Rooks and Becords: The Value of the Selection Set & The Amorality of Infinity
For book and record stores, there was a moment when the largest inventory and the lowest prices won out. Large physical stores with endless rows of inventory overwhelmed the small retailer. Eventually the inventory moved into a series of warehouses/databases with query-based web front ends attached to a product delivery system. Inventory expanded to match the number of sellable books in existence, and the customer experience was abstracted to a computer screen, a keyboard and a mouse. Touch, smell, sound, weight, the look of the spine, the creaking of the wooden floor— all of these modes of interaction were eliminated from the equation. Of course, no one is interested in all books, but if a vendor has all books in their inventory, it’s likely the subset you’re interested in can be carved out of the whole stack.
Two of my favorite bookstores don’t have an infinite inventory. I always enjoy browsing and rarely walk out without having purchased something. The trick is that if you don’t have everything, you need to have what’s good. And in order to have what’s good, you need to have a point of view on what’s good. In New York, the tiny Three Lives bookstore always manages to show me something I can’t live without. Last time I was there it was Tom Rachman’s sparkling first novel, The Imperfectionists. In San Francisco, one of my favorites is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’sCity Lights Bookstore. City Lights often makes the improbable connection. After a reading (in New York) by Richard Foreman from his book, No-Body, A Novel in Parts, I asked him what he was reading. Foreman said that he’d become very interested in an Austrian writer named Heimito Von Doderer. Subsequently, I looked for books by Von Doderer, but came up empty until a visit to City Lights. City Lights was the perfect connection between Foreman and Von Doderer.
More than just a place to purchase books, both of those bookstores communicate a way of life, a way of thinking, an idea about taste and a larger picture about what’s good and important in our culture. While their inventory of books isn’t infinite, one has a sense of infinite possibility browsing through the stacks.
While at first we luxuriated in the ocean of choice, now we find ourselves thwarted by the process of sorting and prioritizing an infinite set of possibilities. One way to gauge the number of choices to offer is to look at the relative amount of time a person spends evaluating possible choices versus the amount of time spent enjoying the choice. If the selection set is infinite, but only one item will eventually be chosen, the customer may find herself living out one of Zeno’s paradoxes.
There’s a sense in which an infinite inventory is amoral. It avoids the choices forced on a small bookstore with a limited amount of shelf space. And perhaps this gets at something central to human experience— something about time, mortality and the choices we make about what matters. Neil Postman relays a quote from Philip Roth about Writers From The Other Europe.
In commenting on the difference between being a novelist in the West and being a novelist behind the iron curtain (this was before the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe), Roth said that in Eastern Europe nothing is permitted but everything matters; with us, everything is permitted but nothing matters.
The voices from a certain segment of the developer classes cry out that the iPad has left out too much. That the simplicity of the device has cut them off from the toolsets with which they’ve become comfortable and productive. There’s no keyboard, no mouse, no windows, no multitasking, no hierarchical file system. Perhaps they state the obvious when they say it’s not the laptop they already have. The device, they say, is too simple to be useful. The computing environment is too vertical. Somehow this crowd imagines a linear incremental evolutionary development from personal computing as they’ve always known it to a simple tablet device. A simple device that includes all the complexity and clutter to which they’ve become accustomed. Of course we know the fate of the complex tablet device they’re describing— it never caught on. That wasn’t what they wanted either.
There’s another segment that says that this new iPad device won’t inspire the tinkerer, the maker. The person who, as a child growing up, reveled in taking apart things to see how they worked. There are no screws to let the user open up this device and have a peak inside. The device is both too simple and too complex. The integrated design and manufacture of the product is at such a high level that there’s not much for the tinkerer to play with. This crowd believes the iPad kills play. But tinkering and play is always a relative matter. With the iPad, tinkering is simply displaced— it moves up the stack to the level of web/cloud and native software. Tinkerers, if they are tinkerers, are not so easily dissuaded.
