DIGITAL DEVELOPMENTS

I’ve often criticised the way iTunes and the digital music revolution of recent years has shafted us, offering the convenience of downloading our music but reducing the quality of the product: even worse, we don’t even really own it any more – the content is leased without recourse to a high quality hard copy as back up.

Just this last week, however, I’ve made a few very pleasant discoveries.

I heard that venerable art-punk stalwarts Wire had released a new album, and went to their website to read about it. There I noticed that they were offering it for sale not only as a CD and a vinyl album, but also as a high-quality digital download. £6.99 and you can get the songs delivered to your computer in pristine FLAC form.

What does this mean? Well, these files are lossless (unlike shitty MP3′s), and can play ‘as is‘ with good audio/video players such as VLC, but even better, they can be converted to WAV files as well and burned onto a CD, as well as imported into iTunes as MP3′s at whatever bit-rate you choose : in other words, you have the best of both worlds. And, no shitty DRM anti-pirating bullshit which assumes you’re a criminal and denies you your rights to the goods you’ve purchased.

This finally makes downloading music a viable proposition as far as I’m concerned, in which you can directly support artists you like, pay less, and get quality product in return. Now compare this to iTunes, where most downloads are still offered only as laughably piss-poor 128Mbps MP3′s with no hard copy at all and at a higher price.

Next I went over to Richard D James‘ Rephlex Records site to find a similar kind of set up: 30 minute EPs going for £3.50, downloaded as CD-quality WAV files – yay! Needless to say I filled my cart with techno goodies, a very satisfied customer indeed.

Clearly this is the route for established artists and punters alike, a system which cuts out crap like iTunes completely, and rightly so. Shame on you, Apple, for getting it so wrong and morphing from a cool stylish outfit into a hard-nosed corporate behemoth.

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I also blogged recently concerning my misgivings with regard to Amazon’s Kindle. Well, as I suspected, that particular device has been entirely discarded and now lives on the arm of my sofa under a pile of miscellaneous crap. Not only did it not win me over to eBooks, it met with an amusing but somehow appropriate accident and is now inoperative.

A week or so ago I thought I’d bring it out to show to a friend. Somehow, during the course of a long cafe chat session, I managed to briefly sit on it. It looked fine after my arse had made contact, and there was no visible damage, so once home I chucked it irreverently into a corner somewhere.

A few days later I thought I’d try to use it again, only to discover that the top half of the display had vanished, thus rendering it completely useless. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say…

 

Kindle? Not Enough Sparks…

I finally bought a Kindle the other day after finding that they were back in stock at Amazon.com after the Christmas rush.

I was ordering books for a forthcoming trip to Italy, and after putting a couple of high quality Blue Guides into the basket I realised I needed another, less cultured and more practical guide, so looked at the Lonely Planet.

As much as I dislike this series, they are useful for when you need to know about rail connections rather than obscure architectural trivia.

However, just as I was grimacing at the thought of having to lug this 1,000 page monster around when I’d only be checking it for details a few times, I noticed a Kindle version was being offered alongside the traditional book, and at a slightly reduced price.

A quick check revealed that the Kindle was in stock, and suddenly I envisioned the weighty tome being transformed into a small slim grey slab, which could also be stuffed with other documents, the ones I usually print out and staple together. A practical solution, even though I realised I would most likely never be reading novels from the electronic newcomer.

The Kindle arrived a few days later, and now, after a couple of weeks of use (or rather, non-use), I can say that its purchase was a mistake.

The moment I saw it I knew that this device was not going to be as revered and respected as my iPhone 4 or Nikon D7000.

The Kindle is just a very limited device in a medium which is clearly still in its infancy. Sure, its promise and premise are startling, and has potentially the same appeal as the iPod first had : you could have your entire collection with you at all times.

With the iPod, however, you still retain your earlier medium. Your entire CD collection gets processed and stuffed into the device, leaving you with both, the mobile lower quality version, and the full files on your CDs for blasting out on your fancy hifi.

The Kindle is different, and crucially so. That large book collection you’ve been building up over the last few decades isn’t going to appear on your eBook reader, not unless you’re prepared to buy them all again in digital form.

It’s rather like the shafting we all got in the vinyl to CD switchover back in the 80′s.

Perhaps some richer folk don’t mind that, and obviously it is they who are the main target for the device : kids brought up in the digital age wouldn’t be affected, but they don’t read books anyway.

Aside from that, which in itself is something of a deal-breaker, we come to the actual reading experience. The screen is fine, and easy on the eyes. The navigation, however, is horrendous. Clunky and unintuitive, all users of iPhones will constantly find themselves touching the screen, somehow hoping that it has suddenly become touch responsive in order to obviate the awful clickfest that ensues any time you want to locate something within your tome.

