digitalphono2

traffic data for buymusic.com

Here is the current traffic data for buymusic.com from Alexa.

I started wondering about this after having tested it on a friend's Windows XP box. The experience was detailed on this page and was - in a word - substandard. In talking with others I have only heard from two (out of many Windows users questioned) who had tried the site. The Alexa numbers (assuming they are in the ballpark) show that buymusic needs to rethink what they are doing.

how do people listen to music?

and does it change over time or with different generations?

Steve pointed out an interesting article by William Berlind on attention spans and music.

Is the next logical progression a 10 or 15 second ringtone?

There are clearly some interesting issues here. Kids are already multitasking at concerts -- it isn't uncommon to see them sharing the concert with friends via cellphone (with terrible fidelity, but the sense of presence is worth a huge amount) and text messaging through concerts is very common.

This sort of behavior is something that I saw a few years ago when I had a god's eye view of music consumption on a few campus networks. We were able to not only monitor what was downloaded, but how many times it was played over a period of time. The interesting thing is that most of the downloaded mp3s were never listened to from beginning to end. (note that there are multiple explanations for this behavior, but it is interesting in light of the views of the listening public and the music industry)

There were some interesting things that came out of the research ...

One thing the RIAA and music industry really need to worry about is the perceived value of music relative to other outlets for disposable income. It may be that they are targeting entirely the wrong generation. It may turn out that giving people mechanisms to audition new music (this goes well beyond what we see in something like the iTunes store or the Amazon recommendation list) will let them find the music that they will want to play enough to warrant purchasing it. If music is too expensive to explore and enjoy (and there are many ways to measure expense), many will give up on it.

mediaeval baebes

There has been a general rediscovery of Mediaeval music and one group of women who were doing it as amateurs managed to rise ot the level where their first recording was the fastest selling debut album on Virgin Classics.

They aren't held to strict interpretations (although they are capable of it) as their name, the Mediaeval Baebes, suggests. Their technique is to take a piece of text and, undetured by the fact that no music exists, create music based on what they feel is the mood. Some of it works well, some of it not as well, but all of it is generally fun.

Check out their album Salva Nos (iTunes 4 required).

They have also been touring quite a bit and their concerts are highly recommended - they can be very funny.

anonymous 4

Classical music covers a huge path of time and space and also happens to be at a very low popularity. Anonymous 4 almost qualifies as a supergroup in the genre.

Four women singing mostly medieval sacred music. They've been doing it wonderfully for about fifteen years (sadly they just announced that they will stop touring next year) - so wonderfully that they've sold more than a million recordings .. a feat almost unheard of in classical music.

If they are performing within a day's drive it is worth the effort to go to a concert. Their disography has about a dozen entries. I recommend:

La bele Marie

1000: A Mass for the End of Time

Legends of St Nicholas

11,000 Virgins

A Star in the East

On Yoolis Night

An English Ladymass

I'm sure their other CDs are great - I just don't own them. I will spare you a detailed review other than saying their music comes as close to perfection as any singing you will hear. Etherial comes to mind.

Their site has concert dates, news and a few real audio samples. Buy a CD or two and see if you can avoid buying a half dozen more.

joseph shabalala

The South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo brought a local form of a cappella known as mbube to the West. Great stuff that is mostly Zulu songs with trills, humming, zips, clicks and other ornamentations most of us are not used to heard.

During Apartheid, this stuff was also somewhat of a rallying cry to the rest of the world, attracting people like Paul Simon to the cause of freedom. The music does rise about the political message and stands well on its own.

NPR's All Things Considered conducted an interview with Joseph Shabalala.

more on buymusic.com

A few days ago I commented on the Windows online music service from Buy.com. Not having a Windows box, I wasn't able to comment on much other than what I could read on the page. As it happens I have a serious interest in this class of service, so I have asked several Windows users for their experiences and tried it over the shoulder of someone who had a new XP box.

I note that I have used and critiqued Apple's ITMS service - it is a solid first try that shows considerable clue understanding how people use music in this setting. It isn't perfect - there are many ways it could be enhanced and a few basic things are missing - but it works and its success has stimulated many others into trying (I know of a half dozen efforts at this point).

back to buymusic.com

The layout is ugly and navigation is lacking compared to ITMS. The songs download well (we tried a half dozen) although the licensing terms vary. There are real signs that this was thrown together with great haste and not everything made the deadline - there are numerous broken links and a general inconsistency to the place.

The actual act of buying is not transparent ... user agreements, entering all of your information and then going to a download page. There is no reason why a service needs to be so complicated.

Management of the music on the user's PC basically doesn't exist - you are on your own here.

