Media Reports
Trials of Finding the Music
By Barry Fox
Is the CD now doomed with death from a thousand cuts inflicted by easy home copying, legal and illegal downloading, and the progressive disappearance of stores such as Tower, Fopp, Virgin/Zavvi, and Woolworths?
Tesco (www.tesco.com) sells mainly current chart favorites, MDC (www.mdcmusic.co.uk) now seems to be concentrating on budget Best Of boxed sets, and HMV (www.hmv.com) (owner of a few old Fopps) is morphing into a sell-everything-vaguely-connected-with-music megastore.
Buying chart CDs by big name artists—such as Madonna or Miles Davis—is easy at HMV. But, as with MDC, the specialist stock becomes thinner by the day. Unfamiliar names are mainly on CDs that have been gathering dust in the racks and are unlikely to be re-stocked. When they’re gone, they’re gone. And customer care is decidedly iffy, too.
When I tried to buy tickets for the London concert to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, it took ten minutes to find someone in HMV Oxford Street who could unlock a ticket sales terminal. They could then offer me only an incomplete choice of price options, no seating plan, and no method of printing tickets, despite a £4 booking fee per ticket. I kept my money.
So it’s small wonder that online CD mail-order sites such as Amazon (www.amazon.com) and Play.com (www.play.com) have done so well. But buying CDs this way is now becoming difficult, too. Amazon is adopting the cost-cutting policy of stocking physical CDs for fast-moving music, but switching specialist sales to MP3 downloads. As CD pressings of specialist titles sell out, the last remaining discs are offered at premium prices or cheap download. Amazon already boasts “over 5 million DRM-free songs” at prices that under-cut physical CDs and identical songs from iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes/download).
Try searching Amazon’s website for specialist CDs that suit your personal musical taste. As an example, I tried to buy a couple of early jazz CDs, Kansas City Bounce by Andy Kirk, and Teddy Hill and his Orchestra 1935-1937. Neither is likely to be available in any High Street store, or even by mail order.
In each case, Amazon offers a 256 kbps MP3 download (giving quite adequate quality for early recordings), which is cheap, easy, and quick to find. The complete Teddy Hill CD as an MP3 download costs £4; the same music on pressed CD is on offer from several dealers at prices ranging between £65 and £120!
www.amazon.co.uk/Kansas-City-Bounce-1936-1940/dp/
B0025YW86I/ref=dm_cd_album_lnk?ie=UTF8&qid=1244107510&sr=1-1 and www.amazon.co.uk/Teddy-Hill-1935-1937/dp/B00261M5OU/ref=sr_f3_5?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1244107702&sr=103-5)
Of course, I’d rather have a pressed CD, with printed artwork and sleeve notes, than a home-burned CD and scrappy DIY sleeve and label; but not at a £60 premium and the risk that the CD may become lost in the post.
Trade insiders reckon that Amazon is taking a loss of between 20p and 40p per track when it sells selected tracks at 29p to try and win market share from iTunes—because record companies such as EMI are asking 49p per track for a WMA download and 62p for MP3, and there are overheads such as credit-card charges. But this loss-leading is encouraging more people to buy a download. [p = pence, the British penny. 100 = 1 pound.—Eds.]
The BPI (www.bpi.co.uk), trade body for the UK record companies, says digital downloading now accounts for 10% of music spending. The official line is a big welcome. Says Geoff Taylor, BPI Chief Executive: “The rapid growth of the digital market is clear evidence that British record companies have the business models in place to deliver music to fans online.”
What the BPI doesn’t say is that because MP3 has no DRM [Digital Rights Management, which limits use of digital content—Eds], a purchased file can legitimately be copied to a Sony Walkman or iPod for portable play, or e-mailed, or burned to Red Book CD for playing on any CD player, with no limit on the number of copies that can be made for family and friends.
