ratpie

Category: markets

  • Streaming versus Downloads? The Fight is Far From Won

    The recent decline in the music download market, coupled with an acceleration in the streaming revenue numbers, has led many to predict the kind of transition that saw the end of the cassette tape, or indeed the cart and horse. There are a few reasons, some a bit less obvious, why this might not be such a certainty.

    For a start, building the higher bandwidth mobile networks required for pervasive access is expensive and difficult. Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, says most of the country has 50% or less 3G coverage. There are plenty of ‘not spots’ due to topography and building materials, so there are likely to be connectivity constraints and disappointments for the foreseeable future. On one of Britain’s main train lines there’s only a 10% chance of maintaining a 15 minute mobile phone conversation. Even if we wanted mobile music on demand we’re not likely to get it cheaply and reliably for years.

    The second aspect to look at is the nature of demand for music. Studies show that most people are happy with a library of 1000 tracks or fewer, a minute fraction of the 50 million tracks now available on demand. And by far the majority of music buyers, even in music mad countries such as the UK, traditionally listened to the radio and bought one or two albums per year.

    In a recent study consumers cited the ability to play music offline as the biggest benefit of a paid for music subscription. They get that with downloads, and with CDs, which perhaps explains the resilience of compact discs, along with the resale opportunity of course. What’s more, mobile data storage is going to get bigger and cheaper much faster than any improvements in mobile broadband. A small personal library, with a radio, and the occasionally impulse track download, is perhaps the ideal package for the casual music buyer.

    It’s likely that streaming’s rapid growth represents the migration of heavy download buyers to a more attractive value proposition, rather than the rest of the market trading up. There might be other reasons for the casual buyers to be enticed into streaming services, for instance their value as profiled targets of advertising. But as things stand downloads serve all but the top few music buyers with a much better mix of price and functionality, so they are likely to be around for a long time yet.

  • The World Is Singing A New Song

    We live in an age of everyday activism, with every purchase an expression of values as well as needs. Ideas about fairness go far beyond the impact of certified fair trading schemes; they permeate consumer marketing. Social media drives a radical transparency in supply chains, with no exploitation tacitly excused.

    Alongside fairness we have discovered a new appreciation of the craft skills and tradition wrapped up in the idea of an artisan. We know that we can be fed and clothed, and that our homes can be furnished and decorated by machines. At some point however we lost the sense that mechanisation is progress, and what came to the surface is the powerful idea that all economic transactions are a medium for human communication. A loaf of bread is now, somehow, a laying on of hands as well as nutrition.

    A musician playing an instrument or singing with real skill and feeling is the very definition of an artisan. The century we’re in could have been made for musicians, whose work delivers all the meaning of a transaction with none of the burden of common wants and needs. If this seems too much of a stretch, consider a cup of fair trade coffee. How much does the ethical content really improve the world? Or how much is it just an excuse for a caffeine dose in a disposable cardboard beaker?

    We in the music industry should not get carried away with enthusiasm for ideas that are easy to express but much harder to live up to. Some voices are now mooting a ‘fair trade’ approach to music. It is very hard indeed to see the parallels between the life of a musician in a G7 economy, and the fate of a worker on a coffee plantation. Nor would the Walk Free Foundation find many major label recording artists among the 35.8 million slaves it works so hard to free.

    Fair trade and authenticity in the music industry have to start from a very different place, and it will need the kind of grinding attention to detail that we have in abundance, but have not so far deigned to put on display. Today it is hard to find out who created a song, and who played the instruments. Such credits as there are don’t really tell the whole story. Was the performance recorded simply and directly, or did a studio wizard remanufacture it into something entirely wonderful but different? If we answer these simple questions we create trust, and trust is the foundation of both fairness and authenticity.

    But this comes with a warning. We won’t be correcting a great social injustice by going down this road, and we should be very careful not to wear the clothes of the genuinely oppressed and suffering. Fairness in music comes when everybody’s contribution is acknowledged and everybody’s rights respected; it’s not an argument over percentages of a payout.

    We have to admit in music that we are years away from the time when we can stand behind a full set of credits for a recording and swear that they are complete and truthful. Our audience, and consumers, have in many ways gone ahead of us, and it’s they who are singing a new song. We need to sing in harmony with them. It’s simple commercial good sense, as well as the right thing to do.

