Comparisons with Pandora quickly come to mind when describing Senzari. Both services let you search for your favorite artist to create your own radio station which will mix that artist’s tracks and similar ones by other bands. Since algorithms aren’t perfect, you can still skip a few songs if you don’t like them.

However, Senzari’s CEO is quick in pointing out the differences between his service and Pandora’s. One of them is the depth of its catalogue: with 10 million songs, Senzari boasts “10 times more tracks than Pandora”. This is clearly a huge asset for Senzari – we all know how frustrating it is to fail to find an artist on these services. This is also an important element for a platform that hopes to please listeners all over the world, with different music tastes, including Brazilian and Hispanic music. (How Senzari Plans to Take On Pandora and Traditional Radio)

Sometime in my second hour of auditioning Senzari last week I realized its algorithm for choosing music sucked. I suppose I should qualify this impressions by adding ‘for my purposes.’ After all, my purpose, as long as I’m going to be subjected to some kind of algorithm, is to enlist it to aid a serendipitous journey of discovery.

Pandora leverages the Musical Genome Project to great effect. The Pandora user loads in multiple “seed” choices when initializing and developing a custom radio station. This really revs up the subsequent unwinding of the algorithm’s musical choice-making. It is easy to develop custom stations that step off trail.

Whereas Senzari’s current algorithm fails. To set-up a station you select a single artist. There’s no way, yet, to refine this initial choice. The ensuing broadcast set reflects this ‘monological’ approach.

Presumably, refinement of this “single factor” comes with plugging in social factors gleaned automatically from Facebook friends on Senzari. Whatever…

I started with rock choices, and started stations with the seed of The Byrds, then of Quicksilver Messenger Service. Initially The Byrds station reflected the folk rock core of the early Byrds, ignored the group’s country-rock breakthrough, and, then morphed into a mostly non-stop 1965-1967 pop hit machine, interspersed with minor tracks from Roger McGuinn and Stephen Stills. My first thought? Way too much of the machine part involved in executing the algorithm was showing through.

My Jellyfish station cycled through Jellyfish and XTC. Inexplicable. Likewise, the Ry Cooder stations cycled through about ten artists. Senzari didn’t get the AFrican core of Abdullah Ibrahim or Randy Weston. The most successful station I created was the one with experimental guitarist Aidan Baker, but only Baker’s context and musical relations are not very familiar to me.

Nor could Senzari make a station from Amos Garrett or The Quarter After. I stopped trying to stump it when it went 0-2.

Next I decided to challenge the obviously thin formula by introducing two left field seeds, Pauline Oliveros, and, Bill Laswell. In both cases, the test I posed to the darn algorithm. was to travel down the various branches implicit in the substantial diversity on offer by Oliveros and, then, Laswell.

Here’s what the formula spun on the Pauline Oliveros station:

Gordon Mumma
Deep Listening Band
Gordon Mumma
Henry Cowell
Pauline Oliveros
Charlemagne Palestine
Henry Cowell
Terry Riley
Pauline Oliveros
repeat: Gordon Mumma
Charlemagne Palestine
Deep Listening Band
Lou Harrison
Harry Partch
Pauline Oliveros
Oliver Messiaen
Gordon Mumma

On one hand this provided an intriguing aural trip. On the other hand, the formula revisited the same records by Mumma and The Deep Listening Band and Henry Cowell, and so shouted out to me how stupid it is, as a musical set-inducing piece of programming.

The Laswell set was even more narrow, and, as a ‘machine take’ purportedly able to access hundreds of recordings related to the various genre preoccupations of Bill Laswell, laying into Jah Wobble and Burnt Friedman for seven of the first twelve tracks was ludicrous and revealing.

Burnt Friedman
Jah Wobble
Praxis
Bill Laswell
Burnt Friedman
Bill Laswell
Muslimgauze
Jah Wobble
Burnt Friedman
Jah Wobble
Material
Burnt Friedman

Senzari won’t be damaging Pandora based in their having a superior music-choosing technology. For me, if there are sensitive muso types laboring for Senzari, their day hasn’t arrived. The musical results sound random, and in comparison to Pandora, Senzari’s hype is cynical.

