For nine years now, a gathering called the Pop Conference has been bringing together a wide range of people who think critically about music for a living.
Journalists, ethnomusicologists, sociologists, musicians themselves and more all gather once a year at the Experience Music Project in Seattle to hear presentations ranging from academic analyses (e.g. "High Art Discourses and White Masculine Mastery in the Music of the Dirty Projectors") to historical overviews of how electric bass innovations have mirrored similar changes in trombone design to listening sessions for the weird radio commercials Warner Brothers records made from 1968 to 1972 and raucous round-table conversations about the current state of pop or how Freddie Mercury changed the world.
I never miss it.
This year, I gave a talk about the history of the Walkman, and how it began a profound change in the way we listen to music (and what music we listen to) that the iPod and its ilk are merely continuing.
If you're interested in that sort of thing, the full presentation is after the jump.
(And if you're really interested in that sort of thing, you can read two presentations from previous years here and here.)
The world changed, quietly, on June 22, 1979, the day Sony unveiled the first “personal stereo” to skeptical journalists in Tokyo.
The device — originally marketed as a Soundabout in the U.S., a Stowaway in the U.K., and a Freestyle in Sweden — soon became known worldwide (and was eventually immortalized in the Oxford English Dictionary) as a Walkman.
This contraption began changing the music business almost immediately, though some people caught on sooner than others. Bow Wow Wow were singing "C30 C60 C90 - Go!" (an ode to the joys of taping music off the radio) in 1980; Chris Blackwell of Island records announced the “one plus one” format in which new releases including U2’s October came out on one side of a cassette while the other side was blank and recordable in 1981; Time magazine hailed the Walkman as “gadget of the year” in 1982; and pre-recorded cassette sales had surpassed sales of vinyl LPs by 1983.
The recording industry, presented with all this evidence of a shift in the cultural zeitgeist that had more people listening to more music in more places than ever before, responded thusly in 1984:
It’s funny because it’s sad. And also because it’s typical. We’ve watched a similar cycle play out with MP3s and the iPod this decade. In each case a new format for recorded music interacted with an ingeniously designed and marketed portable device to produce an explosion of listening. In each case the format and devices that made use of it had existed for years before this particular combination of the two made the cover of Time magazine. And in each case the recording industry tried to exploit the phenomenon while completely misunderstanding what was driving it.
The Walkman, like the iPod after it, actually did pose a serious challenge to the recording industry’s established business, but not because it gave people the ability to hear music they hadn’t paid for. In fact, unlike boom boxes,
which exploded in popularity contemporaneously with the
Walkman and helped fuel the 1980s’ demand for cassettes over LPs, the Walkman
was notable for what it lacked: a record button.
The Walkman offered listeners something far more powerful than free music. It gave them control: control of what was heard; control of when it was heard; control of where it was heard; control, ultimately, of the listener’s environment. Consciously or not, that’s what the record industry was really fighting in 1984, and what they’re fighting even more fiercely today. Not loss of revenue. Loss of control.
Because once the speakers disappear, you never know for sure what someone’s listening to.
We’ll take a look at the consequences of such unpredictability shortly. But first we’re going to rewind to 1978 to see how Sony’s engineers were thinking about what they did, since even they didn’t realize what they were unleashing. Then we’ll fast-forward to today, and take a look at what they unwittingly wrought.
This is the Walkman’s dad, the TC-D5, a high-quality portable cassette recorder launched in 1978. Or maybe it’s the Walkman’s mom, because I suppose this is the Walkman’s dad:
That’s Masaru Ibuka, one of Sony’s cofounders. There are different stories about whose idea the Walkman was, but the most prevalent is also my favorite.
Supposedly, Ibuka loved listening to classical music on the TC-D5 during long plane rides. The audio quality was excellent, but the device was heavy and difficult to power, so he asked Sony’s engineers to come up with something smaller and more convenient.
They did so by adapting another high-quality recorder, the TCM-600, also known as the Pressman.
In 1978, this was the smallest tape recorder in the world that used standard cassettes, but it was a costly device whose focus was on monaural recording; it was mostly used by reporters and others who needed a small dictating machine.
It’s hard to say whether the most important differences between the Pressman and the Walkman are internal or conceptual.
The one on the left was expensive, had a record function and played back in mono. The one on the right was significantly cheaper and had no record function or speaker, but offered stereo sound via headphones.
