Can the Cloud Satisfy an Army of Musical Bit Snobs?

I am a music owner and I demand accurate sound reproduction, having converted my entire physical collection to weightless digital form, CD quality or better. But, in the words of self-described futurist Gerd Leonhold, "Access [to music] is replacing ownership, like it or not. Participate or become insignificant." Bob Lefsetz was more blunt: "Ownership is for pussies."

Cloud-based streaming services provide access to low-bit-rate compressed music, typically no higher than 128 Kbps, targeting low-fi mobile devices. Over 7% of all mobile internet traffic in North America is streaming audio.  What does the music industry think of this listener experience? Neil Young: We're in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we've ever had. It's worse than a 78 [rpm record]." T-Bone Burnett: "A xerox of a poloroid of a photo of a painting." Lefsetz, again: "Instead of soul, we have two-dimensional garbage."

Ownership is for pussies but lossy compressed music is garbage. What is a music-owning bit snob to do, other than become insignificant?

More than 90 million CDs were purchased in the first half of 2012. Let's say an average buyer purchases one title per month. Sales figures therefore represent an army of roughly 15 million listeners who can potentially be moved from ownership to access. If we all switched over tomorrow, could some new streaming service in the Cloud duplicate the listener experience of playing the CD quality or high-res digital audio we already own? Let's run the numbers.

Storage. I'd want to upload my personal library to the cloud for streaming. Most cloud-based storage services offer 5 GB of space for free. But high-res audio is big data. My collection runs 800 GB. Assuming some room for growth, I'll need 1,000 GB (1 TB) of space. The going retail rate for disc space is roughly five cents per GB, so I can buy 1 TB for fifty bucks. Or, I can rent 1 TB from Amazon for $1,000/yr. (Say it out loud: a thousand dollars a year.) Advantage: ownership.

Content. There really is no need to have 15 million individual copies of Abbey Road (the best-selling LP of both 1969 and 2011) in the Cloud. All owners could share one cloud-based copy. Instead of storing our personal libraries, the Cloud would merely have to provide a CD-quality (or higher) digital copy of the collective holdings of 15 million listeners. Let's start with a copy of ECM 1206 from my collection. Unfortunately not available from the label, never released on CD. I'll stick with my high-res digital transfer from the out-of-print LP I bought way back. Advantage: ownership.

Network Traffic.  According to Sandvine, median monthly usage on North American fixed access networks in the first half of 2012 was 10.3 GB and mean monthly usage was 32.1 GB. Streaming CD-quality audio just two hours a day (assuming a 1.4 Mbps connection) would increase mean monthly usage by 50%. Streaming 24/96 audio for the same period (assuming a 4.6 Mbps connection) would increase that figure by almost 300%. Multiply that load by 15 million new streamers and carriers hasten their cessation of unlimited data plans. Add hordes of young people addicted to streaming — now shown to prefer CD quality audio over lossy alternatives — and the internet comes to a halt. Advantage: ownership.

Intangibles. I don't want to have to register with Facebook to listen to my music (I'm talking to you, Spotify). I will not have the experience interrupted by advertising (commercial services). I don't want promoted content inserted into every playlist I create (Pandora). Advantage: ownership.

The spirit may be willing, but the Cloud is weak. Until the issues of bandwidth and freedom of choice are addressed, I'll content myself streaming high-fidelity owned digital audio through the Fog (the wireless cloud inside my house).


             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #38            

Artist: Keith Jarrett

Title: Concerts (München, June 2, 1981)
Title: Concerts (Bergenz, July 28, 1981)
Genre: Solo Piano Improvisation
Year: 1981


One of the pleasures of ephemeralizing physical media to weightless digital is breaking arbitrary physical boundaries to organize the source material in personal ways. I group all my Keith Jarrett solo material by concert date, transforming this 3-LP set with a generic title into a more natural set of two specific shows. Let's see the Cloud do that.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

The John Peel LP Collection: Infinite, Scarce and Significant Objects

[Updated]

If my blog traffic statistics tell me anything, it's that you are probably reading this after a google search related to your interest in the opening of the John Peel Archive online. My original piece, written when the project was announced in February 2012, appears below. If you are an ardent Peel fan, you might want to scroll down now. If you have an true interest in music and scholarship, hear me out.

[Image: John Peel and collection, date unknown.]

The Peel Collection made its debut this week with the first 100 titles in the alphabetized A section. 100 more titles are scheduled to be added each week. The site is well-produced, with photos and videos in addition to the record collection. I'll restrict my comments to the experience of browsing the records.

