Category Archives: Radio

The Tech in My Life #10: Portable music

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As a kid growing up in the 1960s, portable music meant a transistor radio, tuned into one of the pirate radio stations broadcasting from unseaworthy vessels and abandoned structures in international waters off the UK coast. Hence my lifelong love of psychedelic music, as the pirate DJs had playlists beyond the commercial top 40 that was featured on the “Fab” Radio Luxembourg.

Later, the fledging BBC Radio 1 (and later still, the first UK commercial radio stations of the early 1970s) added to the wider choice of popular music, and the introduction of genre-specific programmes, sometimes with a regional focus or predominantly playing album tracks rather than singles.

Aside from the hippies on board Radio Caroline, my night-time listening in the 1970s comprised John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 programme, which kindled my interest in punk and beyond. (Peel once played a track by Greenfield Leisure on which I played guitar.)

Alongside transistor radios, portable cassette decks made it possible to compile your own mixtapes (and copy your mate’s records), but it wasn’t until the Sony Stowaway (later the Walkman) that cassettes became truly portable. Such was the interest in this new playback format that the British Electronic Foundation recorded a cassette-only album in its honour (“Music for Stowaways”), and Bow Wow Wow released a cassette-only album called “Your Cassette Pet”.  Having gone through several different portable cassette players, I ended up with the Sony WM-GX674 released in 1999, to mark the Walkman’s 20th anniversary.

The Sony Walkman unwittingly made it much easier for fans (and bootleggers) to record live concerts, and I still have a bunch of cassettes from London’s Camden Market of live shows I attended only days before. The growth in cassettes led the music industry to launch its ill-conceived “Home Taping is Killing Music” anti-piracy campaign – little did they know what lay ahead….

The next shift in music portability was the Compact Disc equivalent of the Walkman, the imaginatively named Sony Discman. While not 100% skip-proof, the Discman and its competitors did allow commuters, pedestrians and even joggers to enjoy music on the move (using personal earphones in public spaces, of course…).

A number of other recording formats appeared during the early 1990s, such as the Digital Compact Cassette, Digital Audio Tape and the MiniDisc, but despite their superior audio quality and portability, they failed to catch on with the general public, and have mostly disappeared.

Unlike CDs, which are enjoying something of a revival – especially as consumers like the permanence of owning a physical artefact, as opposed to paying rent to a streaming platform. Plus, streaming platforms can remove content at will, making it unavailable to customers. I recently bought a new CD player, the CP2 from KM5. Although not as compact as my old Discman, it is still highly portable, and includes a loud speaker (unlike the Discman), and can both receive and send audio via bluetooth; and unlike the old Discman, it doesn’t require batteries, being chargeable via USB-C.

The internet age brought with it a new audio format, the mp3 file. If the music industry was worried about cassette piracy, it was nothing compared to file-sharing enabled by tech such as BitTorrent, and peer-to-peer platforms that deployed it. But when the first portable mp3 players emerged in the late 1990s, their storage capacity was limited to barely an album’s worth of songs. Also, the mp3 and digital music in general brought with them a new format war, as tech companies and music labels tried to control how consumers access, store and playback their music. This threatened issues of incompatibility, with digital content being locked to specific devices, or to specific record labels, using their own digital rights management protocols.

Thankfully, the first iPod from Apple played most digital file formats, alongside Apple’s own proprietary m4a format, tied to their devices and Apple’s iTunes download store. And thanks to their increased storage capacity, shuffle function and connectivity to iTunes, iPods became hugely popular, especially when a lot of new music was not always released in physical formats. I have had several generations of iPods over the years, and I still own models from 2005 and 2008, which often accompany me on overseas trips. I also have an iPod Touch from 2012, just for good measure.

Now, with my iPhone, I don’t use it to store music, apart from a small amount of content linked to my iTunes account. I don’t subscribe to Apple Music or Spotify, either. Instead, I use my Bandcamp library, and occasionally Soundcloud, as well as streaming some podcasts and radio stations (subject to geo-blocking, of course…). I choose not to use music streaming services because: 1) I prefer to buy my music as direct from the artists as possible, or in formats where artists are earning a better share of royalties compared to streaming; 2) some streaming content is geo-blocked so I can’t access it in Australia 3) I like to be in control of what I am listening to, rather than being a passive consumer of whatever streaming platforms (and marketing budgets) think I should be listening to 4) I don’t trust the streaming algorithms.