A third segment thinks that the iPad will re-incarcerate the audience. Social media and various crowd-sourced content sites have transformed the audience from passive observers to active participants. But, the iPad is deemed an evolutionary step backward, an evil plan by the incumbent media companies to preserve their dastardly business models. The device, they say, is purely for consumption of media— it’s a screen, much like a television. Because it lacks the traditional input tools, the keyboard and the mouse, it can’t and won’t enable the user to interact or create. Multi-touch is a gesture of consumption, not one of creation. Those making this argument defend the “new media of the internet” from the next generation of innovators and the kids who’ll learn to type on glass.
In each of these cases there’s a defense of an inconvenient complexity. The complexity must be preserved to extend the stability of the existing ecosystem. There’s even a moral edge to maintaining the status quo, as if embracing this new platform was a kind of degenerate act. And instead of the device that’s available today, a non-existent device of the future is peddled in its place. A device where choices don’t have to be made, where everything you want, everything you have, and everything you can imagine exist in a simple package. Of course, if you wait long enough, the thing you’re looking for might just come along. Either that or you’ll run out of heartbeats.
In the end, what the simplicity of the iPad allows is more participation by more people with real-time personal and social networked computing. By eliminating levels of complexity, the barriers to practical and emotional engagement with the device are reduced below a significant threshold. But we’re only in the year zero, as the platform expands and matures, as competitors flesh out variations of the theme, new levels of complexity will emerge.
My thoughts have been swirling around the point of interaction for some time now. And by that I mean the point of human-computer interaction. To connect up the threads, at first, I’ve began looking backwards. Perhaps all the way to the Jacquard loom and the punch cards used to control the patterns, and then on to the punch cards used on the early mainframes.
I’m sure there were many steps in between, but my mind races ahead to the command line. This extremely powerful and elegant point of interaction has never really been superseded. It continues to be the favored mode of interaction for a number of software development activities. But it was the graphical user interface that provided a point of interaction that changed the medium.
Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo of the work undertaken by the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) gives us all the fundamental modes of interaction. The keyboard, the mouse/trackpad, the headset, hypertext and the graphic user interface. Within that set of interaction points, we’ve started to expand the repertoire. With the introduction of the iPhone, the trackpad gesture has gained increasing importance.
On a separate track we’ve seen video games controllers become ever more complex. The point of interaction for the game starts to reflect the kind of speed and complexity we create in our virtual gaming worlds.
It’s with the Wii and Project Natal that we start to see the surface of the trackpad detached from the computing device, extruded into three dimensions, and then dematerialized. The interaction gestures can now be captured in the space around us. Originally, the graphic user interface (mouse clicks, windows, desktop) was criticized for the limitations it imposed.
The other key development was the displacement of computing from the local device to the Network of connected devices. The interaction point is now to a new Networked medium. This is the converged form of what McLuhan understood as television. The development of new interaction modes traces a path toward opening to greater numbers of participants the new medium. Beyond mass media, there is the media of connected micro-communities.
Popular culture and music culture has always had a big impact on the development of cutting-edge technology. When we think of controlling technology through hand gestures, we can start with the ether-wave theremin created by Leon Theremin.
This is one of those in-between moments. The wave unleashed by xerox-parc and the augmentation research center is about to be followed by a new wave. The signs are all around us.
Collections, Time, Distance: From Medium to Meta-Data
These are interesting times for the collector. Collections of books, records, DVDs— these all used to matter. What does his bookshelf say about him? And did you get a look at his record collection? I never knew he collected DVDs of musicals with music by Cole Porter.
As the underlying media that holds these recordings moves toward the digital, the bookshelf and the record cabinet give way to the computer hard drive. The physical limitations of the bookshelf no longer trouble us. We can collect to our heart’s content.