However, the archival photographs which get plugged into the broadcast interface are wonderful.

Deep Listening Band

Buffalo Springfield

The nogutsnoglory studios is otherwise known as the ‘command center.’ During the winter, it can get very cold in the uninsulated command center. My creative world’s infrastructure is in the command center! Creativity is not befriended by the chill. Darnit. Guitars don’t stay in tune; the laptop demands a restart; the visions slow down to a crawl. Luckily, I’m able to slice off enough of a chunk into a moveable feast and park-and-play this stuff in Matt’s room. Then the Commander comes home on leave! Darnit. So, off to the living room and into the territory of the, now, six month-old kitty cats.

(Recall Céleste Boursier-Mougenot and Bird Maniax.) No, cats aren’t birds. Glori jumped up on the Fender, traversed it like a bridge, stopped for a photo, and, jumped down. Luckily it wasn’t plugged in because much of time it’s configured to sound frightening.

Speaking of frightening sounds, I’ve plugged Kamelmauz into Bandcamp. Compared to Myspace:music, all I can utter is: how cool is bandcamp? Way cool. Think about the DIY channels on the web in relationship to the revolution that has thrashed both the old hard goods model of the music business, and, the various corporate attempts to cage the freeforme monster and build a highway. Major FAIL on both counts. Meanwhile, Myspace:music and Last.fm, and numerous others, made their own weird roadways. I guess by weird I mean idiosyncratic, and so, weird in the sense of awful, one size for everybody, interfaces.

Bandcamp comes along in September, 2008, with a brilliant concept: keep it simple.

The artist calls the pricing shots

Earlier this year, one of my favorite bands left their label, recorded a new album, and released it as a digital download from their own website. The hour it was due out, I headed to their site, and after several minutes of watching the page struggle to load, concluded that they were just slammed and made a note to check back the next day. But when I did, the site was, once again, excruciatingly slow. This time I was a bit more patient, made it to the checkout page, entered my billing info, and…the download didn’t start. I checked my credit card statement, saw that I’d indeed been charged, and emailed the band. A few days later, the lead singer sent me an apology, along with a direct link to the album’s zip file. I did not then forward that link on to my 200 closest friends, but I wondered how many did, and couldn’t decide whether it was a good or bad thing that most fans had probably given up before getting this far.

Well the new record turned out to be even better than I’d hoped, but now, months later, I’m still running into other fans who don’t have it. This just kills me, because here’s a relatively unknown band that deserves all the success in the world, made the admirable decision to do an entirely independent release, yet was tripped up by the sorts of aggravating technical issues familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to build out their own website. What choice did they have though? They could have put their music up on MySpace or any of its dozens of imitators, but all of those services offer bands what is essentially a sharecropping arrangement. They host your tunes, and in exchange it’s their logo, their ads, their URL, their traffic, their identity. What if you want to build out a site that’s very clearly yours? The only choice seems to be to do what the band did: hire a designer and engineer, buy or rent some servers, spend a lot of time and money, and risk ending up with something that either works poorly or not at all. Does it not seem crazy that if you’re a blogger, you can create a rock-solid site that’s your own in a matter of minutes (and for free), but if you happen to create music instead of text, your options just suck?

Seemed nuts to us, so we created Bandcamp, the best home on the web for your music. We’re not yet another site wanting to host your tracks alongside the trailer for High School Musical 4: I’m Pregnant. Instead, we power a site that’s truly yours, and hang out in the background handling all the technical issues you dread (and several you’ve probably never even considered). We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.

So what’s Bandcamp then? We’re a publishing platform for bands, or, anthropomorphically/arthropodically-speaking, your fifth, fully geeked-out Beatle — the one who keeps your very own website humming and lets you get back to making great music and building your fan base.