One of the reasons I bought an iPhone was to use iOS apps to make my own music, thanks to the plethora of synthesisers and other production tools that were launched off the back of this new and portable operating system. But that’s another story…

Next week #11: Productivity Tools

The Tech in My Life #3: Crystal Radio

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The first radio I owned was a cat’s whisker or crystal receiver, housed in a chic red plastic box. The outward appearance suggested space age technology; the inward reality was a primitive but robust design, and represented my first hands-on experience of electronics.

The advantages of this gadget were portability, ease of use (just a single tuning dial), and no need for a battery or external power source.

The downsides were: limited amplification (no built-in speaker, and the audio was via a single ear-piece – no WiFi or bluetooth in those days!); the need to be connected to an external aerial (a long length of copper wire dangling out of my bedroom window); and it only received medium wave radio signals.

But the worlds it opened up were endless. This was the days before BBC Radio One, and the height of pirate radio stations such as Radio Caroline and “wonderful” Radio London. Listening to the sounds of the psychedelic sixties aged 6 or 7 were formative years in the development of my musical tastes. And thanks to certain atmospheric conditions I could sometimes hear European stations, which sounded very exotic to my young ears.

Next week #4: Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck 

Music streaming is so passé…

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Streaming services have changed the way we listen to music, and not just in the way the content is delivered (primarily via mobile devices), or the sheer number of songs available for our listening pleasure (whole catalogues at our fingertips).

These streaming platforms (which have been with us for more then 15 years) have also led to some more negative consequences: the deconstruction of albums into individual tracks (thereby undermining artists’ intention to present their work as a whole, rather than its component parts); shifting the relationship we have with our music collections from “ownership” to “renting”; paying paltry levels of streaming fees compared to royalties on physical sales and downloads; pushing suggested content via opaque algorithms and “recommender engines” rather than allowing listener self-discovery; squashing music into highly compressed audio formats, thus impairing the listening quality; and reducing album cover art work and design into tiny thumbnail images that don’t do justice to the original. (If you can’t appreciate the significance and importance of album art work, this forthcoming documentary may change your mind.)

Of course, streaming is not the only way to consume music – we still have vinyl, CDs and even cassettes in current production. (And let’s not forget radio!) Although optimistic numbers about the vinyl revival of recent years have to be put in the context of the streaming behemoths, there is no doubt that this antique format still has an important role to play, for new releases, the box-set and reissue industry, and the second-hand market.

For myself, I’ve largely given up on Spotify and Apple Music: with the former, I don’t think there is enough transparency on streaming fees (especially those paid to independent artists and for self-released recordings) or how more popular artists and their labels can pay to manipulate the algorithms, plus the “recommendations” are often out of kilter with my listening preferences; with the latter, geo-blocking often means music I am looking for is not available in Australia. (As I am writing, Spotify is playing a track which has been given the wrong title, proving that their curation and editorial quality is not perfect.)

Streaming can also be said to be responsible for a type of content narrowcasting – the more often a song is streamed (especially one that has been sponsored or heavily promoted by a record label) the more often it will appear in suggested playlists. Some recent analysis by Rob Abelow suggests that fewer than 10% of songs on the Spotify billion stream club were released before 2000. This may have something to do with listener demographics (e.g., digital natives), but it also suggests that songs only available as streams (i.e., no download or physical release), or songs heavily marketed by labels wanting to promote particular content to a specific audience, will come to dominate these platforms.

Further evidence of how streaming is skewed towards major artists is a recent post by Damon Krukowski, showing how independent musicians like him are being “encouraged” to be more like megstars such as Ed Sheeran. Never mind the quality of the music, just think about the “pre-saves” and “countdown pages” (tools which are not yet available to every artist on Spotify?).

I’ve been using both Bandcamp and Soundcloud for more than 10 years, to release my own music and to discover new content. I began with Soundcloud, but soon lost my enthusiasm because they kept changing their business model, and they enabled more popular artists to dominate the platform with “premium” services and pay-to-play fees that favour artists and labels with bigger marketing budgets. Whereas Bandcamp appears to be doing a better job of maintaining a more level playing field in regard to artist access, and a more natural way for fans to connect with artists they already know, and to discover new music they may be interested in.

But all of this simply means that streaming has possibly peaked, at least as an emerging format. The industry is facing a number of challenges. Quite apart from ongoing disputes about royalty payments and album integrity, streaming is going to be disrupted by new technologies and business models, thanks to blockchain, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens. These startups are going to improve how artists are remunerated for their work, create better engagement between creators and their audiences, and provide for more transparent content discovery and recommendations. Elsewhere, the European Union is considering ways to preserve cultural diversity, promote economic sustainability within the music industry, remove the harmful effects of payola, make better use of content metadata for things like copyright, creativity and attribution, and provide clear labeling on content that has been created using tools like AI.