Once we have every piece of music as a digital file on a hard drive, our relationship to the music is displaced from the recording medium (vinyl, tape, cd) to the meta-data about the file. We have no relationship with the bits stored on the disk. If asked to point to which bits represent which song, we would be unable to do so. So instead, we now relate to meta-data in an index. The index of titles assures us that we have indeed collected 20 versions of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. We can push this button, or that one, and call up the file to be played on a connected sound system.
When my music collection was encoded on vinyl platters, I had a direct relationship with the medium. I was careful not to scratch the vinyl. The record was kept in a paper sleeve that fit into a cardboard album cover. For very special records, I’d keep the album in a protective plastic covering so the artwork on the album cover wouldn’t get worn. I used a fairly complex system to clean the records with a special liquid and a brush. I have no such specific relationship with the bits that now hold much of the music that I ‘own.’
In fact, it’s largely a matter of faith that the bits I think I own are physically located on my hard drive. Frankly, the bits could be anywhere. In this relationship, all I care about is the latency between when I locate the song in the index and push the button that connects it to the sound system, and when the music comes out of the speakers. Increments of time displace the qualities of physical extension.
Today’s operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longer want to be connected to computers — near ones OR remote ones. (They probably never did). They want to be connected to information. In the future, people are connected to cyberbodies; cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos — also known as the Swarm, the Cybersphere.
Where a song encoded as bits is doesn’t really matter. I’m only interested in what action creates the connection between the meta-data in the index, the stream of data from the file, and a system that can decode that stream into audible sound. At this moment in history, physical proximity along with wires and plugs seem to be the best guarantee of delivery of the stream with a minimum of latency. Once that service level agreement can be met via the Network, the local and the remote become displaced by the service contract. Apple’s interest in LaLa.com’s approach to collections of music reflects a recognition of how this relationship is changing as a matter of practice.
Real collectors, the completists, often don’t open the package, don’t interact with the collected item in any way that would damage its potential value. While actual contact is minimal, physical delivery of the items is important. A collector of digital bits collects meta-data in an index; however the emotion and the ritual of collection doesn’t really transfer to the digital realm.
As we make these transitions to the digital, we need to renew our understanding the metaphors we use to navigate this space. We take them granted, we assume desktops, two-dimensional screens, files and folders. Even the idea of name spaces could use rethinking.
Once again, Gelernter on how we create models from metaphors, and how those models are going to change by incorporating time (tangible time = the stream):
34. In the beginning, computers dealt mainly in numbers and words. Today they deal mainly with pictures. In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly with tangible time — time made visible and concrete. Chronologies and timelines tend to be awkward in the off-computer world of paper, but they are natural online.
35. Computers make alphabetical order obsolete.
36. File cabinets and human minds are information-storage systems. We could model computerized information-storage on the mind instead of the file cabinet if we wanted to.
37. Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. (Hear a voice, think of a face: you’ve retrieved a memory that contains the voice as one component.) You can see everything in your memory from the standpoint of past, present and future. Using a file cabinet, you classify information when you put it in; minds classify information when it is taken out. (Yesterday afternoon at four you stood with Natasha on Fifth Avenue in the rain — as you might recall when you are thinking about “Fifth Avenue,” “rain,” “Natasha” or many other things. But you attached no such labels to the memory when you acquired it. The classification happened retrospectively.)
While Interpreting The Instruction Set, I Encounter An Ambiguous Opening…
We seem to live in an age where the algorithm serves as an extension of our desire. This picaresque ramble contemplates what it means to follow a rule, what the boundaries of a rule are meant to contain, and the morality of rewriting and overwriting a rule. In his book on the algorithm, David Berlinski provides a definition:
In the logician’s voice
an algorithm is
a finite procedure,
written in a fixed symbolic vocabulary,
governed by precise instructions,
moving in discrete steps, 1, 2, 3, …,
Whose execution requires no insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, or perspicuity,
and that sooner or later comes to an end,
Within the conceptual machine of the algorithm, we envision the creation of software agents that will encapsulate and encode our desires. These secret agents will be unleashed upon the virtual and augmented world to locate the conditions and process the data that match a predetermined map of our dreams and passions.
