[Dixielandjazz] The Cloud that ate your music

[Stephen G Barbone]

PART 2

Note to Bill Haesler. Perhaps you might put your collection in the  
cloud?



Cheers,

Steve



Now everyone, not just a critic, can feel awash in music, with an  
infinitude of choices immediately at hand. But each of those choices  
is a diminished thing; attainable without effort, disposable without a  
second thought, just another icon in a folder on a pocket-size screen  
with pocket-sized sound. The tricky part, more now than ever, is to  
make any new release feel like an occasion: to give a song more impact  
than a single droplet out of the cloud. This presents a challenge to  
culturally ambitious musicians: before they can be larger than life,  
they have to be larger than the LCD screen.

Or they can try to conquer that screen and play the Internet as an  
instrument, using its defining attribute: interactivity. When Google  
replaced its logo with a virtual instrument for Les Paul’s 96th  
birthday — not strictly speaking a guitar but a harp, with one note  
per string — people worldwide played tunes on it and recorded them  
into the cloud. And of course there are smartphone apps to simulate  
guitars, keyboards, drums and recording studios.

Bjork’s next album, “Biophilia,” is due to arrive this fall with a  
smartphone app built around every song: apps that diagram the song in  
both conventional music notation and invented graphic notation, that  
remap the songs as scientific phenomena like (among other things)  
planetary systems and crystal structures, that encourage listeners to  
toy with components of the music to create songs of their own.

“I’m excited to embrace a different handshake between the object and  
sound,” Bjork said in an e-mail. “It seems like every couple of  
decades this takes a somersault, and I enjoy the fresh point of view,  
like the honeymoon of the new format where you can really have an  
effect on the overall direction, and things like enjoyment, love and  
freedom matter again.”

She added, “I definitely wanted the songs to be a spatial experience,  
where you can play with lightning or a crystal or the full moon and  
the song changes. I would like to feel the apps are equal to the song  
in the same way I have always aimed for the music video to be equal to  
the song: the 1+1 is 3 thing. Not that it works every time, but you  
have to aim for it.”

But while musicians learn to play in the cloud, I need it as a  
repository. For the moment, the much-ballyhooed cloud music players  
leave me unimpressed. Each has different mechanisms, features, prices  
and limitations, including one major one: They all depend on first  
uploading the collection into the cloud.

Google Music Beta’s Music Manager has been running for days on my  
laptop, and it’s barely one-third of the way through a mere 4,000  
songs from a single hard drive — a tiny random fraction of the  
collection. Amazon and Apple will automatically add the music  
purchased through their respective stores, but the rest is slow going.

Apple is also promising that later this year, for a fee it will share  
with record companies, that it will implement a service called iTunes  
Match, which will scan and recognize music and add Apple’s own copies  
without uploading. That was an idea that mp3.com implemented back in  
2000, when its Beam-it function recognized CDs in home computers to  
add immediately to online collections. But Beam-it was soon stopped by  
a record-company lawsuit. Now Apple has gotten permission from the  
major labels, though at least one independent, the archivally minded  
Numero Group, has turned down iTunes Match, describing Apple’s  
financial terms as a “pittance.”

Meanwhile, as many technology writers have pointed out, iTunes Match  
as currently described will in effect launder music that was copied  
illicitly, replacing home-ripped files with standardized, good-quality  
MP3s. But now record labels and publishers will receive 70 percent of  
Apple’s fee.

As for the far greater part of my music library that’s just on CDs,  
well, it’s too bad no one is bringing back Beam-it, and even then the  
uploading would be endless. But yes, it’s charming to see an album  
that’s nowhere in my phone’s memory available for listening, with the  
option to copy selected files for offline (which to me means subway)  
play. The cloud services are, after all, just getting started; speed  
and storage capacity will only increase.

For me, though, the great hope of the cloud is the subscription  
services, like MOG and Rdio. Their catalogs are deep, their interfaces  
sensible, their sound quality decent though not spectacular. For every  
fan who imagines herself a D.J., there’s a new social curatorial model  
arising in these services, somewhere between the old homemade cassette  
mixtape handed to a friend and full-scale broadcasting, with a giant  
potential library. You can flaunt or hide what you’re listening to;  
you can get ideas from others’ playlists or copy them wholesale.

But as deep as the subscription catalogs go, they aren’t deep enough:  
imported albums, out-of-print albums, minuscule independents and big- 
time holdouts like the Beatles aren’t in that sector of the cloud.

Yet, again, there’s hope. Apple’s Match is a sign that copyright  
holders are starting to rethink their licensing terms for the cloud,  
which will make subscription catalogs even larger. And, practically  
speaking, for those obscure, orphaned releases there is the unlicensed  
but hyperactive community of collectors who continue to share their  
finds online, with downloads just a search away. As for sound quality  
— well, maybe that’s wishful thinking.

But I have to stay optimistic that it won’t be another decade before  
all my discs really can disappear into the cloud. And then, having  
solved the space problem, I can turn to something even more  
intractable: the time to listen to it all.