out of the fifty-six string players ushering in the first chord, not one plays the same note.”
“Fluxus”
Poème Symphonique (1962): “Each of the hundred metronomes is set up on the performance platform, and they are all then wound to their maximum extent and set to different speeds. Once they are all fully wound they are all started as simultaneously as possible. The performers then leave.”
In a post-scarcity publishing world, the key is to own the most relevant copy
The title of this post sounds a bit cryptic, agreed. Let me try to explain what I mean. The point I’m trying to make is actually very simple. The Web is a giant copying machine. And yet, if people can avoid having to copy something, they will. The problem is that today, the music industry suffers quite a bit from illegal file sharing–a giant copy party. What is going to happen over the coming years is that this copy fest will wind down. Yes, it will! And the reason for that is that there will be services that let people listen to their music without having to copy files and manage them.
Ok, so what matters in a world where p2p is irrelevant? In this world we will instead share and discover music in a giant link-passing frenzy. This is already becoming a reality, only it’s “not evenly distributed yet”.
Here are a number of popular links to Flickermood, a song I released under the alias Forss on Berlin-based Sonar Kollektiv:
- sonarkollektiv.com/tracks/DE-P96-03-00042
- last.fm/music/Forss/_/Flickermood
- forss.imeem.com/music/q9s1RHX1/forss_flickermood
- mp3web.org/dwnl.asp?id=87092
- open.spotify.com/track/6nFNSuVrBNqZ2Qe2TwZZ4G
…oh, here’s a link where you can buy the song, complete with drm and in worse quality. http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=7018176&id=7018192&s=143456. Feel free to go there and, ..eh nevermind.
And then we have soundcloud.com/forss/flickermood. Let’s go back to the cryptic title of this post. Since Flickermood seems to be available all over the place, the key, being a music service or a label or an artist in this world of link-passing, is to own the most relevant copy. With most relevant I mean the most happening copy, the most accessible copy, the most usable copy, the coolest copy, the earliest copy, the most exclusive copy, the copy with the best sound quality, the most permanent copy, the most social copy, the most remixed copy, the most authentic copy, the most interoperable copy, etc.
Although the above links are all cool I’ll focus on the last one to further highlight what I mean. It’s a link to the track on SoundCloud, a service I’m currently working on, where you can listen to the full song in a pretty cool player with discussions happening inside the track through “timed” comments. I’m there too, discussing samples with friends and fans. What’s also interesting about this link is this:
- type
soundcloud.com/forss/flickermood.mp3or.aiffto get an mp3 or an aiff, etc. - type
soundcloud.com/forss.m3u,.xspf,.rssor.atomto get a playlist with all my releases soundcloud.com/forss/flickermood.rssto get a feed of comments- sniff the audio with an haudio compatible app
- go to the url with your iPhone to play it
- embed the track on MySpace or just about any other place, in a player that is better than any other out there.
http://soundcloud.com/api/tracks/flickermood.xmlandhttp://soundcloud.com/api/tracks/flickermood/stream.mp3to do just about anything with the track.- and there is in fact much more… (some of these features are still in development, in case you’re a lucky beta tester)
Good song permalinks is the shit. All this really means is that the track is so accessible, it’s impossible to top. The problem today is that the vast majority of “relevant” copies of songs are in places where labels and artists and other commercial players have little or no control over them. 1% of the listeners may be in a place where labels/artists/platforms are, they may pay, etc, but the other 99% are somewhere else–on p2p nets, on russian pirate sites, on trashy yasn sites, heck, even in their own music players. The key to survival on the emerging media web is to make these copies irrelevant by being drastically more relevant. Downloads won’t survive long in a post-scarcity publishing world–it’s making yet another irrelevant copy of an irrelevant, un-sexy copy to begin with. Just contrast iTunes with SoundCloud. Right now, I just see a lot of lost ad dollars.