The lack of a recording option was a big deal. On one hand, removing that machinery made room for all the components that enabled stereo playback, while also dramatically reducing the cost. On the other hand, very few people at Sony, and almost nobody else in the world, thought there was a market for a cassette player that couldn’t record anything. Who, beyond the well-paid, frequent-flying cofounder of Sony might actually use such a thing?
Well, Sony’s CEO, Akio Morita, for one. He had borrowed the prototype from Ibuka and taken it on a golf outing with some friends, who all enjoyed it. Morita may qualify as a visionary for pushing his team to mass-produce this odd device, insisting (as he reportedly did) that it would be a hit if they could just keep the price affordable for young people.
But there were some things Morita couldn’t foresee. He’s also responsible for that silly orange button and the fact that the first model had two headphone jacks — he thought it would be rude for one person to listen to music alone, and insisted engineers add that orange “hotline” button; pressing it reduced the playback volume and allowed you to talk to your friend without either of you having to remove your headphones.
Morita was very right about how successful a truly portable music player would prove to be, and very wrong about how its purchasers would ultimately use it. It’s hard to remember now, but listening to music privately while in public was difficult to conceive of in 1979.
Something like the Walkman had in fact been invented in 1972. Andreas Pavel had been pitching what he called the “Stereobelt” to multiple electronics companies for seven years, but everyone rejected the idea. “They all said they didn’t think people would be so crazy as to run around with headphones,” he recalled to the New York Times. “This is just a gadget, a useless gadget of a crazy nut.”
Sony’s initial ads and packaging betray this mental block, as they mostly featured pairs of active young people sharing a device, often while on roller skates.
Young people did indeed buy lots of Walkmen, and some of them probably even took it roller skating. But all kinds of people bought the device, and most of them used it to listen to music alone.
The rewards for fulfilling a need nobody previously realized they had can be great. Sony sold 50 million Walkmen in the first 10 years, while Toshiba, Panasonic, Aiwa and others did equally well with knockoffs.
One mark of just how groundbreaking the device proved to be is the cottage industry that sprang up among sociologists and other cultural critics analyzing what this new mode of listening might herald for society.
Shuhei Hosokawa, who coined the term “The Walkman Effect” in 1984, began that article by citing a French journalist interviewing young adults about Walkman use. His questions included,
“Are men who use the Walkman human or not?”
“Are they psychotic or schizophrenic?”
“Are you worried about the fate of humanity?”
That journalist had plenty of company. Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, derided the Walkman as downright masturbatory and carped that the device made young people incapable of appreciating Great Works:
“As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.”
In Christianity Today, Mark Noll described the Walkman in near-Satanic terms as:“One more competitor to the voice of God.”
Twenty years later, Norman Lebrecht was still railing against the device, insisting that,
“Beyond hearing loss, the sonic opacity of the Walkman attacked our musical taste. Instead of seeking melody, listeners grew satisfied with crump-crump rhythm. The decline in classical concertgoing may be partly ascribed to the Walkman, which devalued magnificence and rendered its utilitarian ... The Walkman … promoted autism and isolation, with consequences yet untold.”
“Autism” is a word that comes up a lot in critiques of the Walkman; the ability it gave an individual to separate himself from his fellow man drove a lot of the outcry, even when that ability wasn’t directly referenced. A good example can be found in campaigns such as this one:
In the ‘90s, the London Underground made it a crime to play your Walkman too loudly — as Beautiful South fan Andrew Dunn learned in 1994 when he refused to turn down his volume after a fellow tube rider complained. Dunn wound up owing a 200-pound fine and 100 pounds in court costs.
As a guy who’s often been asked by flight attendants to turn down the volume of my own portable device, I can sympathize with Mr. Dunn, who implied to the NME that he was being persecuted for something other than noise.
I have to ask: when you’re on an airplane with turbo engines rumbling at 140 decibels, babies shrieking, two dudes in front of you droning on and on about how totally drunk their buddy was last night, and two people behind you sharing stories of how Jesus touched their lives, what makes the tinny buzzing of guitars leaking out of a pair of headphones the thing people feel justified in silencing?
Rey Chow hints why when she argues that in collectivist states like China, Walkman usage can be a subversive form of sabotage, allowing Chinese youth to be
“... deaf to the loudspeakers of history ... The autism of the Walkman listener irritates onlookers precisely because the onlookers find themselves reduced to the activity of looking alone. For once, voyeurism yields no secrets.”