We tried to burn the music to some CD-Rs. Two of the tracks burned well, but three didn't - each attempt produced a "coaster". Repeated tries to burn these three failed and each bumped the maximum number of burns category. We tried to use their tech support (email), but no replay has come in 36 hours. My guess is they are overwhelmed with questions and problems so, at this point, you are probably on your own.

The successfully burned CDs were then converted to mp3s to test transcoding between wma and mp3. Note that both codecs are lossy and source->mwa->wav->mp3 will sound worse than source->mp3 or source->wma. The test showed a noticeable degradation in quality (unfortunately I didn't have any of the standard source material used to push the codecs) ... turning up the bitrate on the mp3 step to 192kbps helped a bit, but the result was still worse than the original wma file. Both of us felt that wma->mp3(192kbps) sounded something like 96kbps mp3, but your results may vary and careful testing needs to be done. The weakest part seemed to be the addition of some artifacts on percussion. Additionally female voices sounded muddy. Transcoding is always a stupid thing to do if you worry about quality.

The service has the concept of a primary and secondary license. In theory the primary license has the ability to share music with one secondary device (say a work machine) and can write CD-Rs or transfer music to portable devices according to however the copyright owner has defined. We were unable to support multiple secondary devices. We were also unable to read files that were copied in a normal system backup (very strange). The rules suggest that you can not transfer primary licenses - if you get a new PC you (in theory) have to re-buy your music if you want primary access. I have sent mail asking for clarification on this, but haven't received a reply.

Joe (the PC owner) has three digital players. Two can handle windows media files and both claim to be SDMI compliant. We were unsuccessful in transferring music to either device and one of them crashed leaving the existing files damaged.

The quality of the music is variable. Some of it sounded fine, but one file was incomplete (buying it again indicated that the file was indeed broken) and two others sounded wrong -- like poor mp3 copies. I suspect conversions were done in batch without human monitoring (having done this sort of thing before for commercial quality).

So this strikes me as something that is unlikely to survive without major changes. The people involved probably reasoned that if they made a superficial copy of what Apple was doing, they would win due to the near-monopoly position of the PC. In rushing to service they missed numerous subtle and not to subtle points. This reminds me of the months following the success of the first iMac -- numerous PC makers repackaged PCs in colored plastic housings thinking that was the reason for the iMac's success.

There has been some initial bad press on the Net -- much of it from Mac users who offered screen by screen comparisons of buymusic and itms. Buymusic reacted by restricting access to browsers that claim to be Internet Explorer for Windows.

The worry I would have for Buy.com is that doing something this unpolished and customer unfriendly will create bad will with consumers that may transfer over to other parts of their online store.

Buy.com's CEO claimed he would be getting a million customers a day -- actually that wouldn't be a success as Apple's market share is so small. I think he needs something like five million a day to claim he has equaled what they have done. (the first cut at a number is more like 10 million, but a huge number of PCs are locked up at work at night and are unlikely platforms for the music).

Of course I may have misjudged what Windows users will tolerate - it is possible that they will be thrilled with what Mac users would consider a failing experience. Time will tell - but Joe was pretty annoyed with the service.

buymusic.com isn't crispy thought out

BuyMusic is online with a music store for Windows.

Digging in a little one finds that the digital rights management policy is a function of record company - so your results for copying to CD-Rs, other PCs or your portable player will vary. Your portable player must be SDMI compliant.

The licensing isn't exactly clean. From their site:

Music File Licenses When you purchase and download music from BuyMusic.com, your music files are accompanied by a license with certain restrictions. The music files are encrypted with SDMI license technology to be sure that they are used according to your license restrictions. (See Minimum System Requirements.)

IMPORTANT:
Make sure you mean to buy your music from your primary computer (for example: your home computer) so that it contains your primary license. The licenses are non-transferable. Example: You cannot buy your music on your home machine and then transfer your primary license to your work machine. The computer you buy from becomes the primary computer with the primary license for that song. You can only copy music from your primary machine via your primary license. See below for details.

Two Types of Licenses: Primary and Secondary
There are two types of licenses: Primary and Secondary. The primary license is downloaded to the machine you used to buy your music (for example your home computer). Your primary license enables you to copy your music from your primary computer to your digital media players and to burn it to your CDs as many times as the record label allows.

If you download a secondary license, you do so onto a secondary computer (for example your work computer). Your secondary license enables you ONLY to listen to your music on your secondary computer. A secondary license does NOT allow you to copy your music from your secondary computer to your digital media players or to burn it to your CDs.