Deeper Understanding
I’ve been listening a lot to Kate Bush lately. It all began when I stumbled upon the mysterious new single King of the Mountain (here’s the video) — that track in turn made me rediscover some of her old hits. I’m fond of these multiple layers of harmony that seem to be present in many of her tracks, and Eberhard Weber is great on the bass. Kate’s songs are like musical riddles that make you listen and ponder. And nerds like me just gotta love the lyrics. Just look at the ones from “Deeper Understanding”:
As the people here grow colder
I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it
Like a friend.
I was loading a new programme
I had ordered from a magazine:“Are you lonely, are you lost?
This voice console is a must.”
I press Execute.“Hello, I know that you’ve been feeling tired.
I bring you love and deeper understanding.
Hello, I know that you’re unhappy.
I bring you love and deeper understanding.”
I still haven’t got a hold of her track from the new album, Aerial, that is simply called Pi where she in the chorus apparently sings Pi to 150 decimal places. Where can I get that track? I guess I will have to turn to my friends, the p2p-nets…
Magnatune and Double Moral Hazards
I just read a very inspiring article (part 1 and 2) by Umair Haque on why the business model of the music industry–which still is about selling records–is seriously flawed. Haque applies a theory in microeconomics referred to as Moral hazard to analyze the current market of labels and consumers.
In short, he concludes that we, as music consumers, are finding new ways to compensate for the value lost when we buy music that we realize we don’t like. Labels traditionally act as “quality assurance” agents, but it’s evident that these agents provide too little information to us as consumers about the products they are selling at a (more or less) fixed price; hence creating a typical moral hazard situation. Haque argues that p2p file sharing is mainly about a radical form of risk sharing; we eliminate the costs of buying music that we don’t know if we’ll like.
In part two of the article, he then proposes a number of solutions to the problem. One way to tackle it is to let consumers listen to a piece of music in its entirety before buying. Another way is to provide variable pricing, either on the buyer’s end (consumers get to choose how much to pay), or by the use of some clever algorithm that figures out the demand/value of a particular track or record and then chooses a price accordingly.
Now, Magnatune uses a combination of the above techniques to provide more information to its customers; one can listen to a full album in high quality before buying it to a price one gets to pick ($5-20). In this way, customers can reduce the risk of a “bad experience” by carefully listening to–and then choosing the price for–the music that they buy.
All good? Well, Magnatune’s way may be good enough, but in fact–just as Haque warns–some of the solutions to the problem can give rise to a double Moral hazard! In this case, it’s the listen-to-the-full-track feature that is problematic. Being the hobby hacker I am, I wrote a script that extracts all the mp3-files from the m3u files that Magnatune uses for their track preview feature. In a very short time, my computer had downloaded over 2GB of copyrighted music (Don’t worry, Magnatune, I deleted it again). And the servers over at Magnatune just think that I’ve previewed a lot of tracks, which means that now I’m the one responsible for the moral hazard!
Last.fm Redesigns!
Woah, last.fm has gotten a major overhaul! It’s now possible to tag music; the new tagging interface is pretty good. The player has been made a native application — a wise choice.
But alas, it doesn’t work. Oh no, yet another great service I can’t use because of showstopper bugs. Those nasty things…and there’s only one way to get rid of them…I guess it’s called ‘debugging’. Perpetual beta angst.
UPDATE: It seems to work! This thing is really rocking now.
iTunes Affiliate Application Status
Dear Eric Wahlforss:
We regret to inform you that iTunes has chosen not to accept your application for the iTunes Affiliate Program at this time. Â This may be because:
- The content is unrelated to iTunes
- Your site is temporarily down or under construction — please make sure to apply again after 2 weeks.
- A wrong or misspelled URL given in the application. Â Please correct the problem and apply again.
- Your site is aesthetically unpleasing
- Your site promotes tobacco, alcoholic beverages or excessive drinking/drug use
- Your site contains extreme religious content
- Your site is international (with a majority of visitors based OUTSIDE the US. or written in a foreign language)
Well, Apple, if you could explicitly tell me what’s wrong with my site, I’d be happy to fix it. I’m selling my music on your crappy DRM-ridden platform, remember?
