Spiff/XSPF (continued)

I wrote a blog post yesterday about XSPF, pronouned spiff.

The comments were solidly critical, led by my brother and his friend Tony Alva, who essentially accused me to wanting to destroy the beloved record album format.

I too love the record album format guys, but I haven't bought a vinyl record with the big cover art and liner notes that you can stretch out and read since the mid 80s.  I know that Jackson still does that and that his vinyl collection is his obsession.  And I understand that Jackson and Tony will be listening to vinyl into their old age the way that Tony's grandfather listened to his reel to reel tapes.

The CD is a lousy physical packaging format and has been since its invention (dont' get me started on the silly plastic wrap and tape stuff).  Its one important contribution was the ability to rip the music off of it which has led to the age of digital music.

Digital music has brought portable music, shareable music, and remixed music.  It's a revolution in music, possibly more important than anything since the development of recording technology itself.

Digital is where it's at.  Digital makes music liquid. Andy Rock can't do his metal night anymore because Jackson took back his record collection.  Had the collection been digital, Andy would still be rockin at Olive's.

Now that I have gotten that off my chest, I want to make an important point about XSPF/spiff and playlists in general.  An album is a playlist.  It is the sequence of songs put together by the artist and it is the most important version of the playlist that there is. 

When I listen to music on Rhapsody, I can listen to any number of playlists, radio stations, mixes, etc, etc.

But about 80% of the time, I listen to albums on Rhapsody, not mixes or radio.  When XSPF becomes a reality and everyone has digital music dialtone, I believe that every album gets released as an XSPF file, with amazing graphics, text, video, and everything else that we need to sit back and absorb the music the way Tony wants to.

Digital isn't going to make that experience go away.  It's going to enhance it.

Comments

[Michael]

Jackson & Co. should take heart: As long as there are scratch-and-mix DJs, jazz & classical afficianados and audiophiles, there will still be a market for vinyl (and turntables upwards of US$10,000). The photography market is similar in this regard -- serious shutterbugs will still want the fine nuance of film, large or small format, over any number of megapixels.

Digitial is for the masses, analog for the discrete few who seek it out.

[Tony Alva]

Compelling points that certainly show my naiveté when it comes to this new format your pimpin', but I still think what your dismissing is the experience of purchasing music, the anticipation of the release, the opening the booklet to read lyrics/credits, etc... I can only offer another analogy: It's like if a giant meteorite made of diamond crashed into the earth and all of a sudden, diamonds weren’t anything special to covet anymore, they'd just be common place.

On the more practical side, I think this technology requires a ton more gadgetry in order to get "the XPSF file, with amazing graphics, text, video,..." I can recognize Lou Reed’s Transformed album jacket from fifty yards away, or any countless number of records the same way. What happens to that kind of association in this “improved” new world?

Again, I'm not dissing the idea of a sharable format of music, what I am saying is that listening to music has had a process for 50 years that was very social and tactile. This is not some database of financial records, it's ART. I know you think it's just nostalgia talking here, but when Ozzy Osbourne's Diary Of A Madman was released, my friend came by the deli I was working at and pressed the record up to the window as I was closing. I couldn’t wait to get off of work to join him at his house and listen to it together. This is how people listened to music for FIFTY years and it was a very good thing. Imagine the same scenario today...

Rob Simpson on a cell phone: "Hey Tony, Ozzy's new record is out you might want to pull it down off of Yahoo! and check it out."

Tony: "Yeah, OK. See you later."

Rob worked for the money to buy the record, anticipated the release, went to a store and bought the record, and now owns the record. He didn’t download it from a website that his parents subscribed to.

Andy Rocks vinyl night was special because it brought people together to listen to albums. You can replace vinyl with CD’s if you wish (and I have, haven’t spun a record in years), but the fixed format is something special in it’s own right. I find it hard to believe that you being such a huge fan of music all your life have forgotten all this nuance.

Buying and OWNING music (music you don’t lose if your hard drive crashes, or your subscription runs out), something that’s physical you can collect, with cover art that reflects and represents the music inside, that notes who performed on it, that you can not only listen to on your own, but better yet share in the company of others. Hell, that’s one of the reasons this blog is cool: We share thoughts and talk about music. The only thing better would be to be sitting in my listening room with you all, putting a LP or CD on, beer in one hand, cigar in the other, album jacket on the table, being handed back and forth.

It’s not the portability of this format that I have distain for, but the mourning of a once pure and great activity that every kid for many generations once enjoyed, lost forever in the interest of convenience. What next? Closing the Met because there’s a new wiz bang video card you can get for your computer that has better than human eye quality graphics?

Jackson and I can't be the only music addicts that feel this way reading this blog?