Vincent Jackson, in a 1994 article about the glares he got on the London Underground whenever he put on his Walkman, echoes Chow:
“It’s not the sound coming out of your headphones that bothers people around you. It’s the symbolism.”
He tested his theory by riding the tube wearing his device but without playing any music at all through it, and cataloged all the same angry reactions he got as when he pumped up the volume.
Overheated or not, overjoyed or merely annoyed by the Walkman as they might be, these critics all share a belief that the device has profound power, and all their arguments circle around the same assumption: whatever the Walkman wearer might be listening to, it represents a threat to those in charge.
I repeat: it’s all about control. Transistor radios
allowed you to bring music wherever you went, but gave you no say in what you heard. Boom boxes
gave you a say, as well as the illusion that YOU could be the broadcaster, at least in a small radius around you. But the Walkman,
with its little foamy headphones, was more revolutionary, and
not only because it was easier to carry around.
The Walkman was private. It gave people a new way to listen to music, which changed their relationship to it. Music became a bigger part of their lives, and their expectations about where they could hear it and what should be playing when they did shifted dramatically.
Cassette technology eventually gave way to digital audio, but the Walkman’s two main innovations — private listening in public places coupled with listener control over what plays — live on.
Listener control has in fact expanded exponentially: the cheap mass storage of the iPod means anyone who can afford one can walk around with 50,000 songs in her pocket today, and the combination of mobile apps and cloud-based services mean she’ll be able to access millions of songs from her handset tomorrow.
This is different in scale but not in kind from the summer of 1983, which I spent transferring most of my 500 LP collection to 200 Maxell XL II-S cassettes before moving across the country to attend college.
I couldn’t bring the LPs with me, but I couldn’t leave all that music behind, either, and thanks to technology I no longer had to.
It was a great summer, even if I found myself stressing about which records made the cut and which would remain unrecorded, and then had to make another series of Sophie’s Choices about which cassettes would join me in my carry-on to be played in flight on my Walkman, and which would have to be checked with the rest of my luggage.
Quandaries like those now seem quaint. Record-industry disquiet, on the other hand, is as familiar as ever — and is a big reason we all say “iPod” instead of “Walkman” when we talk about MP3 players.
There’s no reason Sony shouldn’t have dominated MP3 players from the beginning. But the Walkman’s success cemented a strategy Sony had been contemplating for years: acquiring content companies to complement their hardware business. Their acquisition of CBS records in 1988 is arguably the moment they ceded meaningful personal stereo innovation to others.
They wanted synergy, but they got internecine warfare. In the U.S., the Recording Industry Association of America, of which Sony Music was now a big part, had been insisting for years that blank cassette sales represented significant lost revenue for the music industry (in typical over-reaching fashion, the figure they bandied about was a billion dollars a year). If they’d had their way, the ungodly amount of money I’d paid for all those Maxell cassettes would have been even ungodlier, and labels would have pocketed the difference.
In 1992, they finally got their way with something called the Audio Home Recording Act, mandating a 3% tax on all blank digital music media and recorders, which was then distributed to labels, publishers and songwriters. In theory, consumers got something in return: an acknowledgement by copyright owners that home taping does not constitute copyright infringement.
But the act led to weirdness like this:
The only difference between the two is price. The “music” CD-R costs more, even though the same silver discs lie inside each package.
The Audio Home Recording Act was part of a larger preemptive effort the RIAA was launching against digital audio. In 1998, the RIAA got a temporary restraining order against one of the first portable MP3 players, the Diamond Rio, by claiming the device violated the act.
They eventually lost the lawsuit, but their position was clear: such devices were a threat to their business. Keep in mind that most MP3 players, like the Walkman before them, HAD NO RECORD FUNCTION.
That didn’t matter. What mattered was the assumption that the devices primarily relied on media the labels didn’t sell you.
The labels could have been selling MP3s in the ‘90s, of course. By the end of the decade, "MP3" had surpassed the word “sex” as Yahoo’s most searched-for term. The market hadn’t just spoken; it had had a screaming orgasm, but major labels would still wait 10 years before making their catalogs available for sale in the format. It was 1983 all over again,
with labels responding to an explosion of more people listening to more music than ever before by treating a new consumer demand as a crime, rather than an opportunity.
To be sure, the ease of procuring MP3s for free was a massive part of what drove their popularity. But the ability to hear just about anything you want, just about anywhere you might be is ultimately a bigger deal. Anybody interested in helping musicians make a living making music needs to focus on how those phenomena are changing what we listen to, and adapt their business accordingly.
