A Nickel Ain't Worth a Dime Anymore

The urge to believe there is a magic formula for success, and that it can be deduced from studying past hits, is powerful. Strategic Communications Group CEO  Mark Hausman believes he has distilled The 3 Hallmarks of Exceptional Content. Columnist Marcel Williams is convinced he knows The Essential Features of a Hit Record. Their two cents on the subject may be worth a nickel, but as Yogi Berra observed, "a nickel ain't worth a dime anymore."

These checklists, while almost intuitively obvious and rightly containing features correlated with past successes, fail immediately as predictors of the future by being neither necessary nor sufficient. Their authors cannot prove that all the characteristics are necessary for success; i.e. eliminating any one of them will guarantee failure. (Mr Williams even admits as much.) Nor can they prove that their list is sufficient for success; i.e. a work possessing all these characteristics may still be a failure for lacking other elements.

The lists highlight statistical regularities—good for documenting the past, lousy for predicting the future. In The Financial Regulators' Dilemma economist Edwin G. Dolan illustrates how statistical regularities do not always reflect causal relationships using the so-called Nickels Paradox:

Suppose the Federal Reserve observes a strong past correlation between the number of nickels issued by the U.S. mint and the rate of inflation. Does that mean restricting the issue of nickels would be a sufficient instrument to control inflation? Of course not—not if pennies, dimes, bank balances, and money in all other forms were issued in the same quantities as before. All that would happen is that the previously observed correlation of nickels with inflation would disappear.

How does the Nickels Paradox apply here? Suppose all music producers take Mr. Williams advice to heart, and 100% of future tracks can be characterized by: catchiness, timeliness, a strong vocal, and accomplished performance. There would still be only 100 releases on The Billboard Hot 100 in a given week, and the vagaries of public taste would still decide who gets there. Or, taking Mr. Hausman at his word, all suppose all future web content has: a unique perspective, great "get" and/or brilliantly constructed prose. All that would happen is these would cease being differentiating features in attracting readership.

Don't stop critiquing your past work, learning from others, applying rigor and discipline, or nurturing creativity in your quest for greatness. Just don't mistake performance metrics for predictive ones. And use that advice for what it's worth.

             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #48            

Artist: Keith Jarrett Trio

Title: Standards, Vol. 1
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1983





Nothing in Keith Jarrett's discography or collaborations prior to 1983 could have predicted he would record a collection of standards with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette. And nothing could have predicted that this trio would become one of the most enduring working groups in jazz, recording and touring for more than 25 years. Such is fate, or the instinct of veteran producer Manfred Eicher, who put the three together in the studio.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

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.

Metadata For Miles and I Still Can't Sort My Music Autobiographically

Metadata indexes and catalogs your music library.

The care and attention required to prepare and "plate" an LP digitally forges an intimate bond with the material that is hard to duplicate with titles acquired on CD or by download. That bond should be reflected in the completeness of your metadata.

These are hard-won bits. After you've carefully repaired old wear-and-tear, meticulously isolated and labeled all the tracks, and studiously supplied metadata, it's hard to dismiss your newly-ephemeralized title as just another entry in the library.

In contrast, ripping a CD is a mindless task. There are now robots available to do it for you, stacks of discs at a time. Downloading titles has become so easy their arrival has little impact. After purchasing Kate Bush's 50 Words For Snow on high-resolution download, I had to remind myself a week later that the bits had yet to be played. I can't imagine that kind of detachment after finishing an LP transfer, just as I feel more invested in a meal prepared from scratch than I do ordering takeout.

Metadata are the fields —  Artist, Title, Genre, Release Year, etc. — that enable media players to  index and catalog a music library automatically, providing constant-time access to all songs, no matter how large the collection. Virtually all CD ripping software has access to an online metadata source to supply the basics. In ephemeralizing LPs, the job of completing metadata falls to you, and the necessary time investment pays off.

In addition to the basic fields, jazz aficianados routinely complete the Contributing Artist field for a song (not universally available in online metadata sources) to track the dynamics of musicians moving from combo to combo. Enhanced metadata libraries with many extra fields for classical music are becoming available. Using metadata, collections can be sorted along any of the fields.

