Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple is working on a new digital music format

time.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#61

Post by snowwrestler »

MeadowTheory wrote: post #44
snowwrestler wrote: post #6

I am fully supportive of the idea that musicians and songwriters should get compensated for their work in proportion with its popluarity. Just because people love to make music, that doesn't mean they don't want to save for retirement, buy a house, send kids to college, maybe do some investing, etc. If you pirate an album you like, instead of buying it, you're taking advantage of those artists. [steps off soapbox] Th…

Musician weighing in: Musicians and bands had been making a living for thousands of years before the recording industry was invented, and they will continue to do so for thousands of years after the recording industry has crumbled to the ground (mostly due to their own greed and stupidity). While the recording industry certainly allowed some musicians to become filthy rich, that was mostly through exposure. Musicians…

The idea that piracy hurts big labels is laughable. They long ago read the writing on the wall and started signing new acts to 360 deals that give them a cut of every revenue stream.

"Buy a fucking t-shirt"? There are two possibilities.

1) The artist is signed to an exploitative label deal. If this is the case, the artist is not seeing any more money from that t-shirt than they do from an album sale. Nor are they taking home their gate, so seeing them in person isn't helping either.

2) The artist is signed to a limited or ethical deal. If this is the case, then they have a good relationship with their label, and pirating music will hurt them either directly (lost royalties) or indirectly (hurting the label and forcing succesful bands to sign with a major).

I'm sure you play music, but I think your sense of the industry is incomplete or not up to date.

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#62

Post by snowwrestler »

MeadowTheory wrote: post #50
72deluxe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right - it seems popular even on HN where people make a living that musicians are exempt from earning a living through recording and selling music. Wrapped in daft phrases like "music wants to be free", it seems fashionable to engage in copyright infringement for music, and I think it stinks. Arguments that record labels ("fat cats") get a cut of the earnings are not relevant - the musician signed with the lab…

No, no, no. Emphatically no. I am speaking a musician here: by the time you are earning an appreciable amount of money from album sales, you are no longer just "making a living". Most musicians that support themselves through music do it by touring and selling merchandise (including physical recordings), and musicians that get famous have usually been doing this for years before they start making money off of recordi…

Right, because studio time, publishing CDs, booking tour dates, and promoting it all is free.

Before an artist earns money from album sales, they have to pay for all that stuff. When album sales drop, either the artists get less of all those things, or they have to pay for them from other revenue sources. Either way it's not good for them.

The idea that album revenues never did anything for anyone makes no sense.

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#63

Post by colanderman »

Pxtl wrote: post #58
colanderman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a file that contains files" How does this differ from a ZIP file? (Keep in mind all modern OSes support treating ZIP files like directories.)

First, because folders are far more performant for accessing child objects. That's mostly an implementation detail, but a big one - there are tremendous optimizations made on the filesystem that are not accessible for something like ZIP. Particularly relevant to bulk searching/listing - the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files. Second (and this is more a problem in Windows…

the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files.

The problem with this is the concept of "files with subfiles" is not a thing outside of ReiserFS. Sure, if people used ReiserFS, they'd have this feature, but how would you transport such files between machines? You'd have to serialize them somehow: this is exactly what ZIP is.

(Remember HFS resource forks? Me neither. They suffered from exactly the same issue: ambiguous transport semantics.)

Optimizations around such things are exactly that – optimizations – and should not affect the semantics of the objects involved. The proper way to approach this is to decouple data storage from indexing from file semantics. Hence a better approach would be to permit access to contents of ZIPs using FUSE (on Linux) or what-have-you, and index the contents in a database like Spotlight (on OS X).

If a file is a .zip, then it's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's not a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music archive). But not both.

Ignoring that OOXML (.docx etc.) already takes this approach (zipped XML files), the problem of allowing multiple different programs to access the same type of file is a minor enhancement to the OS. (I'm pretty sure you already can configure Windows to allow .docx to "Open With..." a ZIP program.) Supporting files-which-are-also-folders requires breaking quite a few more assumptions in OSes.

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#64

Post by MeadowTheory »

snowwrestler wrote: post #61
MeadowTheory wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musician weighing in: Musicians and bands had been making a living for thousands of years before the recording industry was invented, and they will continue to do so for thousands of years after the recording industry has crumbled to the ground (mostly due to their own greed and stupidity). While the recording industry certainly allowed some musicians to become filthy rich, that was mostly through exposure. Musicians…

The idea that piracy hurts big labels is laughable. They long ago read the writing on the wall and started signing new acts to 360 deals that give them a cut of every revenue stream. "Buy a fucking t-shirt"? There are two possibilities. 1) The artist is signed to an exploitative label deal. If this is the case, the artist is not seeing any more money from that t-shirt than they do from an album sale. Nor are they tak…

So, you think that, because the major record labels have stepped up their game and started exploiting musicians further and through different channels, the right thing to do is keep feeding them cash? Give me a break. Your critique is targeted only at the issue as it pertains to artists working for major record labels. My whole point is that the recording industry was controlled an unstable monopoly based on price-fixing and exploitative contracts from the beginning, and supporting them does not, in any way, equal helping artists.

