Jenni‘s writing about searching for songs on the iTunes store to replicate mix tapes made for her years ago and iTunes not really being up to the task has prompted me to follow up my post on ‘breaking’ the iTunes DRM with some stating of the bleeding obvious. First up, go read The Long Tail. Done that? Okay.
I might be wrong but folk of my generation are probably Apple’s prime audience. Still young enough to think we’re hip (especially in this age of the adultescent) but old enough to have a reasonable disposable income. Because we were teenagers in the pre-CD era we’ve got a shedloads of vinyl and cassettes full of music we love. It might not be of interest to the kids of today because a lot of it wasn’t actually that great but because it’s the soundtrack to our youth it’s important to us. The cream of it has likely been reissued on CD over the years but a lot of it, the Tail, hasn’t. One thing that’s struck me during the Gmail music sharing experiment is how many people have been posting and requesting obscurities from the late 80s and early 90s, which is not too surprising given it’s mainly my peers involved and we’re all in our early 30s. This stuff is incredibly hard to track down in a digital format. It’s not on the p2p networks because even if it was released on CD hardly anyone had a CD player at the time (and certainly not us kids) and anyway, vinyl was cooler and cassettes were cheaper. Those of us with shelves of tapes and records gathering dust would like to play this music on our shiny computers and would probably pay for the privilege.
Now we come to the digital age where the Long Tail is suddenly there and we’re getting used to everything being available. Every niche market is now viable and we’ve all got our specialist interests. The myth of the average consumer has been blown away as every Joe is able to indulge in their relatively obscure passion thanks to the net. Truly this is a golden age what we are in now.
iTunes know this I’m sure but the record labels don’t seem to because there are a hell of a lot of gaps in the store, even now the legal issues with the smaller labels have been resolved. (While the UK store is notoriously bad for this, probably because they’re playing catch-up with the UK rights market, the US store also has gaping holes.) It’s tricky to prove anything because iTunes doesn’t list the the information but if you know what label a couple of artists are on it becomes clear that iTunes is only really selling bestselling music that’s currently commercially available, that the companies have in their current catalogue. In other words they’re competing directly with the high street, which is why we’re paying 79p/99¢ per track to ensure the high street isn’t undercut.
Would it not be an absurdly good idea to dump the entire back catalogue of music that these companies own the right to onto iTunes? Yes, there are costs involved in digitising the really old stuff but I’m talking about music from the 80s and early 90s, the latter of which was released on CD on the whole, so even if it’s not stored digitally there’s probably a CD floating around the office they could rip and send to Apple. In fact looking on Amazon for a few of these gaps they’re actually available on CD! What’s going on here?
Maybe the record industry really is scared of the unknown and just doesn’t get it, in which case we’re going to have to wait a long time for things to change, by which time it’ll probably be too late so it’s going to get messy before it gets better.
One final anecdote. When I was a kid with limited pocket money and a growing interest in music I had to be choosy about what I spent my cash on. I quickly realised that at least one of my friends would buy the hit album of the moment and that I could tape it off them, so I didn’t need to buy it for myself. Instead I would buy albums that my friends didn’t and they would look at this weird shit I’d bought and ignore it, but that’s not the point. The point is the music I couldn’t get for free I’d pay for. Currently you can get pretty much all of the bestselling albums and songs via p2p networks but you can’t find that obscure deleted single from 1988 that changed your life, and because it changed you’re life you’re actually more likely to want to pay for it unlike the ephemeral stuff you download, listen to once and forget about.
The record companies have been looking after this music for us thanks to their contracts and copyrights, keeping it nice and safe but not actually able to make any more money off it because the market just isn’t there in the usual channels. But services like iTunes are not the usual channels. They can thrive on the Long Tail so when, for the love of Bob, are they going to exploit this?
There are various solutions available for getting that old vinyl into digital format, for example the Griffin iMic.
The music industry does not want to go digital at the moment because they will loose control. At the moment they see it as a fringe market that is growing, but CD’s is where the money is at. I assume the profit margin on CD sales is WAY bigger than the cut they get from downloads.
At the moment the record industry is quite happy for the likes of Apple and Napster to create the market for digital music, but I expect the record companies to move in and try and take over when it suits them. They want to control the artists AND the distribution.
I’m still hesitant to download albums from iTunes because of the price and quality. Why pay £7.99 for DRM’d AAC files when I can get the CD for £9.99 from play.com?
I’d love every track ever made to be made available for download after an appropriate fee being paid. It’d certainly help me get some of the obscure and not-so-obscure stuff I want. Though I don’t believe yours and mine in any way coincide :^)
My teen music experiences were thinking music was crap until discovering the 60s stuff my local station played late at nights (wouldn’t happen nowadays). There I was, at 3 in the morning, poised at my tape recorder waiting for an old Beatles or Kinks track. It was just so hard to find the stuff I liked, because rock erased its past so much and what there was aimed for the ‘nostalgia’ angle guaranteed to turn any teen off things. Now there are many reissue labels around willing and able to deliver up that Shangri Las B-side you (well, I) were looking for.
You’ll never have *everything* you want, y’know.
I buy my music on vinyl, and I buy a lot, but I also like to have it on the computer (and the iPod should arrive any day now..bwahahah!). I can get all the big releases (old & new) off p2p and members-only ftp sites much easier than I can get them off vinyl, but obscure stuff basically HAS to be recorded onto the computer through a poxy wire. Not only does that mean I don’t bother doing some of my faovurite albums, but once I’ve got the few tracks I can be bothered to record, I have to add all the release info to it from scratch. Extra slow.
I don’t really buy CDs but recently I have been picking up cheap CDs just to stick the songs on my iTunes, and then slinging the cd on teh shelf to never be touched again.