     

  • Two Ideas for a Bigger, Better Music Industry

    We have come a long way in the music industry since the first faltering attempts to sell music online in the mid 1990s. A couple of personal anecdotes (names withheld to protect the guilty) from those years illustrate just how much music industry attitudes have changed. A top UK band manager raged in one meeting, ‘get [my band] off the internet’. A top record label CEO told a company conference, ‘we think the internet will prove to be like CB radio’. 10 4 good buddy!

    Behaving badly and getting away with it

    Public perceptions of the music industry have changed too, and continue to evolve. What made it attractive as a career to a certain kind of person before the millennium, is perhaps best summed up by this misappropriation and misquotation of Hunter S Thompson:

    The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

    That the original was about TV, not music, and that the twist was added, just serves to demonstrate the sense that success in music was about behaving badly and getting away with it. The potency and validity of that idea seems to have been draining away fast in the 21st century. One of the most enlightening studies of the music industry’s war on internet piracy came not from an economist, but a professor of marketing, Markus Giesler, who looked at how attitudes changed over a period, casting the undoubted disruption almost as an argument between lovers. The title, ‘Conflict and Compromise’, tells us a lot about modern commerce, and music is no exception.

    There is too much in Giesler’s paper that is too good, but I shall pull out a quote from his conclusion:

    consumer heroism also plays a formative role in directing the historical process of market evolution

    Yes, consumers are heroes, and are neither passively compliant, nor victims of whatever tricks the music industry might want to play on them. Consumers do not exist merely to solve our cashflow problems.

    So here are two big ideas, that between them will do much to improve music for all of us who value it beyond its ability to convert clicks into cash.

    1 we must be guided by a model of the kind of consumer we hope to engage.

    In music I would say that our ideal consumer is knowledgeable, about music and artists, and about culture with all its facets, and able to connect between music and other forms of art and craft. Our music consumer is interested in the world too, and what music can do to bring comfort, joy, freedom, ideas, into the many dark places as well as our comfortable developed societies. They are not the super rich. It would be absurd to ask that 99% of the world should be paying for music; but what about pricing within reach of 66%, as a start? And finally, the ideal music consumer is ethical in approach and habit, always choosing the fair and sustainable over a short term buzz with dubious provenance.

    2 we must remove the risk for our partners who innovate and invest to carry our music into the world.

    We should license our partners long term, so they can plan to improve the consumer experience through many iterations. We should be willing to trade some short term benefit for long term stability, so that music licensing risk is never again mentioned in statutory stock market filings. Within the music industry we should collaborate to present our partners with a complete set of copyrights, and a complete set of information about the music. We should take perhaps a seven year, rather than a one or two year view. Our ideal partner is one who will over many years invest to support music with their networks and their infrastructure, and return revenue so that we can reward the creators and investors and regenerate our industry.

    Growing up in public

    We are having a debate now in the music industry about transparency, about data, about interdependence and its risks for us, and for how we can continue to work together. That some of this debate is leaking into our collective conversation with consumers seems to me to carry its own risks. Do artists want to be more transparent about their own business? Or do they only want the rest of the industry to be more transparent to them? Should we be lifting the kimono fully on the small group of writers and producers that dominate chart pop? Does the music consumer have a right to know whether the string section got paid?

    If we continue to go into this debate as though we are unaware we are being observed and judged by our ideal consumers, we will be in danger of perpetuating the perception that we are an underserving industry, that each of us is simply out to get what we can no matter whom we swindle in the process. But if we can get over ourselves and concentrate on being fit to serve our ideal consumers and our ideal partners, a bigger and better music industry awaits us.

  • It’s a Playlist World. Time to Break the Lock-in!

    Playlists are moving to the front and centre of music discovery and consumption. They alter the balance of power in the industry in some obvious, and some less obvious ways. So who is winning in a playlist world, and how can we make sure the power of the playlist is used for the benefit of music fans and artists?

    It helps to know which playlists are important, and for what reasons. For artists and record labels playlists can now make the difference between success and obscurity. Lorde was famously a beneficiary of Sean Parker’s Hipster International playlist, back in 2013. Since then the music services themselves have made sure they own the lists that matter. As though it needed underlining, here’s Will Page explaining how Spotify used its playlists to make Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” a hit:

    Spotify can proudly claim over 90 percent of the credit for this historical achievement, and our curated Browse playlists were the biggest factor.