Although I'd prefer not to dredge this into a petty back-and-forth ad hominem contest, it may be your sense of the industry that is incomplete. Many smaller labels are turning to free digital releases, treating these as a form of cheap and highly effective advertising, and still selling enough physical recordings and merchandise to make a profit, all while giving a larger portion of the revenues to artists. By presenting the situation as false dichotomy between "stealing from artists" or not, you ignore the fact that there may be a better model for the industry as a whole, with more equitable sharing of profits, and you also ignore the incalculable social benefits of free and open access to information and artistic works. In the real world, moral choices are complex, and often you are presented with the choice between two bad things, supporting a fundamentally corrupt and exploitative recording industry that is expropriating profits through collusion and unethical business practices or possibly taking some money away from some people.

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#65

Post by zeruch »

pain_perdu wrote: post #34
imaginenore wrote: post #5

> Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music Bono, I will tell you a secret. It's the good music that's irresistible, not some DRM garbage which you don't even have the balls to discuss.

Well-put sir, thank you for this.

This is the band with the most sociopathhic manager since Peter Grant, who has been trying to push DRM before: http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507 (disclosure, the link is my own write up of a speech by Paul McGuinness at a Medem conf)

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#66

Post by Ryanmf »

dandelany wrote: post #18

Here's something I've always wanted: A consumer music file format that preserves all of the underlying tracks ('stems') so that they can be adjusted while you listen to the song. Imagine listening to a recording and going "ooh, that bassline", and then turning up the bassist and turning down everything else to hear it better. Or easily "remixing" while you listen by eg. applying a filter to only the drums. You could…

Just yesterday I was investigating music/production startups, and one of the few ideas I came across that seemed halfway-interesting was Splice[0]. On the producer side they have plugins for a few DAWs that enable easier collaboration and version tracking and so forth. But what comes of that (and why it's relevant to your comment) is a Soundcloud-ish embeddable web player that breaks out all the tracks/stems into a timeline beneath the main player interface.

It's pretty interesting, although I don't know how much of an opportunity is there, for some of the same reasons mentioned in the other replies. Musicians and producers can be incredibly reticent about this stuff.

[0]http://splice.com

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#67

Post by tzs »

shaggy wrote: post #28

Above CD quality has been tried many times. Currently, the service with the most to offer in terms of catalog is https://www.hdtracks.com/faq . You do have to re-buy albums you might already own, but the choices are ever expanding and include a lot of great stuff. The point in the article about the new format helping lesser known artists really shows just how little U2 and Bono actually get about the current state of…

> To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible

Was Cole Porter a performer? What I see after a bit of searching indicates he was a songwriter/composer, so what would be the attraction of a Cole Porter tour?

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#68

Post by MeadowTheory »

snowwrestler wrote: post #62
MeadowTheory wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, no. Emphatically no. I am speaking a musician here: by the time you are earning an appreciable amount of money from album sales, you are no longer just "making a living". Most musicians that support themselves through music do it by touring and selling merchandise (including physical recordings), and musicians that get famous have usually been doing this for years before they start making money off of recordi…

Right, because studio time, publishing CDs, booking tour dates, and promoting it all is free. Before an artist earns money from album sales, they have to pay for all that stuff. When album sales drop, either the artists get less of all those things, or they have to pay for them from other revenue sources. Either way it's not good for them. The idea that album revenues never did anything for anyone makes no sense.

Most artists tour for years before signing to a major label, during which time they most likely book all their own shows, do their own promotion (with maybe a tiny bit of help from the venue). They have often released albums on a smaller indie label first, usually recorded on studio time for which they themselves paid. There are many artists that have made a living doing things like this for years and even decades, and they are harmed by a music culture which values artists purely based on the number of units of recordings they can move. It is not a simple binary choice between making things bad for the artists or good for the artists by pirating music or not. I personally think that piracy is the catalyst that will effect a tremendous and positive shift in the music industry, where the artistic qualities of the music and, importantly, the performance of music, take primacy over moving enough album units to hit the quarterly sales goal. Maybe the resulting industry will have a lower overall profitability, but maybe that's not entirely a bad thing, since most of the profits the recording industry has made were based on unethical business practices. The idea that this will spell the end of music because musicians won't be able to make a living is absurd and betrays your lack of vision and historical perspective

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#69

Post by ssharp »

tmuir wrote: post #47
startupfounder wrote: post #10

Apple should buy Pono, Neil Young & Jon Hamm's music "high-resolution" 24-bit 192kHz audio company and have Neil play some real Rock & Roll at Apple events.

I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but Pono is bound to fail. Throughout the evolution of widely adopted audio formats, the sound quality has always decreased. The average listener doesn't care about fidelity. They can't tell the difference. They care about convenience. Cassette tapes were better than vinyl records, because they were more portable. CDs were better than tapes, because you could skip tracks. Mp3s were better t…

>The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.

I don't think the vast majority of people could either tell the difference or care about the difference between much larger compression gaps than that.

I received three free months of Sirius radio when I purchased a certified used car. After a few minutes of flipping through the channels, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to such highly compressed music with tons of artifacts, yet lots of people pay for subscriptions.

Re: Apple is working on a new digital music format

#70

Post by bequanna »

I am having a tough time understanding this whole Apple + U2 'partnership' (or whatever it is).

It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant.

Hell, I'm almost 30 and few of my friends have any interest in U2. I just asked my 21 year old cousin and she can't name a single U2 song.

Maybe some of my contemporaries think this is interesting or cool, I just find it odd.

Post reply on HN