But let’s hit the back button on this train of thought. The interface for this exploration appeared the other night at an art opening. Paul Madonna was introducing his new work at Electric Works. On a table in the entry way to the exhibition were a number of books. In addition to Paul’s new book, there was a book by David Byrne called Arboretum. This book contained a number of drawings that I immediately wanted to willfully misinterpret. Byrne’s drawings are mind maps that show connections/relations between things— they represent a kind of systemic history in some cases, or the dynamics/economics of a system in others. They have a strong relationship to Diderot’s organizational ideas for his encyclopedia.
David Byrne, History of Mark-making
There was something about the visual character of Byrne’s drawings that reminded me of the music notation and compositional titles of the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. When music notation is at its most strict, it tells us precisely how a piece can be replicated. The player piano uses piano rolls to produce near identical performances. In the fake book, we might just get the chord changes and the melody— the arrangement is up to us. Braxton takes this kind of abstraction to another level in some of his notation that borders on encoding synesthesia— where color and shape are meant to guide the performers.
Braxton’s Composition #76
Somehow by combining the notation of Braxton and the tree drawings of Byrne, I imagine conjuring up a notation system for an exploration through conversation, a kind of performance script. While, as Umberto Eco notes, the list can be a flexible tool, engendering both anarchic and organizational impulses— I find myself drawn to these maps of notation. When I engage in conversations about strategic direction, I always imagine them taking place within a terrain with specific dynamics.
By Berlinski’s definition, these musical instruction sets aren’t algorithms. Their execution requires insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, and perspicuity. The performer has to make decisions, exercise options, contribute variable inputs that will result in a variety of outputs. In that sense, they function more like a game.
In business, there’s an attempt to codify process to the extent that all of its aspects are substitutable. Even as parts of the machine are replaced, it’s output remains constant and consistent. This is the industrial commodity as ideal. Variances are a sign of poor management.
The script for a theatrical performance is another kind of instruction set. Notational experiments in this realm are also highly instructive. A few years back I attended a performance of the Wooster Group’s Poor Theater. The text of the performance was largely other performances, and the group’s performance itself described as a simulacra. For instance a performance piece, where the movements are the performers’ response to, and modeling of, a cowboy film projected to the side of the stage.
Elizabeth LeCompte by Leibowitz
Elizabeth LeCompte experiments with both what counts as a performance text, and what counts as a vital interpretation. She even refuses to be limited to a single text (instruction set), with the Wooster Group’s La Didone she weaves together a performance based on Cavalli’s opera combined with Mario Brava’s 1965 science fiction film Planet of the Vampires.
Cavalli’s Didone
Brava’s Planet of the Vampires
Wooster Group’s Didone
The mashup, the remix, the blending of instruction sets to produce something entirely new is what the process of creation has always already been. The boundary between recipes loses importance if the meal is well presented and delicious— a new recipe is created.
These two relationships to rule sets define much of human experience. The one approaches the regularity of the machine, while the other can careen off into what seems to be unbounded chaos. One set must be followed to the letter (a machine is the optimal performer), the other leaves openings for a two-way interaction. But the act of writing back into the interface is fraught with danger. It stands on the border of transgression, or transumption. When we don’t follow a rule set, but instead apply a new rule set from different context, we can be perceived as willfully misreading, incompetence or breaking local laws. Edward Said, in his reading of Harold Bloom’sA Map of Misreading, describes the Oedipal resonances:
Thus Bloom writes: “To live, the poet must mis-interpret [his literary] father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father.” Consequently a poet is not a man speaking to other men, but “a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man (the precursor) outrageously more alive than himself.” The great poetic ambition, which only the strongest poets achieve, is to appear self-begotten not only free of the father but, as Bloom demonstrates beautifully in the case of Milton (who is Bloom’s own strong poet par excellence), the father’s father. This final “transumptive” act of poetic majesty Bloom calls metalepsis: “Milton does what Bacon hoped to do; Milton and Galileo become ancients, and Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso, Spenser become belated moderns.”