This isn’t pie-in-the-sky, anarchistic label bashing, by the way. Just this week the Government Accountability Office released the results of a yearlong study of the effects of piracy on the U.S. economy. Among their conclusions:
· There must be some damage from piracy;
· However, there’s no real way to quantify it;
· It’s probably smaller than IP businesses insist; and
· There are instances in which piracy can benefit consumers, businesses and society.
(There’s actually a whole section of the report headed, “Certain Stakeholders May Experience Positive Economic Effects of Counterfeiting and Piracy.”)
File trading may well result in lost money for copyright owners (that GAO report cites a study that suggests one in every five P2P downloads might represent a lost sale), but a funny thing happens when you make the entire history of recorded music available for free, and then give people an easy way to walk around with that library in their pockets. You get unprecedented insights into which bits of your catalog actually engage them. And one of the things you learn is that even when people have free access to every last song your biggest stars have ever recorded, those people don’t necessarily bother to take them.
The implications of that are fairly profound and go well beyond clichés about the death of the album and the return of singles. The days of locking a song people want inside a bundle of tracks that costs $15 or more are indeed fading fast, but labels are getting something potentially more valuable in return. As they relinquish control to listeners, they gain unprecedented knowledge about what those listeners return to over and over again. They can finally hear exactly what those headphones have been hiding for the last 30 years.
A company called Big Champagne analyzes what gets traded on P2P networks, which of those songs linger in listeners’ libraries, and how those two correlate (or fail to) with what’s being broadcast on radio or sold via online services. One of their most revealing metrics is Tracks Per Fan, a count of how many songs the average fan of a particular artist has in her library.
Most listeners, it seems, don’t even carry around an entire album by the world’s most popular artists. For the 500 artists with the most tracks in the libraries of several million listeners, the average TPF is 3.27.
Even the artists with higher-than-average TPFs don’t exactly stun you with their numbers:
|
TPF Rank |
Artist |
TPF |
|
1 |
Lil Wayne |
17.26 |
|
2 |
Gucci Mane |
8.44 |
|
3 |
Aventura |
8.24 |
|
4 |
The Beatles |
8.22 |
|
5 |
Eminem |
7.66 |
|
6 |
Michael Jackson |
7.59 |
|
7 |
2Pac |
7.27 |
|
8 |
Wisin & Yandel |
7.26 |
|
9 |
Metallica |
6.87 |
|
10 |
Jack Johnson |
6.72 |
|
11 |
Jay-Z |
6.40 |
|
12 |
Dave Matthews |
6.39 |
|
13 |
George Strait |
6.30 |
|
14 |
Tech N9ne |
6.20 |
|
15 |
blink-182 |
6.17 |
|
16 |
Taylor Swift |
6.02 |
|
17 |
Led Zeppelin |
5.95 |
|
18 |
Trey Songz |
5.92 |
|
19 |
Usher |
5.87 |
|
20 |
R. Kelly |
5.85 |
|
21 |
Lil Boosie |
5.82 |
|
22 |
PLIES |
5.82 |
|
23 |
Beyonce Knowles |
5.73 |
|
24 |
Kirk Franklin |
5.70 |
|
25 |
DRAKE |
5.70 |
What are we to make of a list like this (beyond the fact that Lil Wayne demolishes everyone else, I mean)? One thing that jumps out at me is the ratio of new to old: it’s about a 60/40 split of currently charting vs. catalog artists. Another thing worth noting is the range of styles: there’s hip-hop, reggaeton, bachata, R&B, country, metal, classic rock, alternative and jam rock, just in the top 25.
You see a similar range, and some more surprises, at the other end of that top 500 list.
|
Artist |
TPF |
|
Yes |
1.48 |
|
O.C. |
1.47 |
|
Dorrough |
1.45 |
|
Kevin Rudolf |
1.45 |
|
Swizz Beatz |
1.43 |
|
Huey |
1.41 |
|
Dorrough Music |
1.41 |
|
Air (French Band) |
1.40 |
|
Travis |
1.40 |
|
Man |
1.38 |
|
P.L. |
1.37 |
|
Asia |
1.37 |
|
The Time |
1.36 |
|
Estelle |
1.36 |
|
Kardinal Offishall |
1.32 |
|
DOLLA |
1.32 |
|
Sweet |
1.30 |
|
Down |
1.29 |
|
Cupid |
1.29 |
|
Savage |
1.27 |
|
IYAZ |
1.26 |
|
ORIANTHI |
1.25 |
|
S.O.S. Band |
1.25 |
|
ROSCOE DASH |
1.24 |
|
V.I.C. |
1.22 |
I have a low opinion of humanity, so I am not overly bothered that Yes and Asia are two of the top acts on people’s iPods. But I will admit that Sweet and the Time are pleasant surprises.
