Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Moving towards ‘feels free’ while further devaluing music.

A press release arrived within the email pile today and it trumpeted this – Nokia launches pioneering ‘Comes With Music‘ digital entertainment service. New service offers customers unprecedented freedom and value. EMI Music, independents and music publishers join offering.

Let me take a deep breath here……ok. There’s nothing but hyperbolic exclamations here. I have to ask, why does the music industry continue to shoot itself in the foot? And why, via their mouthpiece the henchmen of the RIAA, do they continue to whine over falling music sales when they happily embrace giving away music? Perhaps the labels and publishers were happy to receive bucket-loads of cash to license their music in return for allowing Nokia to train young folks in the art of always getting music for free!!?

Nokia announced the debut of its pioneering Comes with Music digital entertainment service, which offers consumers a new way to discover and enjoy music. Customers who buy a Comes With Music device will be able to explore and enjoy a diverse catalog of music of international and local artists with unlimited access to millions of tracks for a year, keeping the music once the year is over and revolutionizing their digital music experience.

Dear Nokia, consumers have been discovering and enjoying music for years, for free, via the internets. That’s why music sales are down. It’s nice to see that you are helping to make more free music available to these consumers though.

“Comes With Music sets a precedent for consumer value and convenience that the rest of the digital entertainment industry is already copying,” said Tero Ojanperä, executive vice president and head of the Nokia entertainment and communities business.”

Consumer value and convenience = internet. Otherwise that’s just marketing double-speak.

“Trying out a music recommendation is spontaneous as customers can download without worrying about the cost of an album or a track – the freedom and simplicity of the service is unparalleled.”

See above.

Comes With Music gives you unlimited access to the millions of tracks in the Nokia Music Store and the music is all yours to keep – because it’s not a revolution unless you get to keep your music.

WOW!

“With the launch of Nokia’s Comes With Music, fans now have a new avenue to find and enjoy music from EMI’s catalogue, and our artists have a powerful new way to reach their fans,” said Douglas Merrill, president, digital business, for EMI Music. “By encouraging music discovery in an innovative and consumer-friendly environment, Comes With Music will continue to push experimentation in the digital music industry.”

Experimentation in the digital music industry – fancy that? Only 10 years too late…

The winners here are Nokia [enhanced phone sales] and music lovers [more free music]. The losers are musicians and songwriters [believe me, my royalties on digital sales are miniscule] and the record labels [training kids to get music for free is so 1998...]

Spin The Black Circle

McLuhan and Vinyl? I know – I sometimes stretch an idea to its snapping point but isn’t that why I bother to type all day?

Here goes – As I sit on the panels I’m invited to I often forget to remind myself that at the heart of all my discussions about music and technology the root of it is about my enduring passion for music.

Computer technology, especially web 2.0, has fooled many of us into thinking that we now have a “new” way of communicating. That is simply not true; we forget that Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago new technologies simply create new environments – the old environment then becomes the content of the new environment; Facebook simply allows us to digitize our Rolodex. The computer and its keyboard are the medium in this particular message. Our constant need to remain in touch with friends and family endures, and still will well beyond technology.

We should really be considering technology’s effect on the individual and society. Remember, e.e. cummings warned that “progress is a comfortable disease.” So where does music with its myriad genres and forms, its emotions and passionate responses, its common currency, fit into a “technological” culture?

Well consider this – Music is the medium is the message; bear with me here.
If music is the message then in McLuhan’s terms the vinyl record can be described as a technological extension [the medium] of the musicians body. The medium then creates the environment that produces effects [the media.] This then has an effect on society and culture where the starting point is always the individual – that is, you and me. McLuhan also advised against a rigid separation of the physical from the psychological.

If we then consider that the physics of media have changed yet the media that provides the atmospheres has not, and we understand that the effect is still psychological and can not be separated, do McLuhan’s ideas help us unravel the mystery of what innately binds us to the rhythms and lilts of music around the globe? [My argument carries over into live performance too where the instruments are extensions of the players bodies.]

Vinyl racks at Music Millennium Portland

Anyway, on to my thoughts about vinyl.

In a world of 320kb MP3s, FLAC, loss-less this that and the other files, I’m going to take a leap of faith here and hope that many of you jump in too – my premise is that a vinyl record surely has to be the purest embodiment of our universal love for music. It’s the closest thing to experiencing music live that I have heard. When compared to A to B, with A being an analog record and B being a CD, A wins every time for me. I share Neil Young’s comments in the digital vs analog wars – Young has acknowledged the benefit of hiss-free recording that digital technology offers, with the caveat that “along with the hiss went depth of sound and the myriad possibilities of the high end where everything is like the cosmos, exploding stars, echo.” [Read more of this discussion here.]

Digitizing music has made music more affordable and provided ease of use in portability but at the huge expense of having the emotional range, the highs the lows the rumbles, removed in the process. What we have been hearing on CD is a compressed version of a digital slice of the possible range of sound available to our ears. At live shows the bass sub woofers in the PA system allow you to literally ‘feel’ the bottom end, on CD or MP3 that experience is simply not available to you. Yet, when you play a vinyl record through a great hi-fi system you can experience it in a recording.
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