Simon says ... - music tag

My requirements for purchasing music online

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:52:00 GMT

I've been a CD buyer so far for various reasons. First I like albums. I mostly listen to whole albums and to me they are conceptual coherent works which should be enjoyed in one piece. Artwork, lyrics, even the choice of the CD case are part of a design decision, part of the whole work (probably not the case most the time anyway). Apart from that I'm a collector. When I buy something I like to have something physical in my hands (does that make me a capitalist?). And I like to put this thing into my shelf, having a visible collection.

But all that aside there are also reasons why I don't like buying music online because of how music is sold online. Let's first step back and look at what you can actually buy: you buy the right to download a specific track or set of tracks from a specific platform often for a certain number of times only and often with DRM (although that is going away fortunately). I don't know about you but I never liked those conditions. Maybe it is more likely that my CDs start going bad than exhausting the number of allowed downloads being caused by hard drive crashes. But think about what else might happen: you might loose your account data for the shop's website (ok, they can send you that), your account might get hacked, the website might go out of business. Or you happen to be somewhere else on the world and don't have your music collection with you so you just want to quickly download some tunes again.

Doesn't this last point seem quite realistic in today's mobile world? We don't always run around with all of our data these days. Rather the trend seems to be to put it online. For music there are various websites which help you with that. Some let you upload your collection of files and allow you to access it anytime, or even let your friends access it in places where that is legal. Others don't even require you to upload your collection but just scan the files on your drive and provide you with access to the files they have on their drives already.

Let's carry this idea a bit further. What if ownership of music was more decentralised? What if what you bought was a certificate saying that you own a certain piece of music and you could go to any music shopping / streaming / download website (the difference wouldn't matter anymore) to require access to it. We would need services confirming those certificates (and not only the original shop you bought it from in case that goes out of business). And we would need an identifier infrastructure to be clear which piece of music the certificate actually talks about. MusicBrainz could probably provide that. Maybe they need to work a bit more on the level of detail of their data but maybe that doesn't matter anymore with online music because most people don't seem to care about editions and remasters anymore. So which level of abstraction in FRBR or similar models is concerned is something to figure out. But the music industry also didn't really embrace MusicBrainz so far, they prefer re-inventing the wheel and building up their own identifier system. At least that was the plan some time ago, did they give up on it again?

So, how likely is that this happens? Not very likely I think because people would need to agree here and the music industry would probably be scared of the idea of losing control.
Also it seems like they waited too long with changing things anyway and now people prefer to just download songs and not pay for them. But to me it seems like something that suits the people's needs while still being on a totally legal basis. I could still own stuff (which is not the case with flat-rate models) and have convenient access to it wherever and whenever I feel like it.

Events for November

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:36:26 GMT

I knew I've come to the right place.

On 11 November I'll be attending SWIG UK. That's gonna be my first conference thing so I'm curious as to what to expect. It's also the first time I will see Semantic Web people live. ;-)

Then, on the 30th of the same month I will finally see Threshold for the first time. They will rock Poole together with Galahad − tried to get into them without success so far but maybe the gig will change that.

Looking forward very much to both events!

Update (22/10/2008): Rejoiced too soon: the Threshold concert got rescheduled to January. Oh well, better late than never.

Update (25/10/2008): And now the Threshold concert got cancelled completely.

England

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:17:00 GMT

Tomorrow I'm off to Southampton, England to finish my degree there. Unfortunately not at the University of Southampton (where they do lots of Semantic Web stuff) but at Solent. Still, I'm looking forward to meeting interesting people, doing exciting projects and seeing some of the many British artists I like live (Threshold are already on my radar for November ;-) ).

Free prog (as in beer)

Thu, 24 May 2007 23:20:00 GMT

Those who always thought "Progressive rock? WTF?" can try out some for free at Galileo Records. This small label has some unknown prog acts signed to it and apparently has problems with illegal downloads. So to fight piracy they put a compilation online which can be downloaded for free. This may serve as a good overview of what prog can do today - but mustn't be seen as typical for the "genre" because there is no "typical" in prog. Which perhaps you can see a bit in this compilation.

Anyway, enjoy listening!

Humour and music

Wed, 23 May 2007 11:52:21 GMT

While listening to Steve Thorne - God Bless America I conceived the idea that humour and music are a tricky combination. You want to listen to music again and again but do you still find a joke funny after having heard it a hundred times? Thus this song feels a bit tawdry after a while - even though it's actually brilliant.

Dream Theater in Bonn

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:20:00 GMT

Finally: in June I will experience Dream Theater live on their "Chaos in Motion" world tour. On the 16th they will enter the stage in Bonn right after Riverside (wow!), other concerts will get a warm-up from Symphony X.
Sure there will be a Porcupine Tree concert in Cologne on 20 June which I would like to see as well; but my priorities are set and I don't have the money for two concerts in such a short time. Anyone got Genesis tickets for free? ;)