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Music in the World of Digital Information

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The iPod, the Internet, and information technology have changed music and sound forever. If there had been no metamorphosis in the recording industry at the hands of digital audio workstations such as Pro Tools, Cubase, and Logic, the major upheaval that exists within the music industry as a whole would still be present. Of course, the two differing aspects of the digital music revolution are intrinsically linked, but the importance of this prior point is that the dissemination of music to the public has become part of a debate that has derailed over 200 years of basic copyright law. “Before the Internet, the rights of authors, publishers, and the public were generally aligned because of one important fact: providing the public with access to content was costly." Today, the interests of artists, distributors, and the public are all entirely divergent.

The concept of intellectual property, as well as the ability to copyright that information, stems directly from the ability to create “exact” digital replicas of any book, movie, or album in a virtually endless manner. In the 1990s and early 2000s, debate raged among scholars of copyright law as to how, why, and/or when digital copyright enforcement of certain industries, companies, artists, or private individuals should occur. Massive personal sharing sites such as Napster dominated the music industry in a manner never before encountered in its fairly brief history. By 2011, the debate seems long decided after numerous lawsuits involving Napster itself and popular, high profile bands such as Metallica. Nevertheless, initially: “Self-described copyright ‘optimists’ argue that copyright law should be extended and modified to allow copyright holders to control all distribution and use of digital information… According to the optimists, the free downloading and file sharing of music facilitated by Napster is nothing more than theft… In response to efforts to expand copyright, the critics primarily rely upon some fundamental or overriding public interest." While it may seem that some public interest loophole has been found and exploited by Internet giants such as Pandora, Last.fm, Jango, and other online distributors, the truth is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 quelled much of this debate. Following the DMCA, satellite and Internet radio corporations were required to pay both publishing and performance royalties for each song, in contrast to the sole publishing royalties paid by conventional radio. In 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board agreed to a proposal set forth by SoundExchange, a non-profit performance rights organization (spearheaded by representatives of EMI, Sony, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Tommy Boy Records, and Matador Records) to effectively double royalties paid by solely Internet providers. In essence, despite the efforts of many lawyers, the Internet succumbed to the modern era of intellectual property copyright. Any public broadcast of any song is considered a “performance,” allowing major corporations (and some artists as well) to tax what is essentially, in essence, binary information. Among many repercussions, the explosion of independently produced and distributed music in terms of availability and affordability has been key. Because the two spheres of music distribution have for so long now remained at odds with one another, each often subverts the other utilizing a specific new form of file encoding, file compression, file encryption, digital watermarking, and/or a whole slough of other techniques.

In the midst of all this, where is the music consumer? He or she is sitting at home or standing in a Best Buy somewhere scratching their heads and wondering if they should stick to CDs, buy the latest iPod touch, convert all their old vinyl to MP3 using a USB turntable, or download only multi-gigabyte, lossless .FLAC or Ogg Vorbis files. Consumers still willing to pay are not given a break: CDs are cheaper, but now LPs come with MP3 downloads as well. It isn’t surprising most honest people have turned to Internet “piracy” as their primary means for music acquisition. Websites such as thepiratebay.org, Megaupload, and Mediafire are only a few of the seemingly endless sites dedicated solely to sharing music quickly, illegally, and in formats easily downloaded but not easily traceable. One implication of this trend, born directly of the digital information age, is the way that a musician makes a living has begun to shift (back) from songs and albums to concert tickets. Another major implication of this swing towards digital theft of music is that the specific format for most private collections is becoming more and more homogenous: the MP3 dominates audio more prominently than CDs or cassettes could ever manage. MP3 as a means of audio signal formatting has various limits and capabilities, but I believe that it’s prevalent position in the audio community, both legal and illegal, make it a suitably opportune format for database construction.

In some small sense, massive popular encoding of music into MP3 files has altered what humans hear on the spectral level. We are born with the ability to hear frequencies ranging from 20 Hz (a deep low rumble) all the way to 20 kHz (a high-pitched and incessant ringing). This range allows us the ability to hear music in a vast variety of ways through the use of different frequency emphases. The specific “tonality” or “sound” of something, known as timbre, is based mainly on the prominence of these certain frequencies. Modification of certain frequencies has a long history in the music industry through the use of a signal processor known as equalization. Different equalization settings allow for a similar song to become something else entirely in its timbre and even the mood it invokes. MP3 encoding places limits on the frequency spectrum that is heard. Though it is nominal in amount, it is still quite audible when compared to CD, but especially when contrasted with older analog listening technologies. Still, MP3 also places limits on file size—perhaps the most important consideration for any database. The limited digital space required by MP3s is what has made them so pervasive for both personal use and across the Internet—beforehand the size of music files themselves was the prevention of any online database or storage system: “The biggest technological challenge… has already been mentioned: the network speed available to most people is still too slow for audio applications." For the purposes of modern education, unless critically listening to classical music or for the specific objectives of an audio program, MP3 is entirely suitable. Additionally, for the purposes of storage and archival, MP3 is more suitable than any other readily available digital format. For these reasons, I recommend its use for the majority of audio files in my concluding proposal.


Sources:
The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology Design and Architecture of Distributed Sound Processing and Database Systems for Web-Based Computer Music Applications