For Sweet, that 1.30 figure implies lots of people have "The Ballroom Blitz," and a smaller percentage of that group also has "Little Willy." Maybe this is not so surprising after all. “Little Willy” is a fine f**king song, and it stands to reason that it should live on.
What’s amazing is that it now has a way to do so, a way that transcends radio formats, demographics, greatest-hits packages or clever use in movie soundtracks. It’s just floating out there, like some odd strand of DNA. And it’s thriving.
I submit that this is a good thing for the music business. Many of these artists and their 1.3 or 6.2 or 8.4 songs are being actively marketed. Almost as many of them are not. Hidden in stats like these are formulas for identifying more of the latter, and wasting less money on the former.
Keep in mind that TPF is an average. So, while Bob Dylan has 3.64 tracks per fan, that means some folks have dozens of Dylan songs and some have only one. To put it in mildly embarrassing perspective: I have 423 Dylan tunes on my iPod, which means for every geek like me there have to be 159 people who only have "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door" (I originally typed "Like a Rolling Stone," by the way, but the stats say “Knockin'” is in fact the most widely shared Dylan tune).
That spread of 159 normal people for every 1 completist hoarder suggests labels aren’t losing nearly as much as they claim. Or, rather, if they are it’s not because people are stealing songs they’d have purchased otherwise. It’s because people are no longer paying for songs they never wanted in the first place.
Let’s say the GAO is right and 1 of every 5 MP3s making up these figures represents a lost dollar (or, if you want to be generous, a lost sale of whatever album contained the tune someone really wanted). That still means 80% of this music is being listened to by people who wouldn’t have engaged with it before. That’s an amazing trade.
The music business of the past believed getting people who wanted 1 or 2 songs to pay for 10 was the natural order of things. The music business of the future accepts the ratio of 159 casual listeners for every 1 fanatic, and does what it can, on an artist-by-artist basis, to move people from the low end of the spectrum to the high, but it doesn’t insist they all start in the middle.
Here’s why this makes sense: if low TPFs imply a somewhat impatient or even A.D.D.-afflicted audience, they also indicate a more curious, questing one than the business traditionally assumed, an audience that jumps backward and forward in time, keeping old songs alive indefinitely and spreading new ones in a wide variety of genres rapidly.
The range of styles and eras on those lists don’t indicate multiple, closed-off, niche audiences. As access becomes easier and storage cheaper, people start listening to a little bit of everything, as demonstrated by another Big Champagne metric.
“Artist correlation” basically tells you what percentage of fans who have one artist in their collection also have another. A lot of those correlations are what you might expect (81% of Katy Perry fans also listen to Lady Gaga, for instance), but some of them are counterintuitive.
|
Guns N' Roses |
||
|
Artist: |
By: |
Reverse: |
|
Eminem |
67.04% |
21.51% |
|
Black Eyed Peas |
58.89% |
21.99% |
|
Nickelback |
55.58% |
32.28% |
|
Linkin Park |
50.85% |
30.78% |
|
AC/DC |
48.90% |
50.18% |
|
Metallica |
48.52% |
45.98% |
|
Bon Jovi |
47.68% |
45.49% |
|
Kid Rock |
45.11% |
40.00% |
|
Green Day |
44.36% |
33.12% |
|
3 Doors Down |
42.20% |
36.07% |
|
Queen |
41.99% |
40.34% |
|
Tim McGraw |
38.97% |
32.06% |
|
The Beatles |
38.69% |
36.26% |
|
The Red Hot Chili Peppers |
37.35% |
40.05% |
|
Kenny Chesney |
37.07% |
33.67% |
|
The Eagles |
35.99% |
45.89% |
|
Led Zeppelin |
34.20% |
48.79% |
|
Garth Brooks |
33.84% |
38.40% |
|
The Rolling Stones |
32.63% |
46.59% |
|
Def Leppard |
31.21% |
53.62% |
Almost 40% of Guns N’ Roses fans also listen to Tim McGraw. Nearly as many listen to Kenny Chesney or Garth Brooks. How many radio stations play all four?