    What artists are looking for is the chain reaction, where exposure on one playlist leads to additions to other playlists and so to positions in interactive charts. There’s some data showing that this now happens ahead of mass media coverage, for instance through broadcast radio.

    Even if charts and pop success are not the main aim playlists can deliver a solid number of plays (and therefore revenue), or bring high engagement from a community. Spotify’s Paul Lamere generously gave us a lot of detail here, including a helpful breakdown of different categories of playlist – genre, context, mood… So for the platforms, playlists are a critical user experience feature, as well as a tool to manage their relationship with the music providers.

    For users, playlists solve some of the paradox of choice problem, while ceding less personalisation than radio or non-interactive streaming. They are also, of course, a digital era reinvention of the mixtape, with all the personal and public status and communication amplified by global reach. For cheapskate families (sorry, hardpressed and hardworking families) playlists solve the dilemma of sharing an account between many people without getting too much in each others’ way. They are a scratchpad for research, and an amazing way to express one’s inner librarian.

    All of the above is an investment in a service; you would expect much lower churn from users who had made more playlists. As such this is a form of lock-in. The cost of switching to a different supplier now includes reconstructing important playlists, or abandoning many hours of work, even where there might not be a significant repertoire risk. And as social and communication tools infiltrate ever more deeply it’s just going to get harder to leave an interwoven graph of music and connected people.

    I suggested elsewhere that the music industry should be considering how we can achieve playlist portability between services, much as mobile network switching was really stalled before you could keep your number. There is a wholly understandable conservatism when users, and artists and labels, have invested heavily in an aspect of a service which is technically tied to that service. We end up working to preserve a service not because it innovates and offers great value, but because we don’t want to lose the work we put in.

    So this is the playlist panorama. A small revolution in discovery and listening, but not a democratic one as the platform owned playlists have almost all the power. A new layer of sharing and self-expression for users. A new dynamic in value which pushes users and music providers to work unpaid to increase the value and stickiness of the platform. Oh, and new opportunities for payola, which frankly are just as bad value as they ever were, and just as uninteresting.

    As so often, the music fan’s interests are wholly aligned with the artists’ and labels’ for a fair, open, and portable playlist format. So take this as a very gentle warning that the benefits of a playlisted world need to be a little more evenly distributed. We should not tempt the platforms to prefer rent seeking to innovation and competition, even if it’s working for us right now. Portability would make playlists perfect.

  • Fairness and Advantage in Future Music Markets

    A debate is being conducted by the stakeholders in the future of the music industry, about who should get paid, how much, and by whom. So much devilish detail is being left out that an intelligent observer would get a very distorted view of the present, and that is no basis on which to build a future.

    So what is missing, and why does it matter?

    First, the spotlight on streaming shades all the other ways that musicians can make money, as recording artists, composers, and performers. It might indeed be that apart from public performance and synchronisation, streaming becomes the overwhelmingly dominant way that recorded music gets paid for. But there is a long way to go yet, and short term advantage over the transition (if there is indeed a clean and substitutional transition) could translate into long term advantage for the winners. ‘Winner takes all’ is not great for music, which benefits from innovation and diversity as much as the rest of civilised life.

    Second, it’s easy to miss the fact that there are many parties between the artist and the streaming royalty, all negotiating their share as best they can. An appearance of transparency can hide as much as it reveals. An artist might agree a 10% royalty from a record company in return for a recoupable investment in their career, in cash and effort. That same record company might agree a 20% royalty with another artist, because there is more competition for their recording rights. Another artist might use a DIY platform that pays out 100%, but have to borrow the money to record the music and hire their own team (or really do everything themselves in their spare time). In a debate about fairness the percentages are meaningless, unless there is coercion or bad legal advice when these agreements were made.

    Third, the famous ‘black box’ exists because some income from selling the right to use a catalogue of music is inevitably unattributable to the subsequent actual use of a piece of music. This is evident at every layer between performer and audience, and it can be dealt with contractually, using proxy values if necessary. If particular companies get a reputation for growing the black box at the expense of attributable revenue in order to retain a larger share of the profits, they will have to compensate by growing the attributable revenue even faster or they will find musicians migrating to where they get a better deal. There’s enough ‘unfair contract’ case law in music to serve as a warning to record labels and music publishers which set out to rip off musicians.

