Hi to all.

Anyone who read the article Mr. Altschul sent should also listen to the NPR report on whether or not DRM (Digital Rights Management) is going to go away any time soon (see http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=102605547&rid=1039 for the story). Please pay careful attention to the last minute or so of the report where Mr. Rose posits that the human desire for control may be at the heart of the DRM issue.

Ted
---- Peter Altschul <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
> 
> 
> The Future of Music: The Celestial Jukebox
> 
>  
> 
> by Douglas Wolk Feb 9 2009
> <http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/03/30/The-Cel
> estial-Jukebox>
> 
>  
> 
> Wired.com reports: The killer app for music-any song, at any time-is almost
> here. The only question is whether or not we'll label everybody who wants to
> tune in to it a "criminal."
> 
>  
> 
> The popularity of MP3s, Internet radio and satellite The ultimate goal for
> music technology, "the celestial jukebox," is going to be reached very soon.
> That term has been floating around for a decade or more, but what it comes
> down to is total access, anywhere and at any time, to any music ever
> recorded. That's not just the 10 million songs presently in the iTunes
> sStore, but the really long tail: the forgotten archives of sound- recording
> history, the exploding amateur library that MySpace Music and YouTube have
> made possible- everything. The celestial jukebox won't just be a listening
> interface; it's clear from the past quarter- century of mix tapes and
> file-swapping and recommendation engines that we also want to be able to
> share music (without digital-rights management) and be surprised by things
> we've never heard before. The only question is whether we're going to get
> the celestial jukebox the way that the biggest copyright holders would
> prefer: by paying for it.
> 
>  
> 
> A few primitive beta versions already exist. Rhapsody lets its users stream
> a large but limited range of recordings for a flat monthly rate, although it
> doesn't stream directly to mobile devices. Meanwhile, the iTunes Store and
> similar online retailers allow mobile customers to buy recordings on a
> pay-as-you-go basis. But scouting for free music online-in both authorized
> and unauthorized venues-isn't just cheaper, it offers a much broader
> selection. Eric Garland of the media- monitoring company BigChampagne noted
> in 2007 that "100 percent of the time, somebody seeking a popular song
> [online] will get a free copy of that popular song." Nearly any recording
> can be found somewhere in MP3 form with a minimal amount of digging. The
> illicit BitTorrent tracker OiNK, shut down in 2007, assembled a gigantic
> amount of music in one place-a collection so comprehensive that its users
> were willing to put up with its complicated, draconian rules.
> 
>  
> 
> And what about the old-fashioned music technology of records and CDs?
> Physical, fungible artifacts used to be the standard way consumers
> experienced music, and now they're rapidly becoming luxury items. Soon,
> anyone who's going to acquire music as an object will want that object to be
> more special than just another damn CD cluttering up the shelf. Last year,
> the band Of Montreal released their album Skeletal Lamping in seven
> different formats: CD and LP, of course, as well as tote bag, T-shirt, metal
> buttons, wall decals, and a paper lantern, all of which included access to a
> digital version of the music. It was a whimsical stunt, but the point was
> clear: A shiny metal disc is now exactly as relevant to the way people
> experience music as a paper lantern is.
> 
>  
> 
> Given the total availability and mind-boggling abundance of music, the
> listener's problem becomes navigation: How the hell do you figure out what
> to listen to next? That's the other part of the future-of- music puzzle. The
> two smartest, best-received music- technology innovations of the last couple
> of years were both solutions to it: Pandora and Muxtape. Pandora is
> effectively a celestial radio station, triangulated for each user's taste to
> play music you didn't already know you wanted to hear. (It also streams to
> some mobile devices now.) And the original version of Muxtape, which shut
> down last August because of legal difficulties, made it marvelously easy to
> assemble and distribute mixes. It didn't hurt that, like every
> music-technology innovation that's ever caught on, from the fretted guitar
> neck to the iPod, both of them featured brilliantly simple interfaces.
> 
>  
> 
> Before long, somebody will put a similarly beautiful, frictionless design on
> the service that users are demanding: a genuinely comprehensive library of
> recorded music; instant, mobile access to it; the limitless capacity to
> alter, sequence, and share it with friends and strangers; and personalized
> guidance to discover new music. Every piece of that technology already
> exists right now. The only problem is that there are nearly insurmountable
> obstacles to building the perfect public music library under current
> copyright law. But it's going to happen anyway, lawfully or otherwise.
> 
> 
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> 10:54 AM
>  
> 
> 
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