Discovery Engines and Music

I was playing around with the liveplasma "discovery engine" –way back in May. I don't know how much it has changed since. (Not much, it seems.) These are some screenshots that I kept on my computer. LivePlasma is a combination of what you could learn from Amazon (what people who bought this product also bought), AllMusicGuide (related artists), the iTunes store (a copy of Amazon), and from file sharing (you can browse the shared files of people who have rare tracks that you like, and discover new music that way, even without downloading or sharing files – but I suppose just doing that is illegal, too??). Wouldn't it be easier to just chat with someone? Yeah, sure, I suppose, once you find someone who shares your taste, but it takes time and I'm lazy and in a hurry.

I like the visualization. It was kinda interesting to see how they mapped out the relationships between the bands. It probably looks different every time you load it. I don't know what the source data is, but the bubbles keep drifting and swimming around. Some bubbles are bigger like gas giants Jupiter or Neptune. Does that represent popularity? And are the colors for time periods?

Speaking of discovering new music, too bad about Tower Records going out of business, but I often wondered how they could possibly stay in business. Nothing to see there but lots of shrinkwrapped plastic CD cases. How are you supposed to decide what to buy? You have to know before you come in. Sure, there are a few listening stations, but they have about 1% of the catalog that is in the store. To have a successful brick-and-mortar store, you should be able to hear all the music in the store. Put the CDs away out of sight. Have listening and viewing stations where you can see the album (and which ones are in store in stock), browse other work by the musicians, link to related bands (a store like Tower should have built a huge buyer preferences database by now), and discover new music that you would want to buy. You would probably have to charge people just to come in and sit down, so maybe serve them a soft drink or coffee, too (waterproof the keyboard, mouse, and headphones). The cost to use it could be about the cost of a CD. If you buy a CD, you get (some of) the money back, it is like a deposit or incentive to go ahead and buy something since you paid to use the facilities anyway. Let customers buy single tracks and combine them to put together their own mix on a CD, too. Limit the time to an hour or two. Prohibit computers or capture of the audio served in the store.

Such a system is a big change from the Tower Records kind of store. They probably could not have successfully transitioned to such a model. This kind of store will probably emerge from internet cafés or music coffeeshops rather than from the old music stores, once the old style stores have fallen away.

I think the price of music still needs to fall. I can see it falling from 99 cents to something like 10 cents a track. I would buy ten times as much music if it were ten times cheaper. I would buy an album a day for a dollar, and spend more on music than I spend now, when it is expensive and shrinkwrapped and locked away unlistenably. I can listen to hundreds of songs on the radio, and realize that I don't have one of them, although I may like them all. Let me buy them, cheap. It will be worth it. They used to let us all listen to everything for free on the radio, and never worried about it. For most people, that was good enough. I never bought popular music for years since I could hear the Beatles any time I turned on a radio. Free mp3s may be a problem, but at least they promote the artist and sell concert tickets and even CDs (for the better quality). Cheap music files would seem to make more business sense, given the economics of production, reproduction, and distribution (which have all gotten cheaper).

Artists will always make good money from concerts. In the future, instead of a hundred millionaire musicians, there will be many thousands who make $30,000, $50,000, $200,000 a year. Eventually, I can see music going for a penny a track. Instead of selling a million, sell one-hundred million. Make it cheaper to just buy it than to go to the trouble of making an illegal copy.

The music industry should stop acting as if they have a monopoly. Anyone can "record music" or make a recording now. They are not needed for distribution, either. Their position is like that of ancient "scribes", who had no real professional role in the world once everybody could read and write. Become a teacher.

One possible function for the music industry is to release DVD-like multitrack recordings which users would then tweak with their own remixes. The original files would be so huge and holographically complex as to discourage attempts to copy, but the remix files would be small files that would play the music from the original disk in the programmed way. Or they could be a stand-alone music file. If these remixes were to become popular, most of the money would go to the original artist, with a small share for the DJ remixer.

Just trying to be helpful, RIAA. Stop trying to stop the circulation and popularization of music. That is the opposite of your original function! Get creative, why don't you?

Some interesting things are going on here:
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php
http://ccmixter.org/
http://creativecommons.org/audio/
http://creativecommons.org/