    Fourth, and a more subtle point, is a concern that the mechanisms for calculating how the music owners, and ultimately the musicians, are going to get paid is inherently unfair. This appears in two forms; one in which stakeholders in a single payment (for instance composers) argue that they should get more of that payment, and the other over whether large pools of money from subscriptions should be considered aggregates of individual subscriber payments, or a single collective payment for the totality of the music offered and used. Neither yields easily to an argument based on fairness, and both are re-distributative. In particular the latter overlooks some very critical points. The service has to provide the music in advance, with the payout being partly for the opportunity to listen, whether it’s taken up by a particular individual or not. Services also have to consider consumer satisfaction, which might just as easily be driven by lots of listening to a wide range of music as by the ability to increase royalty payments for any particular recipient. Artists with very broad appeal will do very well in all cases, but other artists whose audience is more open-eared and experimental might well turn out to be critical for the long term health of the music industry.

    It could easily be that the music industry as a whole is at a great disadvantage to its technology driven partners, whose users naturally enough want to upload and download without a debate about fairness and legality. Certainly in recorded music a very heavy price is being paid for the transition from physical to digital, and consumers and the new music services and device makers are capturing a lot of the new value created. Within the music industry however, there are warning signs that those who arguably already benefit most will try as hard as they can to embed their advantage. It should be a warning to us when ageing and wealthy musicians are presented as the future of the music industry, or asked to argue for fairness in the way all musicians get paid.

    Here’s just one example:

    “Why is someone who pays 9.99 Euros a month just to listen to ABBA in the same basket as my daughter, who streams thousands of songs?”

    The answer to me is obvious. As an industry we need to help new artists get discovered and supported, and we need to develop young and paying customers for music. Helping more money go to the creators of 40 year old sound recordings will achieve neither of those aims; instead let’s choose discovery of new music, and more music, as the way we judge whether the market is working, and fair.

  • Europe’s Digital Single Market is Good for Music

    Accustomed as music companies are to territorial licensing, pricing, windowing, and marketing it is understandable that there should be at least scepticism if not outright hostility to the European Union’s Digital Single Market strategy. Swedes with an average GDP (PPP) per capita of $45,000 can afford more music than Bulgarians with $15,000. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that the inequalities in such a large and diverse market make it hard to price a service or a product which is available to all.

    These inequalities are unsurprisingly reflected in the relative sizes of Europe’s national music markets, with Germany and the UK each more than half as much again as third place France, then a long drop to fourth place Italy. Populations and the size of the economy and the amount of discretionary spending are relevant of course, and it’s gratifying to see that the UK is second only to Japan in the amount spent per capita on music. The wide disparity in the size of the market as a whole and the per capita spend is illustrated well by the fact that the US is only fourth largest in the latter, while being the leader by far in the former.

    There might be many reasons why, even corrected for purchasing power and the availability of discretionary weekly cash, some cultures buy more recorded music than others. In some places music is universally considered an appropriate gift, and record tokens or gift cards deal with the preference problem. Historical differences in economic development mean that the dominant vectors for recorded music are much less present in some countries (and this is why universal high speed broadband is so critical for Europe’s cultural industries).

    But what would a European digital music market look like? It would start out at about €4b, or roughly the size of the US market. But it would have 500m consumers, versus 300m for the US, and a per capita GDP (PPP) of a very respectable $36,000. It would also have two powerhouse centres of music export excellence, in the UK and Sweden, and the benefit of an extraordinary array of local and regional cultural support programmes.

    Back of an envelope maths says that is already an additional €0.75b just by taking away artificial barriers (GEMA, I am looking at you). Other positives might come from innovation, particularly in finding a way to address the less wealthy areas with affordable products and services, without undermining pricing for the higher end. If Europe can crack that there are a few more continents that could prove excellent importers of both music and the digital services and technology that sell it. The necessity of being multi-lingual and serving a very rich and diverse set of cultural preferences would surely give Europeans a strong advantage over the parachute business model strategies of our friends across the pond.

    Even more, where there is already excellence in copyright administration and the digital skills that drive value, a larger internal market would strengthen the good and drive out the bad. Why would local artists trust their careers and livelihoods to inefficient and corrupt collecting societies if they could just join the best and get paid for the world’s biggest music market from one source? And perhaps regional diversity would re-create the middle class of record labels that provided so much value, before they were destroyed by the wave of enfeebling consolidation that left us with two and a half global businesses in a market a third the size it was at the millennium.