One size fits all, yet with the virtue of being really straightforward, shorn of bells and whistles, and, centered on commerce. There’s no easier way to make a storefront for music. The commerce model is really simple: sell ten of a title, and Bandcamp pockets the entire tenth sale’s proceeds. Their factor is Paypal. One prospect that this approach brings forward is a deep A&R resource. When I think of how this could have been the major’s approach, I sit back and chuckle. Bandcamp converts straight digital (i.e. lossless,) files into a number of formats, provides 128kbs streams for every single track in their entirety, and, allows one to give away freebees. Every track is treated equally too. Any track can be embedded in 128 off the site. That feature speaks volumes about Bandcamp’s visionary assumptions.

For example:

There are only three shortcomings, the streams should be at least 224 kbs, and, the artist’s site would benefit from enhanced options for hooking into various social channels. I suppose over time Bandcamp will accrue a lot of dead sites, so it will be increasingly of value to create a genre index using the extant tags and then indicate which artists remain active, and have provided new content in the past six months. The directory of artists (and growing) doesn’t provide any help, however it is great for deploying the random click.

Sufjan Stevens offered a pre-release of his All Delighted People ep and sold 10,000+ copies over a weekend, and prior to the formal release on iTunes. The stir this caused continues to ripple. (See also: Sufjan Stevens and Asthmatic Kitty Take on Amazon, Bootleggers, And You, Maybe _ Village Voice)

It’s open to all, and since this includes me, quality obviously will vary a lot. Still, as an experimental music maker with zero commercial ambitions, I’m not going to think twice about throwing up the latest noise popping out of the command center’s maw.

Here’s In Khorasan–the full thing embedded via Bandcamp. Elegant, if you ask me; even if the stream here is higher quality.

May not show up in Chrome, so a bad bug.

Interesting article from way back on 2/27 over at the music issue blog. It has a very dry title, Archive of Macedonian Music. What drew my attention was the brief discussion of music archiving. The internet has called forth a mind-boggling informal effort to serve up personal archives. Where this is really earth-shaking is when recordings that have been hidden away in darkness, again see the light of day. At the same time, dedicated specialists finally have a forum where their efforts might earn some recognition.

This presents a fascinating paradox: this cornucopia has helped lower archival standards, and, at the same time, the wasteful attitudes of the past have been mitigated to some extent. To say the internet and its free-wheeling and free-archiving constitutes the world’s biggest record store, (or, for that matter, library,) doesn’t describe the actual status of the various collections come to be based on the net. Many of which are labors of love, even if these various outlets for what used to be, for example, the impossibly rare, reside in the wild west.

This, overall, has grievously harmed the old record business. Yet, at the same time, all the archiving and sharing has built resources the old vertical record business never had any interest in constructing. Obviously, the argument based in one-to-one lost sales is bogus, but the declining sales numbers speak for themselves. At the same time the actual reach promoted by networked interest and archival fanaticism obtains a different order of magnitude. This is a scale of enthusiasm the old record business never could even dream about. In fact, it was unthinkable a record could sell 1,000 copies and yet be heard by 10,000 (or 100,000) people.

Every new year between 1974 and 1986 I prepared a listing of the previous year’s best jazz records. I used my evaluation to merchandise records at the store and support broadcast on the radio. At the time, it seemed my sense of the previous year had to be credible for the simple reason that I was in a good position to mightily sample the year’s jazz releases. The record companies were generous in recognizing my dual role. My base sample was large, usually numbering several hundred records.

This comes to mind because this year I have for the first time since then gone to the considerable trouble to assess listening highlights for the past year. The biggest challenge was going back to figure out what actually came out last year. Then, armed with a raw list, in January I mined for recordings I had missed and was interested in.

Between the fan blogs and forums, and, the old line critics, I apprised myself of other critical views. Just a few steps in this direction had me reflecting on how much the critical culture around music has come to–paradoxically–accept and deny the ramification of the internet in its year-end recaps. In a follow-up post, or two, I’ll delve into this. It’s suffices to suggest that the old style critical culture has not grasped how prolix the wider musical culture has become. On the other side, the smart musical mobs do not grasp, and likely have no good reason to grasp, what were the precedents to today’s iTunes and share-ism.

