New music formats: reflections by Marco Arment

Note Trans.: In his article on music formats Marco Arment, the man who created Tumblr and Instapaper, but in this case, first and foremost a music lover, talks about the possibility of a new audiovisual format, announced for the first time in an interview with Bono (U2) for Time magazine, in mid-September this year, about the readiness for this industry and about the history of creation of similar formats in the past.

Time Edition reports :

Bono, Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. are convinced that the artists should be rewarded for their work, so they joined the secret project with Apple to try to make this idea a reality. The task is not simple, considering that music is freely available everywhere “due to” piracy and legal websites such as YouTube. Bono told Time that he hopes that the new digital music format they are currently working on will seem to music lovers to be so incredibly stunning that it will once again seduce them to buy music - both whole albums and singles. The task of the new format is to help not only the U2 group, but also other less well-known artists and other representatives of the industry - those who cannot make money the way U2 does, performing their songs live. “The songwriters don't go on tour,” says Bono. “Cole Porter would not sell a single T-shirt. He would not have come to speak at the stadium closest to you ”[ Cole Porter (Cole Porter) is one of the most prominent American songwriters of the twentieth century - approx. trans.].

Billboard :

In the upcoming central article of Time, Bono hinted that the next song of the band would be released in about 18 months in a new file format. “I think this theme will stir up the music business,” Bono said in an interview with Time, “this will be an audio-visual interactive music format that cannot be copied by pirates. He will return the illustrations to the album to life in a new capacity, you will be able to access the lyrics of the songs and find out how they were created - and all this sitting, for example, in the subway with an iPad or tablet. With this format, photography will show itself in a completely new light. ”

To be precise, all these arguments are full of erroneous opinions and inappropriate optimism.
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If you actively use a smartphone, then music competes with everything else that a smartphone can do - and at the moment it is a lot of things. You are lucky if your audience listens only to music and at the same time is not busy with anything else - however, more of what you can usually hope for is that modern music lovers listen to it in the background while doing some other activity that is not accompanied own music In this case, the most important site at the moment, where you can discover for yourself new artists - YouTube.

I understand why people in the music business believe that it is important to release and sell interactive and multimedia music formats (what year is it?) - to compete with each other, but I don’t think they have at least a chance. As every modern music trend proves the opposite.
Sales of music fall the faster, the more people switch to streaming services. This train has left, and it can’t be returned [1] [ or, as Marco says, “this ship has already sailed” - approx. trans.].

Today, whole albums are as interesting to most people as magazines. Singles and individual articles "kill" albums and magazines, respectively. This is true both in terms of demand and in terms of supply: most people do not listen to albums entirely, and most groups do not release entirely and completely successful albums [2]. People are only interested in the most popular singles. This train also left [3].

The release of this supposed new format will cost a fortune: people will need to take photos, design interactions, draw animations, and do business with Apple. The topic of helping young groups that Bono has touched on is simply ridiculous: young groups barely allow themselves professional recording, let alone everything else.

Apple no longer has market power to support the success of private formats. When everyone bought music on iTunes and listened to it on iPods, the chances of success were higher, but today the situation has changed. The market has become too diverse, especially with the growing popularity of listening to music on streaming services and other non-Apple devices that cannot and will never play these formats.

Perhaps it would have worked in the past. For example, in 2009, when Apple’s market share was greater, and streaming has not yet reached music.

Fortunately, we don’t have to imagine what would happen to the new multimedia format in theory in 2009, because Apple did launch one. Remember iTunes LP ? It still exists, but never enjoyed success, did not affect the number of albums sold, did not reduce the volume of piracy or the attractiveness of streaming, but, knowing about all this, the music industry continues to lose touch with real life.

The fact is that, as in the case of any other budding music or video format, people do not value “add-ons” too much. People appreciate the music itself (and even with great difficulty) and the convenience of listening to it in a user-friendly way. Like this.