It is a hollow experience, a faint shadow of the project's potential. As a visitor, you are confronted with a photo of album spines. As you mouse over the spines, a popup appears for each, with a thumbnail of the album cover and a "card" (catalog?) number. Curiously, the cards are not numbered 1-100. Click on a spine and the corresponding "card" appears, with photos of the front and back cover, additional photos if the album has more elaborate packaging, and an image rendered to look like an index card with the track titles.

That's it.

Oh ... and a link to hear audio from the album on Spotify. Assuming, of course, you have a Spotify account.

The physical collection is a priceless one-of-a kind significant object, given its size, its owner and its place in the history of poular culture. Separate any one phsyical album from the rest of the herd, and it becomes just another used record, with a market value governed by scarcity and condition. Reduce it to a Spotify playlist and it becomes an infinite object with zero value.

Anyone can make a playlist of songs that happen to be in John Peel's collection. With 25,000 LP titles in the collection, it's hard to make a playlist (of songs released prior to Peel's death) that doesn't contain something from the collection. So the "musem" contains photos of metadata (not metadata itself), and weblinks to existing MP3 files. All of which can be gathered from other sources, often in more depth, via online search.

We were promised original paintings. Instead we got a xerox of a Poloroid of a photo of a painting. The site will always attract the mere curious for a single visit. But it offers nothing of permanent value. I don't see the project getting past the C's before the sheer futility crushes the will of all involved. Its celebration in the blogosphere and twittersphere (I haven't found a second dissenting opinion) are further examples of how we are all losing respect for knowledge in general, and music in particular.

Thanks for reading.

[Original essay below.]

The LP collection of the late BBC radio host John Peel, more than 25,000 titles, is going to be digitized and made available to the public via an online museum. This provides an opportunity to discuss the inherent value of physical and digital media as it relates to scarcity.

Physical media — books, LPs and the like — are scarce objects. No matter how many are made, the number is finite, the individual objects are unique, and are subject to wear, damage and loss over time. The ones that survive retain value according to their condition.

Digital media — information stored in bits-only form — are infinite objects. There is no limit on the number of people who can simultaneous possess the information, each copy is identical, and does not degrade over time. The value of infinite objects is in the information transfer; the objects themselves have no retained value.

Attaching infinite objects to scarce objects can make those scarce objects more valuable. Some examples:

• Unlimited streaming of the movie Clueless (infinite) has helped cement Jane Austen's position as a literary icon for another generation. This in turn elevates the value a certified first-edition copy of Emma (scarce).
• Reports show digital downloads of Van Halen's A Different Kind of Truth (infinite) are not selling well, but music industry veteran Bob Lefsetz offers this view: "Based on [fan] reaction, the band will be able to tour for years." (Concert tickets: scarce.)
• A high-resolution digital transfer of a rare LP, taken on the owner's own equipment calibrated to his exact specifications, allows the LP's content to be shared, studied and enjoyed without inflicting further damage. The scarce object becomes more significant by being both widely accessible (infinite) and perfectly preserved.

Which brings us to the Peel Museum project. A physical music collection as large as the Peel is beyond scarce — it's one-of-a-kind. Its value to a private collector is enormous, but finite. There would be a winning bid at auction, the public would gasp and tweet at the figure, and then the collection would disappear into a vault somewhere, never to be seen again until the next auction (and almost certainly never played).

By having the collection digitized and made freely accessible to the public, the Peel family escalates its status from significant object to priceless cultural landmark. Bravo.

What would I want produced by the project? Three things:

• A high-resolution (at least 24-bit/96KHz) digital transfer of each album and single in its current condition, representing the archive of the collection.
• A high-resolution digital restoration of each title, producing the highest possible sound quality that can be achieved from the archived copy. These are the versions that can be made accessible for social, educational, historical and scholarly projects. New restorations can be created as technology improves, as new tools and techniques become available.
• Creative ways for the public to browse the collection, its cover art, its label art, search its metadata, and listen to audio (where not restricted by copyright).

What would you like to see produced from this landmark project?


            Vinyl-to-Digital Restorations #22 & #23           

Title: Think of One

Artist: Wynton Marsalis
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1983

Title: Haydn, L. Mozart, Hummel: Trumpet Concertos

Artist: Wynton Marsalis
Genre: Classical
Year: 1983



Wynton Marsalis scored a landmark achievement in 1983, winning both the Best Jazz Album GRAMMY® for Think of One and the Best Classiscal Album GRAMMY® for Trumpet Concertos. Acquisition of these titles on LP over 30 years ago began for me a personal interest in Mr. Marsalis' work that continues to this day.


© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.