    If Europe’s politicians are wise they will consider not the interests of those global businesses, even if one of them is headquartered in Paris, but rather regulate for the music industry we could have. One that has more opportunities for artists, no matter where they are from, and one that takes advantage of our diversity as well as our size. I can only see good in a European digital single market for music.

  • Three Reasons Why Indie Music Will Thrive

    There’s a professional and independent music industry, sandwiched in between the largest corporate and VC funded businesses, and the hobbyist and part time music makers. It is vitally important as a repository of skills and cultural memory, as the guardian of meaningful values in music, and as an engine of innovation for the future. And I think that its future is very bright indeed.

    Indies Provide a Better Home for Better Artists

    It used to be that their superior financial resources, and, further back, their ownership of the best studios, gave the biggest labels a strong advantage when it came to helping an artist develop a career. No longer. The necessary blend of experience, skills, knowledge and dedication is found everywhere in the music industry, but in the bigger companies it is warped by the demands of financial managers and corporate apparatchiks.

    The best and most interesting artists know this, and increasingly are making the choice to treat the industry as a menu of services that they can buy in when they need them. I think that these artists will over the next few years rediscover the indie record label as a deep and long term partner, where they can find accessible and approachable support for their creativity, along with an unprecedented marketing reach.

    The Digital Dividend

    Professional and independent creators and producers benefit proportionately far more from the revolution in digital tools and technology. Of course access to capital is still important, but the creative playing field is now much more level.

    Music is no different to any other endeavour in that it can often benefit from skills, experience, and teamwork in bringing the artist’s original vision into the world. This set of competences is supported now by technology that enables global scale business networks to be pulled together even by small local businesses. So record labels can help artists who don’t want to start at zero, and can stretch those with ambition to do more with their talent. Digital production tools make quality and authenticity affordable in a way that for many was previously out of reach. And once the music is ready, the digital revolution provides a global market.

    Real Independence is Rare and Valuable

    Real independence is very much in tune with today’s sophisticated consumer, who is more and more rejecting the mass market in food, in coffee, beer, and all areas where your choices say something about your values. Quality matters a lot, but not at the expense of authenticity. For today’s consumer, the way that the corporate music companies manage risk, with focus groups and ‘outsourced’ creative teams, has negative value; this audience has taken DIY to heart and shops in advance of production on crowdfunding platforms, and in small stores.

    Nor can this set of values be faked or bought in. It’s part of the natural cycle of business that founders often end up selling to the big conglomerates, but they can’t sell the love and support of the customer who joined them on the early part of their journey. And of course, in music, the artists that join do so because they share the values. Independence has the chance to become not just a slice in the music industry, but a social and cultural movement.

    So for the following three reasons, I think that indie record labels will grow their role in the music industry of the future:

    Reason number one: The best and most interesting artists need a supportive and sympathetic environment to develop their art and their careers; indies can provide this far better than investor driven corporates.

    Reason number two: Professional indies will be helped by the digital revolution to reach a bigger and more sympathetic market than ever before, with a product that is enhanced by digital recording and sound production technology.

    Reason number three: Today’s consumers are embracing the values that can only reside in independent record labels, and will join the movement if they consider it authentic and worthwhile.

  • Spotify Cannibalises iTunes; Universal Cannibalises Music

    Universal Music has been turning in some very unimpressive numbers for parent Vivendi over the last few years. Traditionally record companies blame everyone other than themselves for their failures (I did a brief survey some years ago here). Now in the frame is Spotify, which relies heavily on drawing users in on its free offering, from where it can sell data about them to advertisers and hope they upgrade to a paid plan. That free tier, said an unnamed Universal Music executive to the Financial Times, is not working hard enough for the music company, and moreover it steals consumers who might otherwise be buying downloads. iTunes, by far the dominant download store, is suffering slow but steady attrition.

    Quoted in the same Financial Times article (March 2015), Spotify managed to both prove and deny this simple proposition:

    The company also rejects the suggestion that its ad-supported tier is responsible for declines in download sales. “Spotify is not cannibalising iTunes,” it says. “Spotify is monetising people who have never been monetised before.” Only 12 per cent of former iTunes users are on Spotify and of that number more than 40 per cent subscribe to the paid tier, it adds.