The fixed symbolic vocabulary of the algorithm is one of the points where misreading wants to overwrite fixity. Meanwhile back on the Network, there’s a sense in which Phil Windley’s concept of a purpose-centric web dares to ignore the local laws and advocates simply rewriting/overwriting the fixed symbolic vocabulary to serve another purpose. There’s a sense in which we can view this as another instance of text, interpretation and performance. The revolutionary idea of the Action Card is that my rule set trumps yours.
To return to the moment that started this train of thought, let’s look at Byrne’s Arboreum drawings as a performance text. It seems as though the fixed symbolic vocabulary becomes slippery when it moves from linear typography to a map or model. The symbolic moves from symbol to symbol. The adjectives finite, discrete, governed, fixed, and precise all seem to lose purchase. And yet if we look at the Wooster Group’s rigorous performances, we could apply all of those adjectives along a different dimension.
These two relationships to the text stand across from each other as mirror images. As the algorithm blends with desire and takes flight into the real time flow of the Network, our sense of logic may sometimes take on the guise of the logic of sense, and it will have to learn to keep its cool as it makes the occasional trip through the looking glass.
Tonight I’ll be attending a performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome at the San Francisco Opera. Despite the sacrilegious themes and radical music, I doubt there will be any protests. Somehow, opera –in the United States at least– has the ability to present some of the most radical art in the guise of the most conservative. Alex Ross, in his excellent book The Rest is Noise, recounts the circumstances surrounding the second performance of the opera which Strauss himself conducted on May 16, 1906 in Graz, Austria:
…word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale–an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by a British degenerate whose name was not to be mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna.
The British degenerate they were referring to was a fellow named Oscar Wilde. The opera is based on his play, written in French, called Salomé. In attendance at that performance were Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, the fictional character Adrian Leverhkühn from Thomas Mann’sDoctor Faustus, and very possibly a 17 year old Adolf Hitler. The performance was one of the defining moments at the dawn of modern 20th century music.
One hundred and three years later, the work still has the power to shock and disturb people. While the dance of the seven veils may get most of the press, the moment where Salome declares her love for the severed head of John the Baptist is complex blend of power, lust, religion and madness. So dust off your tux, opera, as we all know, is a civilized affair.
Next week I’m going to see Puccini’s Il Trittico (The Triptych) at San Francisco Opera. It’s comprised of three short operas: Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. Soprano, Patricia Racette will be performing the lead role in each story. It’s rare for a single performer to take on all three roles. Puccini started with the idea of three short operas about Dante’s Divine Comedy, but in the end only Gianni Schicchi maintained a connection.
Even if you don’t know opera, you may be familiar with an aria from Gianni Schicci, it’s called O mio babbino caro. Courtesy of YouTube, here are some renditions of that song.
Maria Callas
Renee Fleming
Anna Netrebko
And here’s a preview of the San Francisco Opera production of Il Trittico:
Il Trittico premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on December 14th, 1918.
We, perhaps, misunderstand silence. We think of it as the absence of sound. Or the absence of music. We might think the same silence fills each absence. But silence itself, is always full, whenever there is a listener.
In John Cage’s work 4:33, the performer and the audience become one. Every assembly of witnesses marks a different social graph, listens through a different network of consciousness, a different set of dreams.
In Beckett’s Endgame, the character Hamm says: “The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on.” The beginning, however always seems to emerge from the middle. The release of the remastered Beatles Catalog has caused me to replay memories of listening to their music as it was originally released. And as I listen to the new releases (at this point, I only have Rubber Soul), the music isn’t heard directly, but through the lens of the intervening years. The music travels backwards and forwards through time connecting to a thousand threads, its sound resonant with reverie.