[fred]

we've gotten to the salient point now.

hanging out with you and Jackson spinning vinyl is great, but how often does it happen?

i get comments from both of you every day on this blog.

digital transforms boundries and while you lose something social and tactile, you gain frequency, access, and expanded networks.

i'll take the latter because i never get much of the former.

[Giordano]

Ok, I'm a DJ (electronic, house and techno) and a music maniac, so I'm probably not in the mainstream target. What I've got to say is that I love both ways: I love going to record shops, peruse the shelfs, listen to records, getting recommendation from the shop assistant, getting calls when some records I might like are in, talking with other DJs and swapping records, etc.
That said, I also love to get a track in MP3 via mail straight out of the studio, burn it on CD, and be able to play it out the same night.And my access to upfront music from all over the world has incredibly improved with the advent of file sharing and music download services.
I will never give up vinyl altogether, but CDs, MP3s (Final Scratch, anyone?) and all the other tech I can use have made both my music addiction worse, and my DJ sets better.

[Jason Chervokas]

As an owner of something approaching 3000 LPs, a couple of hundred 45s, and even some 78s, I have to say, the idea of the album that we grew up with is dead. Time to stop clinging to it. Not just the 12" vinyl format, but the notion of the "album" too.

Media formats are adopted by consumers for three reasons: Convenience, Extended Functionality, and Price.

Superior audio quality is strictly for early adopters and the audiophile few.

The idea of artists writing and recording a coherent long playing record of music was a function of the development of the 33 1/3 LP playback format. It was an artistic response to the new technology, much like the even tempered scale was a compromise made 600 years ago by harpischord designers. It wasn't dreamed up in a vacuum.

For better--convenience, price--and worse--audio quality--piecemeal consumption of downloadable music is very shortly going to be THE dominent method by which pop music is consumed. Wring your hands if you want to, but don't cry for me argentina....this is what consumers want and it will rule the day.

And maybe that's good. I love the second disk of the new Ryan Adams twofer. The first disk is a bit of a yawn. My advice to consumers would be to go to iTunes and download only the good songs and save some dough.

As to the analog/digital audio quality question--I love analog, I listen to LPs a lot...But it's a pain in the ass to get great performance out of vinyl. I have a fairly high end turntable rig isolated on a homemade rack that is mass loaded with cinderblock and then floated via hand truck tire inner tubes. I have an LP vacuum cleaning machine on the way hear. Half of my records are in storage because it's a chore to shelve them. And I can't listen to them in the car.

I get great audio from the turntable. And even 6 years ago that audio was clearly superior to the digital.

This is no longer the case. For example, the redbook playback of DSD mastered dual SACD/redbook disks shows that digital can now be a superior playback medium (the hybrid Stones and Dylan disks sound way better than the earlier CD and LPs--not the SACD layer, the redbook layer from the DSD master!). And higher sampling rate recording, improvements in jitter reduction, has made digital recording competitive with analog.

The compressed formats are a problem for audio....they're lossy, phasey, icky.... Personally if I compress any files for my own use I use a sampling rate no lower than 320kps, anything less is musically poor. And when I do digital recording I go no lower than 48kps and preferably 96kps and that's just for me screwing around as a hobby.

But, even the compression formats are improving. The AAC format is discernably better than MP3, for example. Any the technology will continue to improve over time.

Am I tossing my turntable and LPs? No way. Too much sunk cost for one, and the great LPs still sound great (The Classics Records 200-gm reissue of Sonny Rollin's The Bridge is just spectacular). But I'm not disturbed by the inevitability of change either.

[jackson]

"What next? Closing the Met because there’s a new wiz bang video card you can get for your computer that has better than human eye quality graphics?"

I couldn't have said any better.

"What I've got to say is that I love both ways"

YES! That's what I'm asking for.

"this is what consumers want and it will rule the day."

Sad, but true. I know I'm fighting a losing battle, but as a wiser man than I once said: "I'm havin' a lot of fun tryin' to win"

"I love the second disk of the new Ryan Adams twofer. The first disk is a bit of a yawn. My advice to consumers would be to go to iTunes and download only the good songs and save some dough."

This is a symptom of the digital age. If Ryan had put his album out twenty years ago, he would have had to cull it down, and it would have been one good album, like you yourself said of the latest Chili Peppers record, too long. If convienience is to win the day, as is the American way, well then fine. I'm comfortable with my Vinyl, I can still buy it, and play it. When the bomb drops and the ones and zeros are no longer of any use, I'll be King with my biological waste powered generator and turntable, amp, and speakers. I never did have much use for a tuner....Exploding or not.

BTW this is fun!

[jackson]

When album art is gone, how will you decorate the margins of your blog.....