One way the old and new school may be bridged is to consider the consequence of share-ism: as music sales have imploded, exposure has increased. This means that the critic is no longer positioned as a gatekeeper by their main advantage, that the critic can sample more music than the dedicated fan. Where this really is evident is in the new school muso’s ability to deeply ‘sample’ on the margins. This comes about because the unit cost of exposure has plummeted. This is in contrast to the old line critic who seems to still be wed to taking stock of what gets pushed their way. Whereas the informal and amateur culture is advantaged more by pulling music into their orbits. Think about it!

Meanwhile, my own list simply reflects what I really enjoyed. I make no other claim. Some of the music below represent long standing guilty pleasures. *marks one recording in each broad genre that I’d tell you to leap into first. I’ll be highlighting individual recordings in the future.

*Asleep At the wheel – Asleep & Willie country-folk
Levon Helm – Electric Dirt country-folk
Michael Hurley – Ida Con Snock country-folk
Buddy & Julie Miller – Love Snuck Up country-folk
Lhasa De Sela – Lhasa country-folk
*Celer – Breeze of Roses electronic
Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions electronic
Burkhard Beins – Structural Drift electronic
Stephen R. Smith – Cities In Decline electronic
Monolake – Silence electronic
*Abdullah Ibrahim – Bombella improv
Sun Ra – In Detroit improv
Pierre Dørge & New Jungle Orchestra – Whispering Elephants improv
Keith Jarrett – Testament improv
Louis Moholo-Moholo – Sibanye: Duets with Marilyn Crispell improv
Martial Solal – Live at the Village Vanguard: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love improv
Cyro Baptista & Banquet of the Senses – Infinito improv
Wadada Leo Smith & Jack DeJohnette – America improv
Bill Dixon – Tapestries for Small Orchestra improv
Kenny Barron – Minor Blues improv
David S. Ware – Shakti improv
Gretchen Parlatro – in a Dream improv
*Or the Whale – s/t pop
Neil Young – Live Archive v.1 pop
J.D. Souther – If the World Is You pop
Ry Cooder – I, Flathead pop
The Band of Heathens – One Foot in the Ether pop
*Allen Toussaint – Bright Mississippi R&b
Los Cenzontles – American Horizon r&b
Buckwheat Zydeco – Lay Your Burden Down r&b
*Staff Benda Bilili- Tres Fort , Tres Fort world
Lucas Santanna – Sem Nostalgia world
Orchestre National de Barbès – Alik world
va – Brazilika world
Tinariwen – Imidiwan:Companions world
Oumou Sangare – Seya world
Amadou & Mariam – Welcome to Mali world
Culture Music Club – Shime world

(139 recordings I enjoyed from last year – below the fold)