From this distance, I see the arc of the band beginning with Rubber Soul, continuing with Revolver and ending with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The time period spans 1965 to 1967. Of course, they performed and recorded before and after those dates, but this is the period where they seemed to really come into their own. The times were tumultuous, culture and technology were changing rapidly and the Beatles provided much of the soundtrack. The distance from Rubber Soul to Sgt. Pepper seems like it could only be measured in light years.
In the film Help, they presented an image of what it was like to be in a successful rock and roll band. The lads were friends and collaborators, they lived together, worked together, and enjoyed each other’s company. They serve as an extended family to each other; they inhabit a world without parents, wives or children. On Rubber Soul, you can begin to hear each member of the band start out on a path that will ultimately end in a parting of ways. I’m going to focus on the work of John Lennon and George Harrison. (You can do this same exercise for Paul and Ringo). By this time, they’d met Dylan, psychedelia was emerging and the idea of a rock band as a social unit was beginning to feel a little hokey. The band’s popularity had started to cut them off from both the world and their identity as performing musicians.
John Lennon had a tragic relationship with his mother, and it colored his relationship with women all his life. The line I’d like to trace here is from the song “Run For Your Life” with it’s violent lyrics about jealously and fidelity to a later, solo effort, called “Jealous Guy.” The movement within Lennon reflected the movement and growth of our culture. A similar arc can be traced from the song “Girl” to the song “Woman.”
The idealized relationship of the band as a kind of endless post-adolescence was beginning break up, as each of the members had to struggle with their own inner demons and find an individual path (the path to adulthood).
George Harrison’s contribution to Rubber Soul was a song called “Think For Yourself.” In the lyrics of this song you can see the seeds of Harrison’s future direction:
Although your mind’s opaque
Try thinking more if just for your own sake
The future still looks good
And you’ve got time to rectify all the things that you should
One can trace an arc from that song to Harrison’s solo work, specifically songs like “Isn’t it a Pity” and “Beware of Darkness.”
Watch out now, take care
Beware of soft shoe shufflers
Dancing down the sidewalks
As each unconscious sufferer
Wanders aimlessly
Beware of maya
As with the beginning, the end, too, emerges from the middle. The Sgt. Pepper album marked the end of the Beatles as a performing group and the beginning a new era of recording artistry. The asynchronous process of recording the album put additional stress on their unit cohesion. Ringo remembers those recording sessions as the time when he learned to play chess. The recording studio had become the dominant instrument, and the producer’s role central to the creative process. The resulting album marked the pinnacle of their success.
Around this time in Woodstock, New York, Bob Dylan’s backing band was creating an album that would be known as Music from Big Pink. It was the polar opposite of Sgt. Pepper. The group would eventually be called “The Band,” and they presented a new idea of what it meant to be in a performing rock and roll band. Their sound was firmly, and visibly, rooted in the sounds of American country music, early rock and roll and the Stax/Motown sound. After Sgt. Pepper, each member of the Beatles tried to move the group back toward being a performing unit. But the music was now Paul with a backing band, John with a backing band and so on. The Beatles were over.
The release of the remastered Beatles catalog provides an opportunity to really listen to the music, and the quality of the sound they created. I’m retracing my footsteps, starting with Rubber Soul. It may take 20 or 30 listens for me to truly hear it. Then I’ll move on to Revolver, and finally to Sgt. Pepper. Over 36 months, The Beatles’ music changed radically, it traces an unexpected and expansive route. As they used to say, “it blows my mind.”
I paid less attention to the work George Harrison the first time around. Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate him more and more. One of the things that brought me back around to Harrison was this cover of his song Isn’t it a Pity by the Cowboy Junkies:
After the Goldrush: The Album, CMX, Cocktail and Networked Music
I first became aware of Nancy Sinatra when her song “These Boots Were Made For Walkin’” climbed up the charts in the 60s. The song was written by Lee Hazelwood, and I had the sense that it was a kind of novelty rather than being representative of a body of work. The song was released in February of 1966, and featured a back-up band known as the “wrecking crew“— they were made up of first call session players in Los Angeles.
