Dead Formats Society

The last few weeks have seen three new developments which offer three very different visions of the future of the music industry: Beatles remasters, Spotify mobile and iTunes LPs. Physical CD sales have long been expected to be eclipsed by MP3 downloads, but recently those downloads themselves are starting to look like old news.

 

 

The Beatles' remastered albums are the CD's last splash as a format. As Rolling Stone put it, EMI "has smartly turned its series of reissues into an event…. Just as the recording technology got more sophisticated with Rubber Soul and Revolver, those albums' CDs sound fuller and cleaner…Sgt. Pepper gains a clarity and vividness the vinyl version simply doesn't have…"

 

Except that was written in 1987: sound familiar? CDs had been selling big numbers for a few years, but unlike say The Stones, The Beatles had held back the release of their catalogue to make it an event. It's not just the Beatles' music we're expected to buy over and over, it's the marketing scheme too. The exact same trick is working right now with further remastered CDs and no doubt it would work again with SACD or surround sound versions.

But the big party The Beatles haven't yet crashed, after almost a decade of anticipation, is digital downloads.

They had better hurry up or they'll find everyone has gone to Spotify.

The second development was the Spotify application for iPhone and Android platforms. This has the potential to revolutionise the industry by skipping the download phase altogether. If you haven't tried Spotify on your computer, you're in for a treat.

 

It gives you instant, legal access to almost every song you can think of, all funded by short radio-style adverts between songs - or you can pay for unlimited commercial-free Premium access for £9.99 a month. The Spotify mobile app, free to Premium users, brings Spotify into direct competition with iTunes.

Apple's iTunes remains the dominant force in digital downloads and also the home of the iPhone "app store". Apple have always been fiercely protective of their territory, rejecting many applications because they "replicated functionality" found on the iPhone. So everyone was certain Spotify's application would be rejected as a clear competitor.

 

It wasn't, and it's even better than we expected. It even includes Offline Playlists, which means as long as you pay your subscription, you can fill your mobile device with any song you like, playable on demand even without an internet connection.

 

There's no need to buy songs from iTunes or anywhere else. It makes you wonder if something happened behind the scenes between Spotify and Apple that we don't know about - a legal challenge, or a deal?

People's reaction to Spotify really shows you how far we have come over the last decade. It's not the £120 a year fee that they're concerned about, it's not even being tied to specific applications and devices, it's the streaming/offline element. "So I don't actually own anything?", they wonder.

Again, sound familiar? It was the same when digital downloading was first introduced. Part of the reason people didn't want to pay was that they felt they didn't really own anything for their money. Nowadays we're prepared to accept an emotional investment in ownership of these bits of data, which can be bought, sold and even immorally stolen when copied. But renting that data for a monthly fee? That's very different. What have we bought? What are we collecting?

 

It's that impulse to own something that feels physical that Steve Jobs of Apple is trying to exploit with his new iTunes LPs. Jobs is 54 and says he is old enough to remember buying vinyl LPs.

 

The best LPs were rich visual experiences with large photos, booklets, lyrics etc. He says (wrongly) that experience ended with CDs. iTunes LPs are an attempt to replicate that digitally.

Somewhat disappointingly, an iTunes LP ends up looking like the extras menu on a DVD: some videos, promo photos and words to pad out the package: nice for the fans, but nothing the internet doesn't provide anyway.

The real purpose is to get people buying albums again. Everyone knows that music business revenues have been declining since 2000. The industry blames that squarely on illegal downloading. But there are several other factors that are always overlooked. Sometimes commentators might acknowledge the effects of supermarkets, internet retailers and the rise of gaming. But no one ever mentions the cherry-picking of individual tracks.

 

Throughout the 90s, singles were dying but there was no downloading. If you wanted an artist's one good song, you bought their whole album at full price. Now you just pay $0.99 on iTunes. Apple actually insist that each track is made available individually and specify the low price.

 

So of course the industry is making less money. Once again, it's the difference between The Beatles' and The Stones' strategy.

 

The Stones sell impressive numbers of downloads, but because it's all individual tracks, their sales of full albums are less than half those of The Beatles.

So will iTunes LPs reverse all that, restore people's feelings of rich physical ownership and get the public buying albums again? Or will Spotify break the link between fandom and ownership completely? Or will things carry on just as before, with highly-anticipated Beatles albums reheated and remarketed on a new format each decade?