    You don’t need PhD level statistics to see that if 1 in 8 of the people who stop using iTunes do so because they are spending more than they would on a Spotify subscription, and if nearly half of those high rolling stoppers trade down to a spend which is capped at £120 per year including VAT there’s going to be less money in the system for recorded music. Access to all the music they either lacked the time or the money to acquire might convince some lesser spenders to push the boat out, but for the majority of infrequent or parsimonious music buyers, big value 100 track compilations would remain a better deal. The gifting market has a bit of inertia and is more likely to stick with CDs, or default to an iTunes voucher.

    More contentious however is that free of charge tier in the subscription service model. For the many who never or only very rarely bought music in any form, the subscription business is as irrelevant as hipster vinyl. But again common sense says that there will be  cannibalisation; between free tiers of service and whatever advertising or taxpayer funded licence fees can be scraped together for broadcast or webcast services, and between free and the paid tiers. And while some services, most notably Spotify and its direct competitors such as Rdio and Deezer, strive to find a balance between free and paid plans, for others, including YouTube and Pandora, paid plans remain commercially insignificant.

    I previously calculated very approximately a net loss to recorded music revenue of about 30p for every £1 of subscription revenue. Some analysts say that streaming is just too expensive, and that the revenue maximising full service price is more like £3 per month rather than £10. One of the clearest explanations, by David Touve, can be found here and in more detail in this presentation here (but please ignore the Swedish Internet traffic data as there was a much more plausible explanation than iPred for the drop recorded). At such low prices the cannibalisation effect would be even harder to deny. And even within a single service it seems hugely important just what you get for nothing and what you have to pay for.

    So this has been a brief survey of just some of the moving parts in the market for recorded music. But why is it that spats over the finer points of music service revenue models reach the world’s financial press? And why do some of the biggest and most savvy businesses seem to be pushing so hard for apparently sub-optimal results?

    That cannibalisation word is a horrible one and nobody is eating people we hope – the idea is contention for finite resources. Record companies and services each have their specialised capabilities that combine to capture value from music, so to some extent they must cooperate. But naturally all music services compete with each other, as do all record labels; and in the middle is a pot of value that could legitimately go to any of the contestants, or indeed to consumers, or to the providers of the devices and networks that connect us to the music.

    In that pot is the explanation for the more inflammatory proposition of my headline, that Universal cannibalises music. Here’s how Vivendi describes UMG for investors:

    Undisputed global leadership position in recorded music:

    • More than 30% market share

    Translate that into a set of rules governing what models and prices a dominant record label would be willing to tolerate, and the trajectory of the market becomes obvious. Dominance means that a market participant not only wins, but is also able to choose the terms of engagement such they will always win. In music that means Universal takes market share away from all the other record companies, and to the extent that it can, also takes value from music services. Those services in turn need to see more of the value they capture also coming from the other labels, and the biggest squeeze will inevitably be put on the smallest. The digital music market has the same kind of inevitability to it as a modulated Conway’s Game of Life. It ends, by the way, when there is either nothing left to contend for, or nobody left to contend for it.

    And the lesson I guess for anyone who makes or owns music that they believe is as valuable, or more so, than Universal’s, is not to swim in a shark pool. It’s probably time to test the always dubious notion that a a platform without chart hits (dominated by UMG and Sony, with Warner and the indies taking turns every few weeks to get a look in) would be unacceptable to a consumer with more developed tastes.

  • Listen to the Music, not the Audio Nihilists

    The trade offs that made digital music possible, when storage and bandwidth were scarce, are no longer quite so necessary through much of the developed world. Some brave services are trying to take advantage of this technological advance by offering higher quality music on demand. They face considerable obstacles, and oddly, a chorus of voices shrieking ‘snake oil’ and calling the whole endeavour a con. We should listen to the music, rather than the audio nihilists. Here’s why.

    A little compression is very hard to notice; unsurprisingly the more sound that gets removed the more likely the listener is to notice a degradation. This is only a small part of the story however. The best and most professional do everything they can to ensure the end product is as good as it can be, right the way through the recording and production chain. But they have a low target to hit, and nobody can easily justify overspending in a tight market. Many of course deliberately take short cuts in order to save time and money. Now that nobody can plead necessity, having a higher final target would be likely to raise standards generally, and this would be a good thing for music fans.