(DRM)-FREE MUSIC
Nokia’s new Comes with Music (www.comeswithmusic.com) is an all-you-can-eat free music service that comes bundled with selected mobile phones. In Nokia’s own words, NCWM is a “free and legal music download service—which brings you the unprecedented freedom to find, own and listen to the music you love, with unlimited free and legal downloads from the Nokia Music Store—with over 6 million tracks for every taste, ranging from the current Top 40 to a brilliant back catalogue from major and independent labels alike.”
In theory the music (recorded at 192 kbps in Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format, which gives higher quality than MP3) is protected by DRM (also from Microsoft), which locks it inside one PC, and one Nokia portable player. In practice there are already illegal hacks which defeat the DRM. And there’s off-the-shelf software, quite legally sold for recording webcasts and Internet radio, that lets a PC capture any protected music while it is playing—e.g., from Nokia CWM or iTunes—and burn it in CD format to a blank CD.
This software, which I will tactfully not name, lets anyone with a Nokia CWM password download those elusive Andy Kirk and Teddy Hill CDs for free and burn them to CD. And because NCWM offers the legal opportunity to download an unlimited number of complete CDs or individual tracks, which remain accessible even after the year’s free subscription expires, the owner could spend a year building a personal back catalog music store that lasts the rest of his/her life.
How has this crazy situation come to pass?
By failing to agree on an industry standard for music—and movie—downloads, the entertainment industry handed Apple and iTunes the opportunity to create a de facto standard with AAC music and H.264 video. Although AAC and H.264 are open standards that anyone can use if a license is paid, Apple locked up iTunes with a proprietary Digital Rights Management system called FairPlay. By refusing to license FairPlay, Apple turned the de facto standard into a monopoly.
The only way for record companies to break free was to agree to something they had previously, vehemently opposed—DRM-free MP3.
In November 2008, the Entertainment Retailers Association (www.eraltd.org) launched the “MP3 Compatible campaign” with a logo “to indicate to consumers that MP3 downloads will play on every PC and every Mac and on virtually every commercially available digital music player.” This is how Amazon can now compete with Apple.
I recently asked Kim Bayley, ERA’s Director General, and Russel Coultart (who runs online sites for artists ranging from the Beatles to Bob the Builder and was ERA Chairman when the deal was struck) how they had finally persuaded the BPI to agree to DRM-free MP3 download sales.
“It’s been a long, long battle,” says Coultart. “Finally so many people got involved that the noise just got too loud for the BPI to ignore.”
“It had to happen. The BPI finally had to buy in,” says Bayley.
But had the BPI and IFPI world trade body been aware of the risks that all-you-can-eat services such as Nokia Comes With Music pose for the record industry?
FUTURE OF CD
John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of IFPI (www.ifpi.org), carefully ducked the risk question, saying: “There’s a great deal of experimentation going on, and different models are competing but I don’t think anyone expects the end result to be a one-size-fits-all situation. Amid this digital revolution, I don’t see anyone in the music business writing off the CD.”
“We have lived long enough with dire forecasts for the demise of the CD, but there’s no sign of it happening. In 2001 analysts told us there would be no CD manufacturing plants within five years, but they were wrong. The truth is that the CD remains incredibly popular and it still accounts for the lion’s share of recorded music sales. Interestingly, Entertainment Research in the UK last year found a very small minority of consumers who download music legitimately have stopped buying CDs.”
Said Geoff Taylor, BPI Chief Executive: “CD sales continue to account for 84% of the UK market, so even with the fast rise of digital, the format remains a crucial part of the UK’s music buying. For many consumers, including digital consumers, the CD still offers a package of great features—outstanding sound quality, durability, a physical back-up copy, artwork and lyrics, premium packaging and a physical object to own and display.”
When reminded that this completely ignored the risk awareness question, the BPI’s spokeswoman could only add: “We think it’s great so much choice is available for consumers via services that funnel music back to those who make it.”