Ms. Sinatra caught my attention again recently with her editorial in the New York Times regarding the inequity of payments for songs played on the radio. Composers and publishers receive payment each time a song is played, but performers get nothing. The presumption is that the performing artists receive promotion when their songs are played and that serves as their compensation. Ms. Sinatra notes that the practice of mentioning the title and artist of a song just played is no longer common practice. And she reveals that ten years ago Clear Channel was asking $24k per title, to mention a song’s meta-data. A radio mention is meant to serve as a kind of link to a commerce service point.
Just as the telecom industry is coming to terms with the fact that voice is indistinguishable from any other kind of bits traveling through the series of tubes, the radio/music business is learning that there’s no such thing as a ‘sound only’ Network. Recorded music needs an extensible interface, sound is only one of the channels. Video, text, images and commerce are some of the channels that need to be included in the digital bundle. When you ‘right-click’ on a tune, what options will you see? If you look closely, you can see the distinction between the player and the thing played is beginning to disappear.
The music industry has responded to this opening with the CMX file format. As currently defined the format will allow playback and viewing of multiple media types, transactional capabilities have not been mentioned. Apple has rejected CMX in favor of its own format called Cocktail. Early rumors are that the Cocktail format will be playable on a new generation iTunes player, although it may also work as standalone software with an incorporated runtime.
Rolling up the various media files associated with a music release into a single new format will create a new container that can be sold to the music buying masses. If all goes according the plans of the record labels, the public will be thrilled to restock their music libraries with new containers of the same music. After all, the public has done it a number of times before. Presumably, the new format will also feature stronger DRM as an attempt to re-establish the old sales model. The most intriguing part of Apple’s Cocktail format is the rumored integration of a social media layer into iTunes.
Some think the record business was destroyed by the MP3 file format. Because an MP3 is simple to digitally copy, the theory is that sales suffered as the listening audience simply distributed free copies of music over the Network. While there’s a grain of truth to this, ventures like the iTunes music store could not have been successful if it were the dominant behavior pattern. The real threat to the music industry was the return of the single and the rise of the playlist.
The record album became the standard unit of sale for music some time after the Beatles managed to fill their offerings with hits from the first track to the last. Once the public stopped buying singles and started buying albums, the goldrush was on for the record companies. The album also served as a kind of filter, bands that couldn’t sustain a level of quality over an entire record didn’t last long. The album became a canvas, a programmed static playlist of music that eventually lead, for better or worse, to the concept album.
The high cost of recording music combined with the album format resulted in a batch production mode for music—also known as the recording session. Batch mode production is closely related to the kind of production done in factories. A special environment is created, set away from ordinary life. Real life is what you return to when you’ve finished your shift working in the factory. With the cost of recorded music production plummeting, the batch mode becomes less and less necessary. Real-time production occurs in-line with real life, the process might look more like the basement of Big Pink instead of the specialized and fully-equipped recording studio.
A bundle of static files wrapped up in a new format is an attempt to get some additional mileage out of the album format. There’s a sense in which this is a duplication of the shrink-wrapped software model. The music industry should look to the recent strategic shifts made by the king of shrink-wrapped software: Microsoft. Microsoft has shifted to a software + services model that includes the full interoperability and the integration of public social media streams. Some of their product will be free, some ad supported and others will be fully paid. And just as the batch mode of software production has been deprecated in favor of real-time, in-line code updates over the Network, music (and all digital media) will eventually move toward this new model.
The battle that Nancy Sinatra is waging on behalf of the performer will not be won in the landscape of radio. That playing field is receding, becoming a small piece of the puzzle, rather than whole ballgame. The new canvas for the digital performer and recording artist is starting to emerge and the examples provided by Microsoft, Google and Apple will lead the way.
