If You Don't Answer, I'll Just Ring It Off the Wall

[Image credit: "Hanging on the Telephone" by Aitch]

It occurred to me that I have been devoting all of my recent blog bandwidth to opinionizin' and have neglected one of my core missions, to offer advice on maximizing the value of your weightless digital music library. So let's talk ringtones.

Just as custom Walk-Up music in Major League Baseball parks herald a particular player's plate or bullpen appearance, custom ringtones allow you to announce the arrival of a call from a specific contact with a unique sound effect. All modern phones come with a standard ringtone library; most will allow you to upload sound files to create new ones. And for-purchase ringtones based on hit songs is big business.

But you know all this. What you may not know is that you can harvest music from your legally-purchased weightless digital library to create unlimited free custom ringtones, without having to worry about copyright or ownership rights.

What makes a good ringtone?

• It should be personalized, an artist or a song that reminds you of the caller.
• It should have energy. The caller is important to you.
• It should be an instrumental passage, preferably the introductory or bridge bars of the song sometimes called a vamp. Vocals just complicate editing.

My preference is for a ringtone to be short — 10-15 seconds — so that it repeats, like a conventional phone ringing. Thus a "good" ringtone is judged on how it sounds played in loop mode. To achieve seamless looping, there need to be compatible zero crossings (ascending or descending) at the beginning and end of the selected passage, so that there is no sound hiccup when it repeats. The editing process to extract a ringtone from a longer work is exactly the same as the steps taken to remove a scratch or pop, only you save what you extract instead of what you join. [Instructions here.] Finally, I like to choose the endpoint to be a transition where you as a listener expect the musical pattern to change but instead it loops back to the beginning.

Some examples I recently created (click links for sound):

• My ringtone for my wife. We like Moby and Ellen likes the Bourne movies. (Let's not kid ourselves, she likes Matt Damon.) So a natural fit would be a passage from the Bourne theme, Extreme Ways.
• Ellen's ringtone for me. No-brainer. David Byrne is one of my musical heroes, so we picked a passage from I Zimbra by Talking Heads.
• My ringtone for my mother. No one knows Mom's musical tastes better than I, having made high-res digital transfers of all her cassettes to fill her iPod. But not a lot of her music meets the criteria above. I settled on the opening of Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary, as played by The Canadian Brass.
• Ellen's ringtone for her father. Had to be jazz. Many choices, including "Harvard Blues" by Duke Ellington (Tony is an alum). But, in the end we settled on the iconic piano vamp from Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Be creative. Have fun.

            Physical-to-Digital Restoration #61            



Artist: Talking Heads
Title: Fear of Music
Genre: Alternative
Year: 1979





Fear of Music is the third studio album by Talking Heads. The album reached number 21 on the Billboard 200 in the United States and peaked at number 33 on the UK Albums Chart. Three songs were released as singles between 1979 and 1980: "Life During Wartime," "I Zimbra," and "Cities." I loved the original radio promo for the album, a robotic monotone voice repeating "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music," over and over. It would be worth violating my "instrumental" rule to have this as a ringtone.

© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

What Would You Pay for Used Digital Access Rights?

The United States Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 to uphold your right to resell legally-purchased physical goods contaning copyrighted elements, even if the copyright holder objects. Meanwhile, a U.S. District Court judge ruled to block your right to resell legally-purchased digital downloads containing copyrighted elements. Where does this lead?

If companies cannot limit consumer ownership rights to physical goods, that may just hasten their transition to all-digital delivery. But courts are fickle, and future rulings could extend re-sale rights to digital downloads. Better for companies to keep digital goods in the cloud and sell access to them.

The major players are taking steps to make non-exclusive rights to access cloud-based digital goods feel like ownership. Since the November 2012 announcement in that the Supreme Court would hear the Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons case, both Apple and Amazon have received patents indicating they are working on technology to permit buyers of e-books and cloud-based music files to resell these products. Don't be fooled into thinking this will give you full ownership rights.

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. And you are free to re-sell them to a willing buyer.

Digital media files — 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. But you should be free to re-sell them as long as you actually transfer possession to a buyer; the value of the transaction is based on its convenience.