Make sure you mean to buy your music from your primary computer so that it contains your primary license. The licenses are non-transferable. You cannot buy your music on your work machine and then transfer your primary license to your home machine. The computer you buy from becomes the primary computer with the primary license for that song.

So much for buying music -- you are buying a restricted license to listening to and sometimes moving the music... It is not clear that you can have full use your music if you buy a new PC as there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to transfer the primary license. Digital rights management issues can get very sticky and I would hate to pay for this service's tech support.

Music quality is probably better than mp3 with 128kbps Windows Media Player 9 files. The site advertises $0.79 files, but I found many at $0.99 and $1.29.

As an OS X user I haven't tried it, but would be interested in hearing from people who have. This tries to be a clone of the Apple iTunes music store (down to the commercials), but there are details. To claim success relative to Apple I think these guys should show that they can do 95 million tracks in the first week (Apple did 1 million in the first 5 days with only OS X shoppers) or something that sustains around 25 million tracks a week.

___

It has been quite some time since I've seen a reference to SDMI.

SDMI is a step towards "trusted" computing - while independent from Microsoft's trusted computing, they are clearly interested in hardware control. The history is littered with interesting incidents (as an exercise google SDMI and Felton) and the consortium involved the major music companies directly. Of course this sort of lockdown will become very solid when Microsoft moves most of the world to their form of secure computing. The media companies will cheer and most people will frantically upgrade their PCs to get content - at least in the imaginations of some.

Where will they allow you to go today?

jacqueline du pré and the beethoven Sonatas

While browsing Apple's iTunes music store, I came across a recording of Jacqueline du Pré; and David Barenboim performing the Beethoven Cello Sonatas. (iTunes 4 required).

Du Pré was an amazing cellist - at equivalent experience levels I prefer her Beethoven and Brahms to Yo-Yo's, but he continues to develop and she was deprived of that chance.

There are other interesting cellists to hunt - one of my favorites is Emanuel Feuermann. Very few recordings exist, but they are stunning. He died from infection following a minor operation in the early 1940s. He had just formed a trio with Heifetz and Fubenstein and it was their intention to record much of the piano trio literature.

An LP I have of Feuermann performances notes the pall-bears at the funeral were Ormandy, Serkin, Elman, Humberman, Schnabel, Szell and Toscanini. Toscanini broke down sobbing shouting "this is murder" and had to be replaced. He had just formed a trio with Heifetz and Rubenstein and it was their intention to record much of the piano trio literature.

scarlatti by igor kipnis

The classical CD market did well in the late 1980s as people replaced their LP libraries with CDs. The labels have large back libraries and much of this came from great recording sessions years or even decades ago.

Seraphim Classics offers budget CDs, some of which are surprisingly good. I've been listing to some of Scarlatti's Keyboard Sonatas (iTunes 4 required) with Igor Kipnis at the harpsichord and would recommend it to anyone who is building their library.

beethoven piano trios

Beethoven's piano trios cover a large segment of his life and are entirely different creatures. Compound this with many performances by world class players and it is hard (delightfully hard) to make recommendations.

I was lucky enough to be a graduate student at Stony Brook where the Beaux Arts Trio was resident. I got to know Bernard Greenhouse, the Trio's cellist, and managed to attend more than a few of his master classes as well as performances of the Trio. I love the tone of his cello (a Strad) - perhaps more than any other cello I've heard. One wonderful master class had Yo Yo Ma visiting (he was the hot young thing back then). Yo Yo sounded wonderful on Bernard's cello - of course he didn't know it well to take it to the limits, but he tried some of the Bach 6th Suite on it. Bernard then played the same measures and then Yo Yo responded. I wish I had known enough music to appreciate their conversation at the time - I wish I had a recording.... but back to Beethoven.

My favorite set of performances is the 1965 recording by the then young Beux Arts Trio (Daniel Guilet, Bernard Greenhouse and Menahem Pressler). The BAT is noted for their freshness and total commitment to the performance (Pressler was amazing to watch - almost appearing mad with a mixture of delight and intensity).

When compared to many other performances (especially those in the past two decades), the early trios are fresh. The slower tempos are almost percussive at times and the finales are dazzling - every note is there in the right place, but the pace is much faster than you will find elsewhere.

The centerpiece of most collections is the Archduke and I've never heard a better performance than this one. In listening to my old LP set (in preparation for digitizing it) I found that the Archduke is badly worn, while the rest of the set is only moderately worn.

You need this set .

A bit of searching reveals that Philips reissued the set on CD about ten years ago. Try hunting for Philips 438 948-2PM3. You also may be able to score a copy of the LPs at a good used record store - there is the risk that the previous owner has played it too many times.