The master list – the contenders – all of interest

Abdullah Ibrahim – Bombella
Abner Jay – Abner Jay
Allen Toussaint – Bright Mississippi
Amadou & Mariam – Welcome to Mali
Anouar Brahem – The Astounding Eyes of Rita
Asleep At the wheel – Asleep & Willie
Baaba Maal – Television
Basseko Kouyate & Ngoni Ba – I Speak Fula
Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba – I Speak Fula
Ben Allison – Think Free
Benny Golson – New Time, New ‘Tet
Bill Dixon – Tapestries for Small Orchestra
Bjork – Voltaic
Bobby Sanabria: Kenya Revisited Live
Branford Marsalis – Metamorphosen
Buckwheat Zydeco – Lay Your Burden Down
Buddy & Julie Miller – Love Snuck Up
Burkhard Beins – Structural Drift
Caetano Veloso – Zii e Zie
Cecil Taylor – The Last Dance V1&2
Celer – Breeze of Roses
Celer – Four Pieces
Chas Smith – Nokadai
Corey Wilkes & Abstrakt Pulse – caves from the Ghetto
Cowboy Junkies – Trinity Revisited
Culture Music Club – Shime
Cyril Neville – Brand New Blues
Cyro Baptista & Banquet of the Senses – Infinito
Cyrus Chestnut – Spirit
David S. Ware – Shakti
David Sylvian – Manafon
Delbert McClinton – Acquired Taste
Diana Jones – Better Times Will Come
Dinosaur Jr – Farm
Drive By Trukcers – Austin City Limits
Ellen Jewell – Sea of Tears
Elvis Costello – Secret, Profane And Sugarcane
Extra Golden – Thank You Very Quickly
Fanga – Sira Ba
Fred Anderson – Staying in the Game
Gary Louris/Mark Olson — Ready for the Flood
Geoff Muldaur & The Texas Sheiks – Texas Sheiks
Gerald Cleaver/William Parker/Craig Taborn – Farmers by Natu
Ghana Special –Modern Highlife Afro Sounds Ghana Blues
Graham Parker – Live in SF 1979
Gretchen Parlatro – in a Dream
Harmonica Shah – If All You Have Is A Hammer
Henry Threadgill Zooid – This Brings Us To, Vol. 1
J.D. Souther – If the World Is You
James Moody – 4A
Jayhawks – Music From the North Country
Jesse Winchester – Love Filling Station
Jessica Williams – The Art of the Piano
Jimi Tenor and Tony Allen – Inspiration Information 4
Joe Lovano: Folk Art
John Campbell – Good to Go
Jon Balke & Amina Alaoui – Siwan
Jon Hassell – Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street
Keith Jarrett – Testament
Kenny Barron – Minor Blues
Khan Jamal – Impressions of Coltrane
Kid Loco – The Remix Album
Kimi Djabate – Karam
Klaus Voormann & Friends – A Sideman’s Journey
Kristina Train – Spilt Milk
Laura Viera – Troubled By the Fire
Levon Helm – Electric Dirt
Lhasa De Sela – Lhasa
Los Cenzontles – American Horizon
Louis Moholo-Moholo – Sibanye: Duets with Marilyn Crispell
Lucas Santanna – Sem Nostalgia
Lustmord – The Dark Places Of The Earth
Luther Allison – Songs From the Road
Luther Dickinson & the Sons of Mudboy – Onward & Upward
Lyle Lovett
Madeleine Peyroux – Bare Bones
Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat – I Am Eve
Manassas – Pieces
Martial Solal – Live at the Village Vanguard: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love
Matthew Shipp – Harmonic Disorder
Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs – Under The Covers Vol. 2
Michael Hurley – Ida Con Snock
Michael Hurley – Parsnips
Miranda Lambert – Revolution
Monolake – Silence
Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics – Inspiration Information
Muslimgauze – Cobra Head Soup
Neil Young – Live Archive v.1
No Blues – Lumen
Novalima: Coba Coba (Cumbancha) Perú
Or the Whale – s/t
Orchestre National de Barbès – Alik
Orchestre National de Jazz – Around Robert Wyatt
Otis Taylor: Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs
Oumou Sangare – Seya
Pierre Dørge & New Jungle Orchestra – Whispering Elephants
Ran Blake – Driftwoods
Rashied Ali – Judgment Day v2
Rashied Ali Quintet – Live in Europe
Red Molly – Love & Other Tragedies
Richard Thompson – Live Warrior
Robert Henke – Indigo_Transform
Rosanne Cash – The List
Roswell Rudd – Trombone Tribe
Ry Cooder – I, Flathead
Said the Whale
Salif Keita – La Difference
Samba Toure – Songhai Blues
Shelley King – Welcome Home
Sleeping Me – lamenter
Son Volt – American Central Dust
Sonny Landreth – Levee Town (extras)
Staff Benda Bilili- Tres Fort , Tres Fort
Stefon Harris/Blackout – Urbanus
Stephen R. Smith – Cities In Decline
Steve Kuhn Trio with Joe Lovano – Mostly Coltrane
Steve Roach -Dynamic Stillness
Sun Ra – In Detroit
Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions
Susana Baca – Seis Poemas
Tam Echo Tam – Dawn
The Band of Heathens – One Foot in the Ether
The Bottle Rockets – Lean Forward
The Doors – The Complete Matrix Club Tapes
The Stone Coyotes – A Rude Awakening
The Subdudes – Flower Petals
Thomas Koner – La Barca
Tinariwen – Imidiwan:Companions
Tinsley Ellis – Speak No Evil
Tom Harrell – Prana Dance
Tony Allen – Secret Agent
Trilok Gurtu – Massical
Trio 3 + Geri Allen – At This Time
va – Brazilika
va – Tudo Ben
va – Chicago Blues: A Living History
Wadada Leo Smith & Jack DeJohnette – America
William Parker – Petit Oiseau
Willie Nelson – Naked Willie

On the end of an era,

“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”

Brian Eno excerpt from interview with Paul Morley, On Gospel, Abba, and the Death of the Record (Guardian, OK Jan. 17-2009)

Kyle writes, in his article, What Will It Take To Unite Artist, Industry and Fan?