    Not all ears are equal, but recording and compression by their nature target a mid point of hearing acuity. And now the discussion becomes a bit speculative. Higher pitched sound is harder to compress, but is important both for the complexity of timbre as well as locating a sound in space. Location in a stereo signal is a bit of a fake anyway, as obviously a single audio source needs to be converted to two separate sounds to be perceived as either to the left or the right in a normal listening environment. In nature, as well as tiny time and level differences, it’s the wrinkles in your ears that subtly reflect and modify high pitched sound in ways that you have learned to associate with position. Because of this complexity the recording or sound creation process has already made many compromises in order to sound mostly OK to most people, and compression adds another layer of compromise.

    But still, as many experts say, most people can’t reliably tell the difference between the source and its compressed version, and express no preference either in listening tests. Surely depriving them of what they can’t hear does not hurt them!

    Sound, however, is not music, and hearing is only part of perception. Nor can simple tests really hope to discover the immensely complicated ways we respond to music, nor how that might be affected by the ways we experience the sound. We all know this of course. Our imaginations fill in the missing parts of familiar instruments, so that even a sketchy recording of a violin shares some of the wonder of a platonic Strad. We are continually exposed to newly imagined sounds, which we fit into our own personal collections of virtual instruments and performances. Musical training even alters the structure of the brain, it is that affective. Even if the audio testing equipment says that the sound you hear now is exactly the same as the one you heard five minutes ago, your perception of it has been irrevocably altered by both memory and imagination. We create what we hear as much as perceive it.

    So for these reasons we should not let the audio nihilists deprive us of the opportunity to create and experience a world of sound and music that could take us far beyond the standard fixed by the CD and then compromised by compression to fit the business needs of the late 20th century. We should and can encourage a music industry that can really stretch our ideas of what is possible in audio perception.

  • A Global Release Day is the Wrong Kind of Globalisation

    Big record labels are gearing up to move their release scheduling so that all new records come out on a Friday at a minute past midnight. They argue that everyone knows anyway through social media when a record is released; that record stores for those buying physical products need to know what day to rotate their displays (they do now of course, but risk being out of sync with download and streaming release dates); that new music should be introduced when interest in music is at its peak in order to compete better with other entertainment options. And also, that simpler planning means better coordination for global marketing campaigns, and also for their flip-side, anti-piracy activity.

    This all looks convincing. Some High Street shops might prefer a different day (Fridays must already be busy for non specialists as everyone gets ready for weekend shoppers) but will welcome being at less of a disadvantage to digital retail and streaming. Much of the rest looks like simple common sense.

    But let’s look at some of the assumptions here. For a start, this is clearly built to fit the Western Christian working week. OK, so the major music markets might work on Western weekly cycles, but at the very least this shows some overreach from record label representatives in the UK & USA who led the decision to move to Fridays. So much for ‘think global, act local’. Also underlying this move is the idea that new music discovery is a short burst of highly competitive attention. It allows no time for second listens, or getting used to an unfamiliar style over the week before deciding to spend your money and make your mark on the chart.

    But are we not increasingly ignoring charts, and making our own journeys of discovery through social media and infinite libraries of music? That would be nice to think, but the money says otherwise. Those charts are important, not just as a signal of success, but also as a vector by which music can move from a niche audience and find broader support. So constricting the gateway is an inherently conservative strategy, favouring the bigger and better resourced marketing teams, and familiar artists. It would not be too far fetched to suspect that the same voices calling for a global release day will soon be trying to coordinate global charts, all based on the ability to mobilise marketing clout in a very compressed and highly contended window of essentially two day’s sales.

    This is a kind of market shrinking madness, inevitably benefiting bigger companies and those with access to TV, which is probably no accident. The recorded music market is essentially static, so if the dominant labels want to improve their financial performance they need more market concentration, and less cost.

    For the rest however, young artists, independent record labels, and anyone who wants to roam outside of the mainstream music playpen, we need to get a bit more organised and find ways to support truly local music and music retailers, outside the hypercompetitive sharkpool that global release day will become. May I start by suggesting Folk Monday’s, Welsh Tuesday’s, Opposite Latitude Wednesday’s, Over 50’s Thursdays…. you get the picture. And then we will be fortified against the torrent of Global Pop Friday.