Maybe for novels this wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but for reference materials it is annoying.

A few days ago I discovered that Kindle has an app for the iPhone which I dutifully installed and found I could download and read all of my purchased eBooks in style.

What a difference, even though the smaller screen is less pleasing to read: being able to navigate by touching headings, turning pages seamlessly by swiping the screen, having maps in colour and being able to activate links directly in a real web browser.

The iPhone will be coming to Italy, not the Kindle.

I only purchased one other book – a large compendium of poetry, which I thought might be nice to dip into. Unfortunately this was not to be – like most of the shoddy free stuff you can fill your Kindle with, this eBook came with no index or contents page, rendering navigation impossible. The illustrations too were missing, replaced by ugly placeholders.

My regard for the Kindle can be seen in the way I treat it – instead of buying a fancy case, it resides in a tatty yellow paper bag.

Obviously the Kindle has been a big hit in its latest incarnation, and sales of eBooks at Amazon have eclipsed those of paper, but for me the device is of little immediate use.

Perhaps it would be more appealing if, aside from the navigation woes, Amazon were to adopt the policy of throwing in a free electronic version with every real book purchase, just as the surprisingly large number of musicians releasing on vinyl include a free CD or MP3‘s. Then you could enjoy the best of both worlds.

 

TOO MUCH INFORMATION?

I was thinking about the Kindle book reader the other night, wondering whether or not it might be fun to get one seeing as how the price has dropped and it might be yet another nice little gadget to have around. Then I got to thinking that it represents yet another digitisation of the Old World, and I had to wonder whether that was a good thing or not. Previous changes have been in the fields of music and photography, and both transitions were not without their problems.

CDs – well, that wasn’t too difficult : sacrifice the large artwork for a dinky little booklet, but gain a far more durable and glitch-free artefact, and once we’d got past the initially lousy digital transfers there was no going back, really.

The second stage of the music revolution has been different, however. As an audio engineer of sorts I was always aware (and wary) of the sonic limitations of the MP3 format compared to the .wavs of the CD. This didn’t stop me from becoming an early adopter of the iPod, although I always drew the line at actually buying downloaded files, always preferring to have the hard copy CD beforehand. The rare occasions on which I have purchased songs on iTunes led me to realise not only the inferior quality of the files and the lack of artwork, but also the issue of ownership. Buy a CD and you have the music there in your hands forever (or at least until that shiny disk starts to corrode…). Download an MP3, and you are merely leasing it. Change computers more than three times and you’ll find that the song is no longer available to your ears. I lost a few in the migration from Windows to Mac, with no way to get them back save by re-buying.

So this last step I will not take, since for me the losses clearly outweigh the gains. Perhaps the young, brought up on this and not knowing any better, won’t care and will cheerily accept what is obviously a diminution of  both quality and consumer rights.

Next transition was photography. I wasn’t an early adopter here, and only went over to the digital side about five years ago, concerned again that the rendering of light into 0′s and 1′s would result in a reduction in quality. When I finally took the plunge and got my first Nikon DSLR, a D50, I realised that the crappy quality evident in most compact ‘point and shoot‘ digicams was not a concern on the big cameras. Once assured of the quality of the images, I embraced the vastly increased possibilities of digital photography to the full.

The fact of being able to see what you’ve just taken has transformed photography from an elitist esoteric pursuit full of arcane terminology into an egalitarian art form which can be enjoyed by everyone. Rule books can be thrown away, and free experimentation is enabled at no extra cost, a real emancipation.

And now Kindle, representing the digitisation of the book. Aside from my love of gadgets, I can’t say that I ever want to forgo the pleasures of holding a new book in my hands. I understand that the decline of the book is probably inevitable now, since young kids don’t read them anymore, and I find myself spending my commuting time peering into my iPhone‘s diminutive screen to read a whole range of things. I also get the undeniable relief our forests will feel when the book becomes a mere niche product like vinyl.

But still, I don’t think that the sheer convenience of having thousands of reads at one’s disposal can beat the feel and look of a real book. This is one transition I don’t think I can ever fully make.

And all this brings me to another consideration of these changes: is the ready access to vast amounts of music, books, information and images necessarily a good thing? The nerd in me loves the idea of being to carry my entire music library around with me, but after a certain stage was passed in the growth of my iTunes library I was reminded of the lyric to the Devo song ‘Freedom of Choice.’

‘In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want.’

Sometimes of an evening, when I’m recumbent on the sofa and looking forward to an hour or so of sonic relaxation, I reach for the iPhone, open the iTunes remote app, and am then stymied by the vast amount of music available to me – around 21,000 songs. It freaks me out a bit. I don’t know what to listen to. Stick to a well-worn favourite, or try something a little less familiar, or even completely unheard? (Such is the amount of undigested material in my collection). Perhaps there are limits to what the human mind can deal with. I find I can handle a collection of 5,000 songs, but not one of 21,000. That I cannot conceive of comfortably.