Cloud-based digital media files are shared objects. Only one copy need exist because possession is retained by the owner (Apple, Amazon) who can sell an infinite number of individual rights to access the file. Amazon's rumored system for selling your "used" Kindle titles merely turns off your access to the book(s) and enables access for someone else. There is no transfer, making it impossible to place a value on the transaction. Why are "used" digital access rights worth any more or less than the original rights?

Furthermore, Amazon has announced Coins, a virtual currency obtained via credit card which will be used by Kindle Fire owners to purchase games, apps, content, and in-app purchases on their tablets. Expect any transaction in the virtual secondary market to be denominated in virtual currency, which amounts to "store credit" issued to the seller. (We all know how coupons convince us to spend more money.) Hard currency enters these walled-off digital ecosystems, but it never comes out.

Ownership of music still trumps access in the cloud when audio fidelity and freedom of choice are considered. All my weightless digital library files play identically, whether the material was originally sourced on vinyl, CD, or legally-purchased download. That same homogeneity should extend to selling any or all of the files, or donating the library after I'm gone. Stand up for First Sale protection everywhere.


             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #55            

Title: The Big Band Sessions

Artist: Anita O'Day
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1979

The Big Band Sessions (2-LP, Verve VE-2-2534) is a re-packaging of five Anita O'Day titles: Anita O-Day Swings Cole Porter with Billy May (V-2118), Anita O'Day and Billy May Swing Cole Porter (V-2141), Trav'lin' Light (V2157), Cool Heat (V-8312) and All the Sad Young Men (V-8442). I recently purchased it at an estate sale for $2 and made a high-res digital transfer with tracks organized according to original title and album sequence. (Yes, you can do that.) If First Sale Doctrine is not universally applied, how many copyright holders' permissions (euphemism for payments) would be necessary to sell this digital re-packaging — one, five, six? Any number greater than zero is too many.

© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

That Was the Day Before Love Came To Town

It's an established tradition at In Aurem A2D to use holidays as opportunities for Surface to Air Full Circle music challenges. Our last was on Thanksgiving.

[Photo credit: Yehia-elal​aily]

You know the drill. (Connection between our game and the WDET-FM Music Head fundraiser is in our first challenge.) Starting with a particular song, chart a path along associated metadata to create a connected playlist; but at some point, reverse course and return along a different metadata path to arrive full circle back at the starting song, in "about an hour" of running time. Bonus points if you only use songs from your personal library (as I always do).

That bonus may get harder to achieve over time, if the trend continues away from music ownership and personal libraries to music access and personal playlists via streaming services.

To celebrate Valentine's Day in the USA, our starting/ending song is U2's "When Love Comes to Town" (featuring B. B. King).


Full-Size table here. Annotated table with metadata associations here.

A worthy effort at almost exactly an hour (within the margin of error on the published running times). However, it makes more use of direct song title to song title transitions than previous lists, something to watch in the future. Previous lists can be found in the Surface to Air 2012 Retrospective.

While you listen to any or all of the tracks along our journey, check out this Brain Pickings thought piece,  Calculating the Odds of Finding Your Soulmate. Happy Valentine's Day!

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #52            

Artist: U2

Title: Rattle and Hum
Genre: Rock
Year: 1988





Music buyers who only know an industry dominated by iTunes can't imagine a time when you needed to buy an entire double LP set just to get the one or two tracks you really wanted. The feature film Rattle and Hum may have been negatively characterized by some critics as "an accidental mockumentary," but the performances are solid. For me, the highlights are "When Love Comes to Town," a hard-charging blues duet with B. B. King, and the equal-parts plaintive and haunting "All I Want Is You."


© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

Thank You For Sending Me an Angel

It's getting to be a tradition at In Aurem A2D to use holidays as opportunities for Surface to Air Full Circle music challenges. Our last was on Labor Day.

You know the drill. (Connection between our game and the WDET-FM Music Head fundraiser is in our first challenge.) Starting with a particular song, chart a path along associated metadata to create a connected playlist; but at some point, reverse course and return along a different metadata path to arrive full circle back at the starting song, in "about an hour" of running time. Bonus points if you only use songs from your personal library.

That bonus may get harder to achieve over time, if the trend continues away from music ownership and personal libraries to music access and personal playlists via streaming services.