Nowadays, Digital Natives discard and consume popular music repetitively through file-sharing not only for reasons of fashion but because as fans they take it for granted that the Major Labels and a growing underbelly of independent musicians together will produce a continuous flow of new music. But, as we learn to appreciate the idea that the values of the world they inh[a]bit and the technologies they surround themselves with have had a profound effect on who they are, we can begin to understand that the social ecology of music culture that took decades or more to develop offline, isn’t just going to reappear online.

If you read the rest of the article, you’ll learn it’s implication is that the audience and music indutsry might come to realize what are their future mutual interests and then forge something massively neat under the ‘altered’ conditions.

Poppycock. Kyle is crying in his beer, I’m afraid. Whether music fans take anything for granted, or not, is besides the point. The music culture is whatever it is in the current moment. In actuality, today it’s a panoply of sub-cultures that self organize around whatever are the fragmentary interests of groups.

Salvation for the Recording Industry lies in their ability to offer services that are more in step with the emerging social norms of Digital Natives.

The ‘Recording Industry’ will always be around, but it’s going to keep shrinking and shrinking. It’s not worth saving, and forward-looking artists eventually will pay it little attention.

Thems the beans. If you want to evaluate musical culture, you leave the territory of the shriveled-up pipe dream of massive success and depart also from the shattered territory of the once monolithic recording industry.

“It’s a long shot, sure,” Eric Harvey of Pitchfork writes, “but at a time when so much of the structure that holds together music culture has disappeared, fans could take the initiative to create a new one.”

They’re already doing this. The various micro-cultures being created are neither industry or artist friendly. They’re not lucrative for either industry or artist. There’s an economic paradigm implicit in this development, but its much more aligned with behavioral operations than exchange value.

Free won. Under that single condition, any time trying to revive the music industry is time completely wasted.

Charles M. Blow, on one hand, could be viewed as late to the record industry implosion party, (or RIIP,) in gaining some exposure on the NYT’s editorial page. Swan Songs? July 31.2009 On the other hand, he makes some killing points.

I.

The problem is that if people can get the music they want for free, why would they ever buy it, or even steal it? They won’t. According to a March study by the NPD Group, a market research group for the entertainment industry, 13- to 17-year-olds “acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007.” CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent.

II.

This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.

III.

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

(My comments) Behavioral economics would suggest that the high time/effort investment in downloading, whether as a paying customer or freeloader, favors only those downloaders who appraise that the investment has a positive payoff. Freeloading is not very efficient, but, it does have the upside of quantit. In fact this would figure into a positive behavioral model—even if the end result is acquiring more music than one could ever hope to listen to. (Ha! Visit my basement.) This also favors fanatical listeners, always a tiny slice of for-a-price music consumption.

The move to access rather than acquisition constitutes a different behavioral model altogether because, obviously, access-on-demand means the consumer is matching their listening time precisely to, as it were, turning the web radio on. There really is no business model for this from the record industry’s point of view.
But, it’s easier to shut down for the time being. The record industry could vanquish iMeem and Pandora and Grooveshark and all the others open access DIY podcasting services. Except then crowd sourced casting would really erupt, especially if people served tunes back ‘up’ into the network. Instead of menus of streams, you’d literally have crowd sourced clouds. This will eventually happen anyway. My guess is we will go through some heavy handed industry quashing of the DIY services, so it will swing back to acquisition for a while before the transition to crowd and cloud.

None of this matters much in the broad sweep of things. The record business, both tangible and digital, is just about finished.

80% from less than 1% of all available songs? Sounds familiar. But, the actual consumption when you include freeloading, is probably many times the size of the paying market. I don’t know the metrics, but it is safe to say the amount of music being listened to has never been greater than in today’s environment.