Some other random examples from similar charts: about 38% of Beck fans listen to Johnny Cash and Eric Clapton. 73% of people with R.E.M. on their device also have at least one T.I. track, and 27% have some Phil Collins, while 31% of Barry Manilow fans and 30% of Neil Diamond fans dig R.E.M.
As Eric Garland, Big Champagne’s C.E.O. and the guy who provided me with all these charts, likes to say, “People are not radio formats.”
They probably never were, but it took the Walkman and blank cassettes to let the average bus rider be his own DJ, and it took the iPod and MP3s to give him a big enough library to build some seriously idiosyncratic playlists.
Labels aren’t the only ones uncomfortable with these changes. In 1988, Prince had the CD version of Lovesexy mastered as a single track.
It was his rebellion against the then-new phenomenon of shuffle play.
He’d made an album, dammit, and that’s the way he wanted you to hear it.
And yet another part of me giggles at what happened when the album first went live on digital download sites: since it was delivered as a single track, you could buy it for 99 cents.
There are a bunch of morals packed inside that sequence of events, but I’ll limit myself to one: there’s what the audience wants, and what you want them to want.
Sometimes it’s worth getting that balance wrong, and losing money as a result.
But sometimes it’s just stubborn and stupid.
Portions of album content provided by All Music Guide © 2011 All Media Guide, LLC ® 1999-2011 Rhapsody International Inc.
"one more competitor to the voice of god". I love it.
What I have been wondering, and your data only makes me wonder even more, is how many hardcore fans most artists/bands will find.
The new music business model revolves around turning artists/bands into brands that can cultivate a group of fans who will support them over the long term and buy whatever they have to offer and come to all of their shows.
But if fan support is shallow, it's more likely that most fans don't really want to interact with any artists/bands all that much. They want to grab a song or two and that is it.
I suppose one could argue that the Big Champagne data doesn't represent superfans because they are the ones most likely to acquire the music of their favorites by actually purchasing it.
Fantastic post- could be the basis for a whole book on listening habits and trends.
Big corporation (major label) bashing is as reductionist and misguided as treating consumers/customers as statistics in an endless procession of Powerpoint presentations and market analysis.
Human beings work for these companies and they work hard for their artists. This is not to say that major mistakes haven't been made, but it is not the first time that market-leading corporate entities have lost touch with those human beings they call 'consumers': the recorded music industry has faced a number of challenges that interlink in complex and unpredictable ways. Clearly no-one understands the whole to the degree that they can suggest a workable solution going forward.
Invoking history (beyond Napster in 2001) to help shine a light on the current situation is something that seldom occurs. This article, by looking at the thought processes both of the heads of Sony and the early Walkman adopters, should help people understand a little better about the relationship between media companies and the people who enjoy their output.
Hopefully, intelligent discussion like this can breed a little empathy; for the uni students who love music but can't afford enough to fill a fraction of their (expensive) iPods; for the creators of works and others who facilitate those creations, some of whom deserve a living so as to keep on creating; and possibly even empathy for the CEO tasked with pleasing his employees and customers whilst delivering a healthy dividend for shareholders.
On the statistic at the end:
If Big Champagne only tracks songs obtained via questionable means, won't their data be skewed against people's favourite artists?
Although I couldn't prove it, surely people would be less likely to rip-off their favourite artists, being more likely to own the CDs and thus have ripped them into their music library? (or downloaded them legally)
Maybe these charts relate to artists that people don't quite like enough to buy, but are interested enough to check out for free...
Suzanne and Tom, you both touch on a similar point, so let me clarify something about the Big Champagne stats.
The stats in the charts above are based on user libraries. While those libraries may well include many tracks obtained for free via unlicensed P2P services, they also likely include purchased tracks (ie, ripped from CDs, or paid digital downloads, etc.). So my guess is that they reflect music people care deeply for as well as music they feel much more casually about.
My sense is that our new-found ability to freely grab music we're only casually interested in is ultimately good for the music business as a whole (if a short term disaster for the record industry part of that wider business). Most times, that casual interest will remain casual. But sometimes, that casual interest will lead to a more intense relationship with artists we would have missed completely, otherwise.
I think another thing to think about with these stats is the age of the downloader. I think age of the band is important, too, but harder to categorize.
I see three (just off the top of my head) age groups of downloaders.