To celebrate Thanksgiving Day in the USA, our starting/ending song is Talking Heads' "Thank You For Sending Me an Angel."

Full size table here. Annotated table with metadata associations here.

We're getting a little lengthy at over 61 minutes (longest running time for a list to-date). But this list appeals to me for metadata associations enlisting wordplay that we have not explored in pevious exercises.

HappyThanksgiving!

             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #46             

Artist: Talking Heads

Title: More Songs About Buildings and Food
Genre: Alternative
Year: 1978





More Songs About Buildings and Food is the second album by Talking Heads. It was the first in a series of three produced by Brian Eno. In 2003, the album was ranked number 382 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. I bought it after seeing Talking Heads peform "Artists Only" and "Take Me to the River" on Saturday Night Live. Before MTV made music on TV ubiquitous, appearing as the musical guest on SNL was a significant milestone for an act.


© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

Music Ownership, First Sale Doctrine, and a Potential Parade of Horribles

The US Supreme Court is hearing an appeal that could change your ownership rights to music.

If you purchase music as physical media or license-free downloads, you are protected by the so-called First Sale Doctrine of the US Copyright Act, which gives people the right to lend, resell, or give away the works that they've bought, even if those works contain copyrighted elements.

If you purchase music as licensed downloads (or by storing it in the cloud) you accept terms clearly outlined in the end-user agreement for doing business with services like iTunes. Consumers do not own their iTunes material; rather, they get a non-exclusive right to access the files, a right that cannot be sold, donated, or given away, even to your descendents after you die.

But the case of Kirtsaeng v. Wiley, currently being heard by the US Supreme Court, could undermine First Sale Doctrine, making ownership feel more like licensing.

Book publisher John Wiley & Sons is suing to prevent an entrepreneur from (legally) purchasing cheap editions of Wiley textbooks in his native Thailand and (legally) importing and selling them to foreign students in the US at below list price.Wiley is asking the Court to rule that First Sale Doctrine only applies to goods made in the USA and that Mr. Kirtsaeng needs their permission to run his import business. [Transcript of oral arguments.]

The so-called "Parade of Horribles" resulting from a ruling for Wiley are many and far-reaching: foreign manufacturers like Toyota having to seek permission from all owners of copyrighted content in their vehicles before import and sale in the US; companies perversely moving manufacturing operations overseas specifically to escape First Sale Doctrine on their products; libraries requiring permission from copyright holders before lending titles in their collection; US citizens requiring permission before bestowing gifts of copyrighted items (books, fashion, textiles, jewelry) brought home from the design capitals of the world. All would have negative US economic impact.

Furthermore, once a precedent is established that First Sale Doctrine can be limited, the slippery slope scenario imagines a tangle of special-interest exemptions passed by a lobbyist-influenced Congress until the suburban garage sale becomes a bureaucratic nightmare, used book and music stores become extinct, and eBay and craigslist shut down completely.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has joined Demand Progress and the Free Software Foundation in giving you a platform to contact your legislators to urge them to stand up for First Sale. While you're at it, ask them to pass legislation conveying legacy rights for licensed media. Take action today.


             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #45             

Title: The Modern Jazz Quartet

Artist: The Modern Jazz Quartet
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1972

The Modern Jazz Quartet (2-LP, Prestige PR 240050) is a re-packaging of three Modern Jazz Quartet titles: Concorde (PR 7005), Django (PR 7057) and MJQ (PR 7059). I recently purchased it at an estate sale for $2 and made a high-res digital transfer with tracks organized according to original title and album sequence. (Yes, you can do that.) If First Sale Doctrine is not universally applied, how many copyright holders' permissions (euphemism for payments) would have been necessary to buy this used record — one, three, four? Any number greater than zero is too many.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

What If Your Cloud Suddenly Vanished?

You have abandoned music possession and are now completely dependent on streaming services in the cloud to deliver their vast-but-low-bit-rate song libraries for your listening enjoyment. Are you prepared for the day when your cloud, or any other cloud, may no longer be there? From all indications, that day may be inevitable.

The most popular streaming services, Pandora and Spotify, have unsustainable business models. If these two pioneering giants can't survive in the long run, what chance does any other service have? Maybe music possession isn't as quaintly 20th Century as pundits would have you believe.