Just for the record, I’m not a huge fan of content quotas (a possible outcome from the EU proposals), but I would prefer to see better ways to discover new music, via broadcast and online media, which are not dependent on regimented Top 40 playlists, the restrictive formats of ubiquitous TV talent shows, or record label marketing budgets. Australia’s Radio National used to have a great platform for new and alternative music, called Sound Quality, but that came off air nearly 10 years ago, with nothing to replace it. Elsewhere, I tune into BBC Radio 6 Music’s Freak Zone – not all of it is new music, but there is more variety in each 2 hour programme than a week’s listening on most other radio stations.

Next week: More Cold War Nostalgia

 

Musical Idolatry

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As a rebooted version of “Australian Idol” appears on network television, I can’t decide whether programs like this are a result of the current state of the music industry OR are they the cause of the industry’s malaise…?

I’ll admit upfront that I know I’m not the target demographic for these shows (Idol, Voice, Talent…), so I’m not even going to comment on the quality of the musical content or the presentation format.

Before we had recorded music or broadcast radio, the industry relied upon song writers selling sheet music, in the hope their compositions would get performed in theatres and concert halls – and audiences would want to buy copies of the songs to perform at home.

Then, radio largely killed the music hall, and with the advent of the 7″ vinyl record, together they eventually displaced the reliance on sheet music sales. From the early 1960s onwards, we also saw more artists writing, performing and recording their own material, which transformed both music publishing and the record industry itself.

Although record labels still exist as a means to identify, develop and commercialise new talent, only three of the so-called major labels have survived – a process of industry consolidation and M&A activity that began in earnest in the 1980s – ironically, a period now regarded as a “Golden Age” of pop music.

A key legacy of the punk movement of the 1970s was a network of independent music labels, distributors, publishers and retailers – along with a strong DIY ethic of self-released records and independent fanzines, thanks to lower production costs and easier access to manufacturing and distribution.

Now, there is more new music being released than is humanly possible to listen to. It is relatively quick and simple to produce and release your own music – record on a home laptop (even a tablet or smart phone will do), upload the finished mp3 files to user-accessible platforms such as Bandcamp and SoundCloud, and promote yourself on social media. However, without significant marketing dollars to buy an audience, those hoping to become an overnight viral sensation may be disappointed. And even if you do manage to get traction on one of the global streaming platforms, the income from digital plays is a fraction of what artists used to earn from physical sales.

So that’s how the major labels (and some of the larger independents) still manage to dominate the industry: they have the budget to spend on developing new talent, and they have money for marketing campaigns (and possibly to influence those streaming algorithms). Plus, they have access to a huge back catalogue that they can carry on repackaging at a fraction of the original production costs.

It’s also true, however, that the shorter shelf-life of many newer artists means that labels don’t have such an appetite for long-term development plans, where they are willing to nurture a new talent for several years, before expecting a return on their initial investment. Just as with fast fashion, the pop music industry has become hooked on a fast turnover of product, because they know only a fraction of new releases will ever become a hit, and they have to keep feeding the beast with new content.

Which brings me back to programs like Idol. First, it’s one way for the music industry to fast-track their next success. Second, it literally is a popularity contest – the industry gets an idea of what the public likes, so they can pre-determine part of their release schedule. Third, hosting these contests on commercial TV means advertising dollars and sponsorship deals can help defray their A&R and marketing costs (or, at least help them to prioritise where to spend their money).

But let’s not pretend that these singing shows are nothing more than televised karaoke. Performers don’t get to play their own songs, or even play any instruments (as far as I can tell). The program content relies on cover versions – usually songs that are well-known, and therefore already road-tested on the audience. Plus, by choosing to perform a particular song, a contestant may hope to win by association or identification with the successful artist who originally recorded it. But contestants are not free to choose whatever song they like – my understanding is there are only 1,000 (popular) songs to choose from, just like karaoke.

In pretending to discover new talent, in part, the industry is simply hoping to re-release songs in their back catalogue, albeit with a new face on the record. Through the restrictive format of these programs, the industry is not discovering new musicians or finding new song writers and composers, and it’s certainly not forging any new direction in music, because of the reliance upon an existing formula, and dependence on a very specific (and somewhat narrow) strand of pop music.

Next week: Eat The Rich?