Forss Offical Site
The new site has been launched, complete with exclusive downloads, remix possibilities and a video! I’m actually making music full time this summer, which is one of the reasons why I’m not posting that much here. I will be posting more on the blog over at The Forss Website over the next few weeks though!
iTunes 4.9 is out
Being able to mark the ones I’ve read is good.
And that means podcast integration! Aside from not being able to browse the Apple Podcast Directory for some reason, the interface for storing podcasts is really nice and simple. I’m switching from iPodderX, which used to be my tool of choice.
There are serious threats to the iTunes+iPod value chain now in the form of other better, more open music stores, and new music players integrated directly into mobile phones with slick form factors. Is this the first step towards the downfall of Apples vertical value chain? Will the next version of iTunes offer a sales platform for podcasts? Will the next iPod be a mobile phone? Many questions, and as usual only Steve knows…
Towards the heavenly jukebox
A little over a month ago I visited last.fm in their very east Londonish office. Talking to the team, I got to know about some really cool things that they have in store for the future. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to talk about it here…
Mischa, Martin and Johan at last.fm.
One of the things they’re already doing though, is spidering (both manually and automatically) P2P networks, constantly feeding the radio database with terabytes of new material. Since they have a valid radio license, it’s fully legal!
This reminded me about what I wrote in 2003:
“Now, if file sharing apps would implement the cache model and rareness indexing I’m currently emulating manually, so that songs I never play are purged automatically from my local node and downloaded again upon request or automatically as their rareness indexes drops below critical, and if we could implement a way of auto-discovering other people with similar tastes by comparing my collection with theirs, it would make it even harder for commercial alternatives. Not to say if we’d come up with a cross-P2P search engine working on Google principles — “Yoodle”!”
Indy — a fairly new, client based “competitor” to last.fm — actually has a very simple caching functionality, resembling what I spoke of above. It basically dedicates more space for music relative to the rating you give it; 5 star music gets 1GB, 4 star gets 500MB, 3 star gets 100MB, etc. The cache is then FIFO-purged automatically.
Alas, I never got convinced by Indy since the music it plays simply is too bad. I believe the base of CC-licensed music actually isn’t there yet in terms of quality. I ended up pressing the 1 star button for every track, desperately hoping for the collaborative filtering system to find something good for me — but it never happened. I think I had one 3 star track out of 25 bad ones…
So I’m back to last.fm for now, thinking it would be very cool if we could somehow integrate last.fm with Indy, getting the best of both worlds.
iTunes Music Store Sweden Launches
I just bought Chopin & Rachmaninov: Piano Sonatas played by the incredible Héléne Grimaud. I discovered her through my mother who was blown away by her Bach performance in the Stockholm Concert Hall. Apart from being one of the top interpreters of composers such as Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninov, and Arvo Pärt, she apparently runs a wolf farm in the state of New York!
She has eyes like a wolf, too!
This wonderful music aside, I’m not terribly impressed by ITMS. That it’s so successful is really proof of the fact that this market is in its infancy. After all, Apple’s music initiative is 100% vertically integrated; They own the hardware and the software the platform runs on, they own the distribution platform itself, they own the player, they own the format, hell they almost own the artists. I’ve sold over 1000 tracks on ITMS, and what do I get? Well, not much! In fact extraordinarily little! And thanks to some bizarre licensing deal, my record seems not to be in the Swedish store (Just one track).
Browsing around, I also realise how much I miss tabs and the normal browser interface. Where is the “bookmark this track” button? Where are the easy-to-use permalinks! This is an n-dimensional space I’m navigating after all! I discovered lots of music metadata errors when browsing the classic catalog — where can I submit the errors? Sadly, my comments on Beatport seem to apply for ITMS aswell!
But, there is still nothing preventing Apple from creating a browser based store later on. They can solve the music integration the same way they’ve done with Widgets, which is quite beautiful (Or they could do it with an HTTP header, which would enable Firefox integration). And lastly, they have promised to open up iTunes when the iPod’s market share drops significantly. Even though I love Apple, I actually can’t wait to see this happen.