June 30, 2008
Neil Young’s answer to iTunes
When I met legendary rocker Neil Young recently, he was pretty disparaging about iTunes. It’s like all new digital media technologies, he said: great for convenience, but the sound quality sucks (since I have a tin ear when it comes to music, I’ll leave others to judge the validity of that comment. But Peter Gabriel, another musician who’s been working on new ideas for distributing digital music, certainly agrees.)
Young let slip that he is now talking to record companies about licensing an alternative digital platform that he has been working on - something , he claimed, of far higher quality that could provide an alternative to the privacy-prone download world, and perhaps even a new business model for music.
The technology behind this was first shown off last month at Sun’s JavaOne conference (we blogged about it here.) Young, who is something of a techie, has spent 15 years experimenting with different technologies to assemble a complete archive of his career. He is now finally ready to release the first multi-media instalment. It will come out on Blu-ray discs, with the capability of adding extra content in future through downloads.
Bemoaning the fact that he can never keep a secret, Young told me he was now trying to promote this as a broader media platform:
We’re in discussions right now about developing our own media platform based on that. Something record companies can sell their artists’ works on. Something that can’t be downloaded, something that’s got much more depth.
It has every media component you could want, and they’re all married together in a platform. That means other artists could use it, other record companies could use it and gain the knowledge of our 15-year development curve.
This needn’t be limited to music, according to Young.
How about the history of the Civil War? How about the British Empire? If you have a career spanning 40 years, maybe it’s George Washington’s life. It could be a lot of things.
There’s so much to this that we can’t tell, that you can’t see in one sitting. Maybe there’s a structure there that could save the music business - a new thing, where it is creating new products.
When it comes to convenience, speed and low cost, though, iTunes (and piracy) take a lot of beating.
I read the linked article. It basically sounds like he is saying “We’re going to fight piracy by making so much data you wont want to pirate it.” Not the most impressive solution I’ve heard.
Fundamentally, we’re limited by the bandwidth of our eyes and ears. You can only do so much to make it more interesting.
Of course, the cost of such media is massive, and has to compete with Wikipedia. Do I want the official version, over 50 blue-ray discs which I have to change in and out, or do I want to browse the internet? Of course, he plans to update from the internet, which is at odds with his desire for a mass of informaiton.
Just because Bluray supports multi-layer discs, doens’t mean its “got much more depth.”
Face it, information has reached the point where it dissimnates freely. Piracy or not, the speed of information will remain, one either embraces it or fights it.
Posted by: RH | June 30th, 2008 at 5:48 pm | Report this commentA big HOORAY to Neil, a big favorite of us oldschool rockers everywhere!
We who collect LOSSLESS - aka CD-quality and above - recordings of our favorite artists are ALWAYS overjoyed to hear of new live recordings being officially released.. it means a great quality product for us to buy in a convenient, handsome package! We are disgusted at the trading of LOSSY - aka mp3 wma etc - cruddy-as-can-be quality sound files.
I recently heard Neil, among his many wonderful musings he offers his live audiences lately (as he always has), state that he indeed ENCOURAGES folks to share his material over peer-to-peer protocols… probably because he knows this is where one finds the much larger, LOSSLESS copies of his music which retains as much quality of the original performance as possible. It should be noted in this context that there is a great struggle on for control of the net, whereby megaconglomerates who wish to control what folks can and cant see on the net are actively throttling down access to people-to-people protocols such as BitTorrent, which by NO means is something that equates with illicit activity. It simply takes the server load off of one point source and spreads it around the net, eliminating the cost barrier which the meek are faced with when wishing to share large files. A great example of this is distribution of free, nonproprietary operating systems such as Linux.. find such legal torrents at
www.distrowatch.com
peace! Be the Rain!
Posted by: Jonny Rotten | June 30th, 2008 at 6:17 pm | Report this commentBest of luck to Neil Young and friends and thanks for the wonderful music, but here in the USA,the mobile phones available so far from ATT , Verizon Wireless ,etc., use only a proprietary TV format,MediaFlo from Qualcomm, so we get what they let us see and hear,how can the customers break free? do customers have a say ? how to justify this absolute monopoly with the good intentions of Neil Young ? will LiMo do it ? will Google do it? will Symbian Open do it ? will RIM do it ? will the Tooth Fairy do it ? ….the reality is that in some areas we are going backwards, not forward, and that is not what the great music of Neil Young is all about…
and we are going to need new massive batteries to hear all that great music on the go …hydrogen/methanol fuelcells for mobile devices were moving forward , and then…..silence,i guess the Oil Fairy made a move, right?
Posted by: blogger | June 30th, 2008 at 8:04 pm | Report this commentNeil
Just keep touring - live music never sleeps.
Posted by: Pat | June 30th, 2008 at 11:08 pm | Report this commentPat has a point. I went to one of the (excellent) Radiohead gigs in London last week. Having pretty much given away their last album, they were raking it in live: tens of thousands of people on both nights, paying close to £50 for a ticket. Looks like a sustainable business model to me (not that Thom Yorke is likely to be a fan of the term “business model”).
Posted by: Adam Jones | July 1st, 2008 at 2:46 pm | Report this commentJava is gonna revolutionize the music industry? You mean like Java Applets “revolutionized the web”?!? What is it 1995 all over again? Neil- kids don’t wanna sit in front of their computers to listen to music anymore like they sat in front of hi-fis listening to vinyl in the 70s. The cassette happened, the boombox happened, the car stereo happened, the ipod happened.
We have a high resolution audio format already: FLAC.
Posted by: Chet | July 1st, 2008 at 11:39 pm | Report this commentWhoa! Who knew Neil Young was a techie… He’s surely come a long way since his early days. Hope people don’t have to pay through their noses for the new format that he’s planning.
Posted by: Kalpesh Khivasara | July 3rd, 2008 at 11:39 am | Report this commentHere’s an idea:
1) artists concentrate on writing quality songs
2) release them on LP
3) we buy them and hear great sound quality
4) when we don’t want them any more, we trade them.
Meanwhile, release everything on reasonable quality MP3 so that we can winnow the wheat from the chaff, with an option to upgrade to lossless at a fair price.
Posted by: Kevin Smith | July 4th, 2008 at 2:18 pm | Report this comment