Fine words, but as anyone who shops for non-chart CDs can see with his/her own eyes, fewer record companies can now afford to press small runs of specialist titles.
BURN ON DEMAND
Fortunately, there is another option—burn on demand. Instead of pressing discs in batches, and warehousing them until sold, the record company burns blank CDs, one at a time, when needed.
When I mail-ordered a CD of the Bill Elliott Swing Orchestra, it arrived from the US as a home-burned CD. I wasn’t best pleased.
A year or so ago, when I ordered a Universal Music CD by 70s UK soul artist Jess Roden from Amazon, it arrived by mail from a supplier called The Disc Kiosk (www.thedisckiosk.com/cdo.htm). It had been burned on demand and the sleeve art was poorly printed, with minimal and incorrect information. At £10 I felt ripped off.
Amazon no longer offers the burn option, and a CD copy now costs up to £140.
//www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B00000JA0F/ref=dp_olp_0?ie=UTF8&condition=all
For a lesson in how to do the burn-on-demand job properly, look no further than the Wyastone Leys (www.wyastone.co.uk) manor and estate deep in beautiful country near Monmouth. This was the home of Nimbus Records, pioneer in Ambisonics, purveyor of top-notch LPs, maker of the first high-quality PCM digital tape recordings, first manufacturer of CDs in the UK and developer of high-density mastering with blue lasers. After some financial upheavals (including being owned by the unlovable rogue Robert Maxwell), Nimbus was bought back in 2002 by its founding directors, changed its name to Wyastone, and started a burn-on-demand service.
The trigger was discovering on buy-back that more than two-thirds of the catalog was unavailable or deleted because it no longer sold in sufficient quantities to meet the minimum re-press requirements.
Says Wyastone’s Business Director, Antony Smith: “It was clear we had to find a way to bring back all deleted titles and create a system that would cost-effectively keep them in print. By returning 500 titles to the catalog and with sales per title averaging just 75 pieces per year it increased our revenues by more than £175,000 per year. More importantly by switching all of our production to this method it reduced our stock by 80% over three years.”
Wyastone worked with Sony DADC in Austria on producing burned discs with predicted 35-year life that cosmetically look exactly like a replicated CD, or DVD. The disc data is stored on computer hard disc servers and verified as a bit-perfect copy of the original. When a disc is ordered, the master audio file is selected along with the matching artwork file. Duplication and digital printing is by automated robotic systems.
There is no minimum quantity for CD or DVD duplication; customers order exactly the quantity they need right now.
[Digital printing matches the quality of traditional lithographic printing, but with the flexibility to print exactly what is needed when it is needed. The artwork is stored on the servers, with the music or video, and can be anything from simple two-page inserts to 64-page stitched booklets, single- or double-sided, in color or black and white. Digital printing is price competitive for quantities less than 2000 copies.]
All new Nimbus titles since May 2002 have been created using this short run manufacturing technique. During that period some have sold many thousand copies and some only a few hundred. In June 2008 Wyastone opened a sister facility in New Jersey, to cut out the cost of transatlantic shipping.
Says Anthony Smith: “We have used the system to re-release all titles on the Nimbus label, restored the Saydisc, Lyrita and MusicMasters (Classical and Jazz) labels and enabled Hall and Red Priest to start their own labels. In total we manufacture for about 160 labels.”
The entire Lyrita catalog—of over 130 titles—will be brought back over the next 18 months. Many of Lyrita’s original analog masters have never been available on CD (www.lyrita.co.uk).
Having seen a batch of jazz discs produced by Wyastone, I can vouch for the fact that I would never have known they were burned to my demand. And I would far rather pay more for them than make downloads and home burns.
On-demand replication looks increasingly like the only way to save the non-chart CD—and probably DVD, too—from extinction. How odd that neither the BPI nor IFPI thought to
mention it. M3
Barry Fox reports on the audio industry as columnist for the British publication Hi-Fi News. His commentary appears in every issue of Multi Media Manufacturer.