Many have re-purchased the recordings that they already had on vinyl or audio cassettes, with the advent of the CD and the ability to download music via the Internet, mainly because each subsequent medium was much more convenient than its predecessors. Nobody bought a CD just because the booklets inside were longer and had more annotations than the liners in the cassette cases.

SACD and DVD-audio will not go far, and Pono , most likely, also [4], because a slight improvement in sound quality is not enough to cover the significant inconveniences that these new "private" [ read: non - universal - approx. translation] formats bring ubiquitous music players to the world.

There is nothing Apple or Bono could do to get people interested in the vaunted annotations to the records. People are only interested in music and the convenience of listening to it, period.

As for "music that cannot be copied by pirates," I will ask again, what year is it? This ship not only sailed long ago, but had already sailed around the world a thousand times, sank, was raised from the bottom, turned into an attraction for tourists, went down, was dismantled and modified into a more profitable oil tanker. Piracy is not a real problem in the music industry and never has been, and we still have to come up with some kind of audio and video format that really cannot be copied by pirates.

In 2007, Steve Jobs wrote an essay entitled “Reflections on Music” to try to sway big record companies to selling DRM-free music [ DRM - Digital rights management - technological copyright protection tools - approx. trans.]. Here is an excerpt from it:

“Imagine a world in which all online stores sell DRM-free music encoded in publicly licensed formats. In this world, any player can play music purchased in any store, and any store can sell music that is played on all players. This is definitely the best alternative for buyers, and Apple will support it wholeheartedly. If the big four record labels provide Apple with their music without requiring it to be protected with DRM, we can go to selling DRM-free music in our iTunes store. Every iPod released will play music without DRM.

Why should the big four record labels agree and allow Apple and other companies to sell their music without using DRM to protect? The answer is simple: because this system has not stopped and may never stop musical piracy. ”

I am sure that this is a coincidence, but I spent a lot of time and did not find “Reflections on music” on the Apple website [5]. Here is a copy of the Internet archive, and the only working copy I found was in the archive of the Korean Hot News.

Jobs, apparently, as usual, had ulterior motives — he most likely wanted to simplify further negotiations and enhance the capabilities of future devices and their characteristics: he probably knew that Amazon MP3 Store , which was preparing to launch, had agreed on music without DRM, and did not want to be at a disadvantage.

But I also bet that, as a customer with taste, a technologist and just a man, he absolutely sincerely disliked DRM and wanted to abolish it as much as he could.

The attempt, on the whole, ended in success. There was no talk about TV shows and movies purchased via iTunes leaving DRM, but the music in iTunes really lost DRM protection in the next few months (this page from Apple is still available). And the world has not collapsed. There were no sudden flashes of piracy. Everything remained the same, only it became more pleasant to be a buyer.

Now we all are accustomed to music without DRM protection, and I believe that it would be a big mistake to launch a music format that is “burdened” with DRM [6]. Today it’s quite difficult to get people to buy music as such - the last thing the industry needs is another excuse for not caring for people.

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[1] I say this because I often buy music and very rarely use streaming services.

[2] I say this as a music lover who listens to all the albums entirely. The decline in quality is obvious.

[3] So it was decades ago, but during physical media carriers, the only way to get a hit single was to buy the entire album. Audio cassettes and singles were rarely produced in small batches, because everyone in this chain — bands, recording studios and salespeople — earned more money to produce a full-length album.

[4] Music as better than CD is not new . And if there really was a demand for it, Apple would have already promoted it for sale and supported its reproduction, but, in fact, few people are interested in it. How compelling would be a high bitrate format alternative to streaming services? "We are going to make a music collection on your iPhone with 16GB of memory 4-10 times harder to improve the quality, which is impossible to hear at all in any headphones, not to mention your EarPods and Beats." If people are forced to choose between quality and convenience, convenience will certainly benefit.

[5] According to Wayback Machine, the original page was turned off sometime between December 27, 2010 and January 27, 2011. I suppose and hope that this is the result of poor management of the Apple website, and not intentional action, although a similar article is “Reflections on Flash "- still available on the site.

[6] DRM can also be used by streaming services.