You got me good with the Andy Rock, but I suppose Andy could have purchased all that vinyl himself if it hadn't gone the way of Beta tapes...Living in Manhattan, it's easy to get vinyl, but Andy lives in the vast wasteland that is Rockland county, there's no vinyl at the mall.

[bskeels]

"And maybe that's good. I love the second disk of the new Ryan Adams twofer. The first disk is a bit of a yawn. My advice to consumers would be to go to iTunes and download only the good songs and save some dough."

But so many times the experience of an album (whatever format) grows on you with age. Properly priced (ie, _way_ cheaper per tune to buy the whole album), you get best of both worlds. At, say, .99 per track, but $7.50 for a 12-15 tune 'album', you can hit the highlights, but go back and play the artists playlist (correctly named in the comment) occasionally. I've found any number of albums that I liked _way_ better (and, to be fair, the reverse) after letting it settle in. Especially with artists you really love, why not give them that chance?

[Tony Alva]

Fred,

Geography prevents Jackson and I from partaking in the soon to be ancient rite of the shared listening experience as I described it, but it is one that my wife and other friend do with some regularity (sounds like some creepy swingers party, doesn't it?).

Bottom line, we're losing more than we're gaining.

Jason,

Always an intelligent perspective from a real aficionado.

"The idea of artists writing and recording a coherent long playing record of music was a function of the development of the 33 1/3 LP playback format. It was an artistic response to the new technology, much like the even-tempered scale was a compromise made 600 years ago by harpsichord designers. It wasn't dreamed up in a vacuum."

Seems to support my position. Like the U.S. constitution and harpsichord driven scale, it ain't the perfect form, just as close as you may ever get (bold statement meant to incite).

Also, consumers want Brittany Spears, that doesn't make her good. (I always end up using her name as all that is evil in music. Note to self: Find new brainless musical dolt to vilify),

Jackson,

You and I just may end up being the Osama Bin Laden's of the audio world. Living in the caves of remote mountainous regions with our rag tag army of traditionalists, hauling around our biofluxcapacitors, listening to all the LP's Trickster finally tossed in the garbage after capitulating and subscribing to iYahooieXSMspiffymacallit.

...and yes, this is a lot of fun!

[Tony Alva]

BTW Jackson...

"I never did have much use for a tuner....Exploding or not."

LOL!!! Get yourself a case beer for that one.

All The Love From Dogtown,

TA

[Jason Chervokas]

Hey, I LIKE most of the uptempo Britney Spears records. Better than Abba, maybe as good as the Monkees. Certainly we'll be listening to Oops I Did It Again as long as we'll be listening to (I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone," and I for one think we're better for it!

I know when my daughter and her friends send MP3s to one another via e-mail it's not socially much different than we old timers playing records together.

One of the greatest afternoons I ever spent in my life was spent schmoozing in the living room of George Avakian, the man who brought Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis to Columbia records, who help steward the LP format into existence....It was that afternoon that I realized how malliable all this is. Avakian did "concept albums" with Sonny Rollins later at RCA, modeled on Sinatra's concept albums for Capitol in the 1950s, the idea was thematically related/mood related songs (In the Wee Small Hours, Come Fly With Me--all travel/exotic place songs), holding a set of listening together. It was all about adapting to the new format, not the other way around. That's what spurred artistic innovation.

Whatever comes let's just try to make it sound the best it can for the greatest number. Don't forget, for a while the pop audience embraced cassette tape.

[jackson]

Jason - you had me at Mississipi John Hurt - you lost me w/ the Brittany. Monkees forever! ABBA Rulz! I'll take 'Fernando' or 'Dancin' Queen' over 'oops' any day.

[Marc James]

You're right, digital IS the future (and present for many like myself). But I want own the music and have control over it. If I decide to cut back and expenses and stop paying the subscription, I still want to have the music I payed for. I can't warm up to the idea of renting music. I am perfectly happy with iTunes.

[fred]

Jason is right about the second Ryan Adams disk. It's terrific. Should have been released as a single record.

[johannes brahms]

Random thoughts:

50 years is not a long time. The history of recorded music is short, even if you include scores and written notation.

Altering the way music is consumed goes in hand with altering the way it is produced, hence the product is altered - how did people(non-musicians) remember a catchy theme when the only opportunity they had to hear it was a live performance? How did musical memes cover ground? What were the implications for the substance of music when these factors changed with mass production/distribution of recorded music?

It's funny reading down these comments and noticing all the album art to the right - will you be adding your 50 favourite playlists? How would you depict those?

Technologies which give us ("consumers" if you like the old binary) control over our consumption actually complicate our lives (what should we play next? How do we remember a song or a group of songs cut adrift from physical/visual cues?) - we want to trust a producer to package the experience for us because that's supposed to be their expertise.