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   Music DNA

or: New Formats, Old Thinking

The Guardian has an article today about a proposed new music format called MusicDNA and, oh God, the Music Industry still doesn't seem to get it if this is the sort of idea they're soliciting:

"A fan buying a MusicDNA file of Florence and the Machine's Lungs, for example, could watch - on their computer screen or music player - videos of recent performances, pore over artwork and sleeve notes, find out about concerts and buy a tour T-shirt, while following any blogs or tweets the musician might write."

So, in essence, it's an MP3 with extra content.

THIS IS A FUCKING. TERRIBLE. IDEA.

Here's how it would work, in theory. The fan fires up their internet connection, goes looking for a particular song they like, and are basically faced with three options:

1. Illegal download - variable quality and availability, audio only, costs £0.
2. Legal download of audio only - may only be as good as the illegal download, costs £0.79 (current iTunes standard price).
3. Legal download of MusicDNA file - audio is the same as option #2, but comes with pictures and notes and blogs and videos and who the fuck knows what else. And almost certainly costs more (though no price has yet been announced).

And that's supposed to tempt illegal downloaders to pay is it? Are you kidding me?

Before we consider anything else, let's just consider what people want to do with music they download. THEY WANT TO LISTEN TO IT. We've had portable video players for years now, the technology is well established, and with so many smartphones now floating about there's a huge audience of people who have the capability to download videos instead of just audio.

But when was the last time you saw someone on a train, on a bus, walking down the street, or sat in a park watching a music video? I'm pretty sure you've never seen this, or if you have it's been a rare occurrence. Because, of course, no-one really wants to watch anything longer than a silly YouTube video on a screen that's only three inches. And even then, people aren't really consuming such videos via their phones or portable media players in anywhere near the quantity that they consume audio.

Nope, people have been perfectly happy to just listen to music for centuries, and that isn't going to change. When Sony invented the Walkman they made it possible to do this on the move, but the action of listening to music didn't change.

So, when you download that MusicDNA file, you're downloading the audio you do want, and the other stuff that you might look at once or twice. Or not at all.

Yes, that's right; the Music Industry think they will make people buy more records by wrapping the audio files in a bunch of chrome and crap that will only serve to make the files bigger, and therefore will make them take longer to download. MOST PEOPLE WILL NOT PAY MORE FOR A FILE THAT'S HARDER TO DOWNLOAD. ISN'T THIS OBVIOUS? PEOPLE WANT CONVENIENCE, NOT FILLER.

Mind you, sticking useless filler that nobody wants on a recording is not exactly new territory for the labels. They were doing that with shit album tracks fifteen years ago.

This idea is also crap because of the suggested nature of the content. Blogs? Videos? Artwork? Fan-generated content (please, no)? Links to buy merchandise? Tweets for fucks sake?!?

Exactly what part of that stuff will not already be freely available online? I'm fairly sure most artists and labels wouldn't be so stupid as to block non-paying users from seeing their blogs/tweets/merch/ticket sales (though I'll bet one or two will try), but let's assume they make art and videos exclusively available via this format. How long after release will it be before someone rips them and they get posted everywhere online? Less than an hour, I suspect. And then the label has not just piracy of the audio to worry about, but piracy of the art and video as well.

Rather than solving the problem of piracy, the problem becomes much bigger with this format. What a brilliant idea.

"Oh, but the information can also be updated after it's been downloaded," the MusicDNA people will argue. So? What form will these updates take? Music fans want to connect to the artist, not to some content creators desperately trying to spam a viral into existence. Blogs and Twitter connect us and, as I've already mentioned, those things should be online anyway, and provide a two-way medium, not just a broadcast medium. So they're better than MusicDNA just pushing stuff down your datapipe without any opportunity for you to respond.

No, this is a case of seeing that a particular idea is technologically possible, then not considering whether or not it's actually something that people want.

Or, to put all of the above more succinctly, do you have any CDs that also had a video of the song on them? Yeah, me too. How many times did you play the video, compared to the number of times you played the song? I'm estimating, with the video I played the most, it was probably only a dozen times, tops, that I played the video. The song, however, got played at least a couple of hundred times in the first year I owned that CD.

Another key problem is the idea of music formats in competition with MP3s. Ladies and Gentlemen, need I remind you of the sorry saga of Ogg Vorbis, the Betamax of downloadable audio (arguably a better format than MP3, but no one gives a shit)? No, MP3s are embedded now, and they can reproduce stereo at a quality so good that only nerdy FLAC enthusiasts/delusionists claim they can hear any different. Until we start listening to something other than stereo, or gain the ability to hear outside of the normal human range of hearing, MP3s are here to stay because they do the job perfectly well.

OK, let's finish my rant with a few choice quotes from that Guardian article:

"'Out of a rusted old VW Beetle we are making a Ferrari,' said Stefan Kohlmeyer, the chief executive of Bach Technology, which has developed the file."

No, Stefan, out of a perfectly reasonable Ford Focus, you are making a Ford Focus that is trying to tow the fully-loaded trailer from an articulated lorry. And charging people extra for it.

"like transforming a tiny house into a huge villa"

No, Stefan, it's like transforming a tiny house into a tiny house with a fucking moat around it. A moat that is possibly filled by flushing the toilet.

"this high-value consumer experience is not clonable, yet highly viral"

I want to hurt Tom Silverman for being serious when he said these words.

"If MP3s were the cassette, MusicDNA will be the CD."

Again, Tom, no. If MP3s were the cassette, MusicDNA will be the exact same cassette in a really shiny box that doubles the price.

Seej 500

Yorkshire, UK, 25/1/2010

This article was written by Seej 500 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License.

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