Pandora, which had its IPO in 2011, has never been profitable. Its revenues are growing steadily, but so are its losses. For the quarter ending July 30, 2012 revenue was up more than 50% year-to-year to $101.3M, but its quarterly losses of $5.4M were 3x last year's. According to filings in Spotify's home country of Luxembourg, the company lost $57M on $236M in revenue for fiscal year 2011. The red ink cannot continue indefinitely.

"Cost of sales" is the highest contributing factor to the sustained losses. Pandora operates as a limited-play radio service and does not have to negotiate royalty deals with individual labels. Still, last year the company paid 54% of its revenue out in royalites under the provision of federal copyright law that lets it use (almost) any song. Spotify operates as an unlimited on-demand music service and negotiates directly with labels and publishers for the songs it makes available, paying a staggering 97% of its revenue on licensing fees and distribution costs. (Source: NY Times.)

To climb out of its hole, Pandora is lobbying Congress for a copyright license deal more aligned with satellite radio and cable outlets, the so-called Internet Radio Fairness Act. The licensing rate for satellite is set at 7.5% of gross revenue. Cable music services pay 15% of gross revenue. On the other hand, Pandora pays 2 cents per hour for the more than one billion streaming-hours it runs per month. (Source: LA Times.) Music publishers, becoming more dependent on revenue from streaming as CD sales continue their decline, oppose any change. Additionally, statutory licensing is unique to the USA; overseas growth for Pandora will be hard to achieve without similar license deals in other countries.

To reverse its current fortunes, Spotify faces the daunting task of trying to make monopoly economics work. If the EMI sale closes, there will only be only three major music labels. As explained by Michael Robertson of MP3tunes.com, the jaw-dropping secret licensing demands of record label monopolies would not be tolerated in any other industry as they "crush innovation, as well as any hope of profitiability." Since failure to reach a deal with any of the labels would put a huge hole in Spotify's catalog, the company really has no choice but to concede to industry demands.

Listeners have embraced streaming audio services in the cloud. At least 33 million people have tried Spotify, more than 150 million have registered for Pandora. But maybe now is not the time to abandon music possession completely in favor of streaming; the current cost structure of the industry is unsustainable. Are you prepared for the day when there is nothing but blue sky where your cloud used to be?

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #42             

Artist: Willie Nelson

Title: Stardust
Genre: Country
Year: 1978



Willie Nelson has never been one to do the safe or expected, and this Booker T. Jones-produced album of pop "standards" from the '30s and '40s certainly fits the profile. The success of Stardust paved the way for the late-career standards album of virtually any singer you can name. I had never heard more than a couple lines from Irving Berlin's cloud-free "Blue Skies" (via montage in the movie White Christmas) until picking up this album as my introduction to Mr. Nelson's work.


© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.


All Labor That Uplifts Humanity Has Dignity and Importance

[Rivera Murals, Detroit Institute of Arts]

It's getting to be a tradition at In Aurem A2D to use holidays as opportunities for Surface to Air Full Circle music challenges. Our last was on the 4th of July.

You know the drill. (Connection between our game and the WDET-FM Music Head fundraiser is in our first challenge.) Starting with a particular song, chart a path along associated metadata to create a connected playlist; but at some point, reverse course and return along a different metadata path to arrive full circle back at the starting song, in "about an hour" of running time. Bonus points if you only use songs from your personal library.

That bonus may get harder to achieve over time, if the trend continues away from music ownership and personal libraries to music access and personal playlists via streaming services.

To celebrate Labor Day in the USA, our starting/ending song is Elvis Costello's "Welcome to the Working Week."

Full-size table here. Annotated table with metadata associations here.

We're getting a little lengthy at an hour and 49 seconds (longest running time for a list to-date). But this list appeals to me for metadata associations enlisting songwriter names that we have not explored in pevious exercises.

Happy Labor Day!

             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #41             

Artist: Elvis Costello

Title: My Aim Is True
Genre: Alternative
Year: 1977





My Aim Is True is the debut album by Elvis Costello. It was the first of five consecutive Costello albums produced by Nick Lowe. In 2003, the TV network VH1 named My Aim Is True the 80th greatest album of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 168 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time..


© 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.