This is stupid on their part, but it’s understandable as a short term money-making bridge to eMusic’s going belly up. An objective eMusic seems hellbent on realizing. But, eMusic is almost completely in their own universe of stupid in an industry that has redefined the term stupid.

Still, I am a happy customer. eMusic remains a tertiary source of interesting music.

A little background: I joined eMusic in 2000 at the tail end of their unlimited mp3 tracks for $14.99 orgy. I knew that was too good to last. Heck it was insane. But, over 9 years, they’ve grandfathered my monthly package at every price increase bump in the road. The end result is I’ve paid $1,400 for 6000 or so tracks, the equivalent of 700+ albums, and paid about $2 per album. How good is that? It’s great and almost insane.

Over that time, eMusic has been a trendsetter on the low-margin mp3 boulevard, you know the street that runs smack dab through the middle of the town called, Absolutely Free Music. As a user you made your deal: cheap music and lousy bit rates but with no DRM, and, eMusic’s inventory of small indy labels was heaven sent. If you the user was a muso and fan of the margins of various genres. Count me in.

A few years ago eMusic was sold to an investment firm. A price hike followed. But, eMusic kept doing their thing, offering non-major label tracks (and full albums,) at a great price. On June 1st they changed their own landscape. Taking my own customer commitment as an example, my monthly package will remain $11.99, but my download will decrease to 30 from 50. This works out to a 16 penny per track increase, to a 40% increase. Bummer. Read about it. Fury.

However, unlike the many hundreds of suddenly disgruntled customers, I’m not sent into apoplexy. I get their pain, yet, I never thought eMusic was going to forever hold itself to the match with the projection thrust on their brand. This projection was that eMusic was akin to the ol’ hippie indy or specialist record shop. When the investment company bought eMusic, I figured the bloom scattered from my own more modest illusion.

I don’t envy any business and business model which seeks to peddle at a profit tracks from recordings amidst the scourge or paradise of the world’s biggest ever free record store. Interestingly, the Guardian’s report on eMusic’s new pricing asserts that eMusic has something like 400,000 customers. Alright: basic plan is $11.99, call it $12 x 12 months, equals $144 per customer, times 400,000 = $57,000,000 per year.

Is that a lot of sales? In the scheme of the current record business, it’s at the upper end of the middle of the drastically consolidated music industry. After all, Apple’s iTunes is selling around 60,000,000 tracks per month, and doing $3+ billion worth of annual business. $57 million is equivalent to having a chain of 30 bricks-and-mortar stores doing $2 million each on a yearly basis. But, perhaps eMusic’s sales are half that. *

eMusic gets a tiny slice of the pie. Just as it is, was, for the Rounders and Telarcs, etceteras of the old hard goods music biz world, living on a business model focused on the thin slice of (no-doubt,) fanatic customers for indy produced music, consigns one’s business concern to a thin slice. And, there isn’t any way around this brute fact.

eMusic was driven to revamp their business model because new partner Sony is going to add 2 year old catalogue to their offerings. Not to eMusic’s credit, they showcased to their loyal customers news of the gigantic price increase in the clothing of benefit presumed to derive from adding the pathetic Sony legacy catalogue. This was equally disingenuous, and, patronizing. Uproarious.

By all accounts, eMusic CEO Danny Stein is one of the most arrogant people in the music biz, this in an industry where little napoleans have always been a dime-a-dozen. So, he didn’t help his brand here, with ludicrous rhetoric found in his slapping announcement:

The addition of these bold-face names [Sony] doesn’t change our mission. eMusic will always be an alternative to mass market digital music stores — a deeper, richer music shopping experience. more of the good stuff 17dots blog

It won’t be the last time the hard core fan gets crapped on. (Twas ever thus.) Nevertheless, it seems fairly, if not bluntly, obvious, that eMusic is heading in a necessary direction, given that they cannot grow their pie much, maybe can’t grow at all, if they remain a hip outlet casting a net to the margins, and doing this for even 40 cents per indy track.