Yet, armed with all this information, I still can't sort my collection autobiographically — chronological by acquisition date. That information is deeply personal and uniquely revealing.

Imagine being able to go back and revisit your purchases, deduce what prior purchases or other factors influenced each decision. Did you buy artist B because s/he previously played with artist A on a title you liked? You could see exactly when particular artists came into your consciousness, or left it. An animated graph of the top 5 genres in your collection over time could show how your tastes evolved. The autobiographical sort would reveal more than any other slice through a person's library.

I'm sure there is someone reading this who has kept that information. In what personal ways do you catalog your music collection?

              Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #13              

Title: Elaborations

Artist: Arthur Blythe
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1982

How did this album find it's way into my library? It would be a complete mystery unless you study the metadata. Most likely I sampled Arthur Blythe as a bandleader because he recorded as a sideman with Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition. Mr. DeJohnette, a 2012 NEA Jazz Master, is for me a trusted source due to his long association with Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock in the so-called Standards Trio. But Mr. Blythe's presence in the library was "one and done," so Elaborations clearly didn't suit my taste at the time of acquisition. It may be a better fit now.

             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #14            

Artist: The Rolling Stones

Title: It's Only Rock 'n' Roll
Genre: Rock
Year: 1974

It wasn't until I ephemeralized this title, a birthday gift long ago in high school and long out of heavy rotation, that I realized that it contained the song, "Time Waits For No One." As an amateur creator of WDET-FM Music Head playlists, — which connect the metadata dots among songs — and restricting said lists only to content in my own library, I long sought to make the leap from artist Tom Waits to title, "Time Waits ..." And now I can.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

LPs and CDs Are Fraternal Twins

An LP and his digital twin.

Raise your hand if you think there are files on a CDDA disc (an "audio CD").

OK, put them down. There is some misinformation out there.

When you put an audio CD into your computer's drive, Windows Explorer will display a CDA (CD Audio Track) file for each track. If you double-click one, Windows Media Player opens and plays the track.

But the files don't really exist. Each one is a shortcut to where the corresponding audio track starts on disc. Explorer just calls them files because files are what it understands. Without the physical CD loaded, the "files" are meaningless.

A CD is a continuous laser groove of 16-bit digital stereo audio samples, starting at the inner edge and radiating outward. The implicit sampling rate is 44.1 KHz, meaning no time information needs to be encoded with the audio.

An LP is a continuous physical groove capturing an analog stereo waveform, starting at the outer edge and radiating inward. The implicit recording and playback rate is 33 1/3 rpm.

Both are round, have a hole in the center, spin while playing, and are read by a tracking sensor.

Thus, they are fraternal twins. A CD is basically a digital LP (played in reverse, but not saying Paul is dead). That's one reason CDs and LPs share common playback inconveniences, and why dematerialized digital playback has made the CD seem just as clunky as his analog twin.

In my professional life at Harman International, I manage development of multimedia infotainment/navigation systems for the OEM automotive market. Our newest systems don't even include a CD player. An iPod/USB interface is now standard, reflecting the market preference for dematerialized play.

But that didn't stop an OEM customer's test group from flagging a Harman system because "it didn't play CDA files." They thought that dragging and dropping CDA files onto a memory stick was equivalent to making an audio copy of a CD. We quietly buried the bug report as "not reproducible" (so to speak).

Our digital transfer process for LPs will produce more accurate results.

                Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #1              

Title: The Survivors' Suite
Artist: Keith Jarrett
Contributing Artists: Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman (1931-2006), Paul Motian (1931-2011)
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1976

My interest in jazz got its start with a college housemate's copy of Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert. But it really took off in grad school as I started mining through the ECM catalog at dear, departed Schoolkids Records in Ann Arbor MI. My jazz holdings stand now at roughly 250 titles, and you can trace a path back from virtually any of them to one of the four members of this quartet.

The most labor-intensive task in the digital transfer pipeline is extracting and isolating individual LP tracks. Not surprisingly, the task time grows linearly with the number of tracks on the disc. You're grateful for a title like The Survivors' Suite, where side 1 is track 1 and side 2 is track 2. Quick and clean.



© 2011 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.