Those like me in their early 30's who had broadband and free music (Napster) right when we were at our listening peak (18-25) and 'new music introduction' phase. Because really, after college age, you don't bring that many new bands or genres into the mix.
The younger group who get ALL their music online and pull from any genre. They are less affected by what plays on MTV (Nothing) and radio and more by what's on their friends' lists.
Finally, those older than me who only pull music that they probably already own in another format or music that is more album-oriented which will skew the TPA.
Thanks for this! I especially appreciate the historical perspective.
An interesting complement to this talk is Kyle Bylin's "The 'Broken' System: Deconstructing Consumption," in which he argues that the traditional music system is biased towards scarcity, while the increasing accessibility of music now biases consumers towards fluidity, sharing and rapid evolution of musical taste.
Oh Napster, how I loved thee. How long did napster last - a year? Two? Man, though. Napster was how things ought to be. No other p2p has ever matched its efficiency or overall awesomeness.
Love the article! I would add that a user's playlist might be influenced by those around them. For instance, I have music on my computer and phone that has artists that my wife likes as well as my kids. While the majority of the music is mine, there is probably 10-15% that is in the "other" category.
It would be interesting how this compares to the stats that Pandora.com has access to. People rate the songs as it fine tunes what you want. Such as my favorite station that is a mix of Metallica and Norah Jones type music.
Cheers
I'm, Italian, say older, than 60 or so...and, in my music taste! 'collection', is a gamut of tiles from early Baroque, through Baroque, Classical; Bach, Hayden, Mozart Beethoven et al, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky (NOBM has to do with hairless wizards and a certain mouse), Ragtime, early 20's and 30's, playable sheet music included orchestral scores(notably the first form of recorded and replayable music}, although requiring some chops, Swing, BigBand, Glen Miller, the Dorsey Bros, Carmichael, 40's film music ,sound tracks from movies, Broadway shows, R&R thru the 50's 60's 70' 80', LedZep, Genesis, Beatles, Rippingtons, Birds, Clapton, Johnny Winter, Doobies, Allman Brothers, Atlanta, New Orleans Jazz, Austin Blues, Black Blues, Black and Blue by the Stones and all their albums, ZZ Top all,, Def Lepard, Johnny Dio, Freesus cripes , about every f**king thing I could listen to and get my ears on. Listen, I love it all! I have too many favorites to list! To make too fine a point, I have in my actual, physical recordings, about 45 cassettes, a 100 or so CDs an iPod that is virtually blank and a great memory of beautiful music....and I'm definitely against organized Studios and hi-priced recordings, but I bought every last one of those recordings I listed, and more. For one reason; I'm a self taught, piss poor musician, that has a fair piano and guitar hand, and a almost perfect pitch sense, and I used it and my talent to copy all the guitar licks and songs from a ton of music, including piano play along with rock to find the licks (Try copying Keith Richards on ‘Hand of Fate’) and learn the musical compositions I want to enjoy playing. For MYself and no other reason. I am more than willing to bet there are a million or more people like me, who listen to and learn to play music, from radio and recordings they buy to enjoy music. i am in love with the oldest form of communication and I deeply resent any company that tries to dictate my musical tastes. It's why I listen to Peter Gabriel, he speaks to the critical audience of music listeners who dictate their own music genre, not the companies. In that Blue Champagne has a demographic of statistics that is slewed to a survey of MP3's is only part of the real picture of People who Love Music, and get it as they can. It is to be experienced and emulated, for the sake of the 3 Muses, Not 'Distributed" by SONY, whom I loath for their attempts to put manacles and blinders on the American Music Scene! It's America's, not SONY's! Thanks for the early IPod SONY, but Steve-O-Jobsirino got it right! Thank Gerswhin! Last but not least; those half-wit, so-called-christ-loving-'Preachers' are just hypocrites that; preach and bleat about 'autistic' music lovers, need their ass booted out of sight and their twisted-sister mentality washed out! Danger Carl Citizen; Danger! Listen to music instead, its much better and more interesting. Having said all of that, I hope that you agree about my take on music and the joy of finding it and playing it. All the more reason, as CSN&Y sang to us, Teach your kids music, well and love and learn with them. Enjoy!
That was an incredible article... well articulated, thorough, and insightful. It's fascinating to watch the music industry change in real time, but it's just as fascinating to see how it has evolved in the past few decades. Thanks for taking the time to put that article together. It was the best read I've had in a long time.