Think, Eric, Think!

I find the concept of re-mediation quite useful for illuminating the transition from an old to a new medium.
In the case of photography, for example, it started out as a way to make perfect Stillleben paintings, in the case of film it began as a way of capturing theater plays–photography re-meditated painting, film re-meditated theater.

What’s happening right now in music distribution is that the emerging digital medium is re-mediating physical distribution. Think about it for a minute, the MP3 files littering your virtual desktop even look like little CD:s (at least on Mac OS X they do). You still buy them piece by piece, you download them, you collect and manage them. Even the names we use to describe these things; “albums”, “tracks”, hint at the history from which they originate. Coverflow attempts to bring back the feeling of flipping through a stack of records, etc.

It’s not until we manage to bring out the unique characteristics of a new medium and thereby fully realize its potential, that we can really say that the transition from one medium to another is complete (In fact, it’s never really complete–it’s a continuous, ever-changing movement…).

Today we’re beginning to see the true potential of the web as the coming dominant medium for music distribution, as its unique characteristics disrupts the legacy economic models of the industry.

So what are these unique characteristics? Again, I’d say the most important one is the link. If we free ourselves from the old mindset, stop thinking about files for a moment, and start thinking links instead, we’re opening up a new world. A link is not just a way to get to a piece of music, it’s a doorway to a unique place, a living, evolving context. Since this place is comprised of content, but perhaps more importantly of context, let’s call it content-context. Or to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, like Alex and I did in a recent talk, “any sufficiently interesting context is indistinguishable from content”.

In an economy of links, the “most relevant” content-context always wins. It gets the most exposure, it gets the top position in search engines, it attracts the most attention. In this world, quality is relevancy.
A link is far more lightweight than an mp3 file, not to mention a physical carrier. It changes the game because it can be passed around in a few seconds rather than minutes or hours. It can also turn into a widget–emerging standards show how elegantly this will happen in the future. In this light, it’s unbelievable that it took so long for so many music and web companies to make link-passing easy, and that quite a few companies including iTunes, Beatport (Sorry, but your site still sucks), MySpace and a few other big players still don’t seem to get this (Last.fm, Imeem, Songbird, SoundCloud, Spotify and Topspin are a few of the ones who do). Making it hard to link to a piece of content-context is one of the strategically worst thing a web-based company can do, in my opinion.

With 100:s of millions of people with the tools in hand (Twitter, Facebook, Email, etc) to broadcast links through their personal networks in a split second, any piece of content-context can gain huge attention in just a few hours. This is where the web is really unique compared to the old mediums. And this, perhaps, is the single strongest driving force in the ongoing medium shift…

I’ll be in London tomorrow talking about SoundCloud and some ideas for music distribution on the web. Come by if you like, I’d love to have a chat!

More information can be found on the OpenMusicMedia Meet website.

“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.”

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.mp3 or .aiff to get an mp3 or an aiff, etc.
• type soundcloud.com/forss.m3u, .xspf, .rss or .atom to get a playlist with all my releases
• soundcloud.com/forss/flickermood.rss to 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.xml and http://soundcloud.com/api/tracks/flickermood/stream.mp3 to 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.

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…

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!

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.

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.  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.  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?

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!