Whereas, by undercutting their immensely larger competition, especially doing so overseas, in peddling Sony catalogue, it might be possible to double their user base in due course. If this is close to the mark, then the price increase locks in new customers at a more profitable price point, does the same for older customers, and, probably insulates eMusic from too much attrition in the short term.

But all eMusic can really do is pump up their tiny market slice of digital downloads from, say 3% to 6%. This is not an enviable market position.

Actually, eMusic, iTunes, all the others are–over the mid-term–trying to establish some traction against a truly for-free market space. I have no real idea, but my guess is that for every track somebody pays for, 10 more free ones find a home. Also, I’ll bet that most music fans who have sustained their enthusiasm for collecting music for more than ten years, are likely very resourceful at driving their own marginal acquisition costs down, down, down.

Still, I understand how pissed off the world of the music fanatic is at the world of bean-counting investors. This is true whether it’s eMusic or iTunes. What isn’t true of eMusic is that it ever was really like some hipster’s hole-in-the-wall room of vinyl bins. There used to be, and, to an almost laughably inconsequential sense, still are attempts to make a love-the-music-first business model actually work. But, after 30+ years of observing such things, love-the-music-first is always the canary in the coal mine.

Apple iTunes rival eMusic to unveil overhauled website
“The US company generates 80% of its revenues from the domestic American market, but said its UK business was growing more quickly.

Pakman said the site sells between 7m and 8m songs globally each month, adding that global revenues and subscriptions would rise by 40-50% this year.”

8,000,000 x $0.30 = $30,000,000. (For every mp3 eMusic sells, iTunes sells 8. Sobering.)

Joy Press, in Salon; Like a Virgin Megastore, shut for the very last time

The author remembering walking into the Oxford Street, UK, Virgin Megastore in the 80′s,

“I can still feel the special frisson of entering what appeared to be a music-lover’s paradise: an enormous space pulsating with music and light, packed with miles of aisles of cool vinyl.”

My memory is visiting the Tower Records Annex in NYC in the late 80s. At that time the gathering wave of CD sales made NY a vinyl shopper’s heaven. Likewise with the Central Square used record stores in Cambridge, Mass. Back at my desk in the rear of the record department, I’d pore over cut out catalogues from One Way and Scorpio.

Here in Cleveland, over the last few years, Borders Books and Music has degraded its music departments to the point where it is hardly worth a trip. The best local indy, My Generation closed 5 years ago. Record Revolution, an indy I first walked into in 1967, hollowed itself out over 15 years. Cleveland today is not in any way a record town. Once one of the great ones, today that reputation has perished.

But if I say to myself ‘good riddance’ to great music browsing, it’s partly informed by my spending 11 years on the front lines while managing an indy record store in Middlebury, Vermont. My tenure there ran from the dawn of the disco and punk era to the flowering of the compact disc era, 1976-1986.

Yet the writing was on the wall for the indy record shop by 1981. After several years of deep discounting of the top hits–starting in NYC and spreading from there–after the holiday season of 1979, the major labels turned the small store’s spigots off in the aftermath of the labels’s being buried in post-holiday returns. (Thank you, Rovert Stigwood!) Polygram led the way in imposing account minimums and this in turn forced indies into the arms of one stops and their 10% higher prices, if they wanted to stock the high turning hits and major label catalogue. Although my store was somewhat immune from competitive pressures, when another indy arrived a block down the street in 1984 and implemented pricing to undercut my own store, there was not much I could do except race with my competitor to the bottom.

Hundreds of indies and many regional chains went out of business in the first part of the 80′s as the majors doubled up on their bets on a big pipeline ending in the deeply discounted end caps of the big chains and new fangled big box general merchandisers and the cynical loss-leading big city shysters.

The way I look at it today, 8 years after I departed from a failing Cleveland area regional chain after a 5 year stint, this history is the proper context for how the major labels completely mishandled the rise of the web. Certainly as early as 1997, there was no substantial indy base for the majors to work with ever again. It’s nowadays maximally ironic that what the web realized was the world’s biggest free and compellingly diverse and sticky and deep record store. How righteous that the indy aesthetic thrives on the music forums and mp3 blogs.