WEEKLY WHINE

Non standard

This past Friday, I found an interesting editorial on CNN's site. Under the headline "Opinion: MP3 death watch", a writer mentioned the music industry's file standard that was to transmit music more securely than the MP3 format. Unsurprisingly, the author asserted that the Recording Industry Association of America was doomed to failure. After all, major record labels still believe that MP3 transmission is losing them millions of dollars, and they're right. The one fact that they always omit is that it could just as easily gain them millions of dollars if they simply changed their tactics slightly. Some big-name groups have already released songs exclusively in MP3 format, such as They Might Be Giants and the Beastie Boys. This is also an excellent way for new startups to gain exposure; you'll find many sites that distribute MP3 files containing songs from new artists that aren't able to sign with a major label.

All this was no surprise. The rest of the article was not a surprise either. The author made the outlandish claim that MPEG Layer 3 compression will not last forever and that it will soon be replaced by something better. Needless to say, this shocked me not at all. Actually, that's not entirely correct. I was surprised not by what he had to say, but that he said it at all. This was obvious to me, at least. Of course the world is not static. Of course formats will change. Of course technology still has a long way to go. Of course there will be newer and better.

The MP3 format has been around for about three years now. That's an eternity in the computer industry. Three years ago people were using 150MHz Pentiums and thought that 32MB was lots of RAM. A 1GB hard drive was enough for just about anything you could care to store. Of course, once people started building MP3 collections, they would rapidly grow to consume large fractions of a hard drive, so when storage expanded even more, demand already existed. The computer industry always finds ways to help itself, and in the process, it helps other industries. Magnetic tape went from mainframes to homes, where it was transplanted into VHS cassettes. These devices enable anyone to see any film at any time, and more importantly, they mean more money for film studios. If you don't believe me, just go into any store where the films of last fall and winter are reaching the shelves. If people liked them then, they'll like it again. This is the logic behind storable media.

The other logic is that it's always improved. If you don't believe that either, just go back to that same store. Chances are that they're selling last year's films not only on cassette, but on something called a "DVD" as well. They've been hyped for years, but only now are they really becoming a major part of the market. You can get fourth generation DVD-ROM drives on new computers, and DVD-RAM drives are a bit younger. They can store much more than an ordinary CD, from which they are descended. Whilst CDs could store only audio and short video, a single sided DVD can store about 6GB data, give or take some. That's equivalent to a full length film and any other snippets that the filmmakers put on the disc: additional audio tracks, additional footage, the film's trailer, bios of the cast, commentary on the film's production, whatever. More importantly, in many cases DVDs are cheaper than cassettes. I can tell you this from experience. When π first came out on video, it ran about $100 on VHS and about $20 on DVD.

The music industry can learn an important lesson from the movie industry. Filmmakers are providing incentives for new technologies: cheaper, better, more stuff. Musicmakers are providing "decentives" for new technologies: copyright blabbering, lawsuits, market fragmentation. When young filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky emerge from NYU film school, they make their first full length feature films and release them through the help of large corporations like Artisan Entertainment, which make full use of everything that will give the films exposure. When young musicmakers emerge from wherever it is that they emerge from [sorry, I don't have a specific example in mind here], more often than not they have to battle the large corporations that like being where they are and don't want to support anyone that people haven't heard of. How else to explain Jennifer Love Hewitt's "music career"? Maybe I'm biased, but the first time I heard one of her songs, I detected something that puzzled me for quite a while until I realised that she sounds just like Hansen.

But like that author said, MP3 won't last forever. Do people still have 5¼" floppy drives, dot matrix printers, and Commodore 64s? [Actually, I still have a Commodore 64 with a 5¼" floppy drive and a dot matrix printer, but I'm not the same as everyone else.] The Rio, a portable MP3 player manufactured by Diamond Multimedia [which, by the way, also manufactured my DVD-ROM drive], is headed directly for the same group of products, with one exception: At one point, Commodore 64s, 5¼" floppy drives, and dot matrix printers were actually widespread and useful. Neither may be said for the Rio, but it may be said for the MP3 format in general. So go ahead and use it, but work on something better. Sometimes the future comes before we're prepared for it. Other times it comes after a lengthy wait.