How then, do the young folk brought up with the internet deal with this overabundance of material? Do they develop a good filtering system that helps them cope with the vast possibilities? And is the easy availability of everything causing it to be devalued? Do the teenagers of today love and cherish the tunes on their MP3s as much as I did the 7″ singles I used to buy once a month or so with my savings?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions, but I understand the importance of not becoming another tedious old git complaining about how things were better in the old days (I don’t necessarily think they were).

However, I do know how amazingly adaptable human beings are, and how the universe itself is built on change, and how it is futile to fight it. The digital revolution will proceed no matter what we think of it: the trick will be to embrace only that which seems to truly enhance life and reject that which does not, although it is often difficult to make this important distinction.

MUSICAL MALADIES

The Musik Industry has apparently just given up suing pimply teenagers who illegally download their products, which follows in the wake of the recent Apple decision to drop the obnoxious DRM protection system from iTunes purchases. So, basically, they’re admitting their paranoid greed-fuelled attempts to halt the march of time have been a dismal failure.

Oh poor Musik Industry, my heart bleeds for you!

I remember reading an interview with Devo in a 1979 issue of the NME in which they likened the experience of signing with a major label to being anally raped. A tad strong, perhaps, but not far off the mark.

Akron, Ohio's finest!

See, this is how the System works. You sign with a label and they give you a large wad of cash known as the ‘advance.’ Now many a naive ensemble somehow mistook this for being wages or just free money, and blew the lot on hot babes and powdery substances. But no, the advance is not a free cash hand out, it is a loan against future sales.

See, this is how the System really works. The advance and all recording and promotional costs are taken out of subsequent unit sales. And the cut the artist receives on a sale is something like 5%. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that unless you are shifting millions of albums, you are not going to be flying around in your own Lear jet snorting caviar off naked gold-painted midgets. No, you are going to be endlessly touring in a clapped-out van, sleeping on the floor of some dive, and waiting tables in your spare time. If this isn’t bad enough, consider that the record company then owns not only the recordings, but also the songs themselves.

An artist after signing with an unnamed Big Label yesterday

Not only has the greedy Musik Industry shafted the artists, they have also fleeced the general music-buying public.

With the advent of the CD they saw a golden opportunity to make more cash by compelling us to purchase our favourite albums a second time in the form of those early horrible thin-sounding digital versions, often made from sources other than the master tapes, and occasionally actually lifted from vinyl copies.

No matter, this meant that a decade later they could flog them all a third time in the form of digital remasters, providing us with the product we should have got the first time around, together with a few crappy out-takes.

Then came the age of peer-to-peer networks and file-sharing, and the conservative behemoth that is the Musik Industry reacted not by embracing the new medium, but by fighting an unwinnable rearguard action and throwing lawsuits at a few kids in the vain hope that this would halt the ubiquitous practices of a generation.

Oh dear...

The truth is, illegally sharing music is nothing new. In the late 70′s my cohorts and I, perpetually strapped for cash, would buy disparate albums, then circulate them and tape them on cassette. This was, I suspect, a universal practice, as was taping off FM radio.

The Musik Industry tried to intervene then too, by placing ludicrous ‘Home Taping is Killing Music‘ stickers everywhere. ‘Home Taping is Slightly Denting our Enormous Profits Which We Don’t Pass on to the Artists‘ would be closer the mark.

It wasn’t long before a very amusing variant slogan was appearing on stickers and badges proclaiming ‘Home Fucking is Killing Prostitution.’ Tee-hee.

Liars!

So, now the poor old Musik Industry is going to try to embrace the new paradigm and stop harassing people with lawsuits and intrusive protection software. About fucking time.

Thing is, illegal downloading is not as bad as the big companies imagine. Every free download does not equate with a lost sale. People often download stuff they are curious about, in which case it could be seen as a marketing tool, or they download stuff on the periphery of their tastes that they would never have bought anyway.

If someone is a real fan of a band, they will aspire to own the CDs replete with artwork and .wav files (ten times better quality than the crappy MP3s floating around the net), or at least support them through going to gigs and buying merchandise such as T-shirts.

Tee-hee! Chortle, chortle...

The bottom line is, illegal downloading is fact and it’s not going to go away. The Musik Industry had it good for a long time, then stuck its head on the sand, so screw them for being a bunch of conservative corporate Nazis who cared only about money. With the powerful networking tools provided by the Internet, bands can directly interface with their audiences and thus cut out the suits.

Now go to my band’s website and order some CDs, you cheap pimply bastards – I need to eat!