Comment Interactive Music Applications (Score 1) 835
A grand opportunity exists to improve the intellectual abilities of American youth, while reinvigorating our music and technology industries, at zero taxpayer cost. The short-term key to this project is the promotion of home computer interactive music applications that allow users to mix and remix songs based on the principles of harmonic mixing, which is simply the process of mixing songs in compatible keys. The long-term key to this project is corporate-sponsored formal music education in middle schools, facilitated by interactive music applications.
Our solution will simultaneously remedy major short and long term problems of the music industry, offer significant profit potential for technology companies, enhance music education and interactivity for consumers, and improve the cognitive abilities of American youth. It is a winning situation for all sectors.
1. ASSUMPTIONS:
- Record companies suffer from "market myopia." The entertainment market is generally a zero sum game, with newer forms of entertainment displacing established segments. The music market is shrinking as interactive entertainment (video games, websurfing, enhanced DVDs, etc.) takes an increasing share of discretionary income within the entertainment market. Even within the diminished music market, the CD market is also shrinking as CDs are displaced by music DVDs and broadband streams offering greater perceived value to music consumers. Although these newer attractions have displaced CDs, record executives' tunnel vision isolates the CD market from broader entertainment markets. The record industry refuses to deal with this new reality, and instead blames pirate downloads for their revenue drop. Pirates are convenient scapegoats. Unless the record industry can meet the challenge of interactive entertainment, it will continue to shrivel.
Anti-piracy arguments presume that consumers would have otherwise purchased free downloads, but this presumption ignores the principle of "price elasticity of demand": If all pirate downloads were stopped, consumers would only purchase a fraction of those songs. In the total absence of pirate downloads, CD sales would have dropped because many consumers now prefer interactive entertainment. Passive electronic entertainment (CDs, broadcast radio & TV) has lost market share.
- Record companies cannot block pirate downloads. They now seek a competitive advantage over pirate networks such as Kazaa, but have yet to design a viable business model for licensed downloads. Partnerships such as the Echo Network, and enterprises such as Listen.com, will offer licensed downloads with varying degrees of success. Apple's iTunes system serves as a model for enhancement, by newcomers Microsoft, Amazon.com and AOL. Licensed download systems will position themselves with other premium media, offering similar value over pirates as cable systems enjoy over broadcast TV, and broadband enjoys over dialup ISPs.
- Music consumers will pay for licensed downloads only if their perceived benefits, including portability between various devices, outweigh their costs. Licensed downloads offer the inherent advantages of speed, accuracy, safety and sound quality. Their appeal would increase with additional features useful in interactive music applications, such as bonus song versions (instrumentals, a cappella versions, etc.) and mixing information (key and speed data). Encouraging consumer interactive music applications could double sales of leading edge home computers. These applications could be as much fun as videogames, yet much more beneficial to all involved.
- Home computers operating below 2GHz are quick enough for the vast majority of home applications. Only some extreme games and audio/visual applications can effectively use the speed of leading edge home computers. Since consoles dominate extreme gaming, and since consumer video applications are still in the early adopter stage, audio applications can drive the market for leading edge CPUs.
- Although popular music has increasing rates of dissonance and disharmony (due primarily to random sampling, production and remixing by non-musicians), music consumers still prefer harmony to disharmony.
2. OVERVIEW:
Despite compelling evidence confirming the cognitive value of music education, it appears that neither the technology industry nor the recording industry support the music education lobby. Microsoft, Intel, and the recording industry are conspicuously absent from VH-1's "Save The Music" campaign sponsors. The recording industry's horizon is limited, concerned primarily with exploiting current assets, and fighting pirate download systems. The tech sector's lack of enthusiasm is also unsurprising, given that music education would seem to present, at best, a long-term investment in human capital. There is limited congruency of interests. If we could demonstrate substantial short to mid-term profit potential to both industries, however, then tech sector investment and recording industry cooperation could be assured.
Harmonic mixing is the missing link in this equation, the "Rosetta Stone" which will translate corporate music education investment into corporate profit, and which will induce music consumers to choose licensed download sources instead of pirate sources. Simply the process of mixing music in compatible keys, harmonic mixing serves as a "program guide" for interactive music applications, and provides a backdoor approach to music theory for those without formal music education. It will not only make youth more receptive to conventional music education, but will also promote household investment in advanced computer hardware and software, as youth become interactively involved with music technology.
This solution requires strategic planning and cooperation between the music and technology industries, which may be secured most readily by education advocates such as the American Music Conference. We might call this effort "Project Camelot." Two synergistic concepts, neither of which has been fully promoted, form the nucleus of Project Camelot: the cognitive value of music education, and the value of harmonic mixing to interactive music applications. The Project will parlay consumer music interactivity into greater demand for licensed music download services and computer hardware. It provides the tech sector with short-term incentives for sponsoring music education, which results in long-term improvements to America's work force. The Project also provides short-term cognitive value to interactive music consumers, through the process of harmonic mixing. As each sector acts in its own self-interest, the public good is enhanced.
Project Camelot will create, in essence, a "music ecosystem" with four primary participants: the technology industry, music industry, music education professionals, and music consumers. Acting in their own self-interest, each group receives benefits significantly higher than their costs. This "music ecosystem" may be envisioned as a virtual tower built on four corners, representing these four groups which currently have limited interaction.
The beauty of this system is its ability to forge strategic partnerships where common interests had not been identified. These partnerships will form a structure of economic and social benefits, including solutions for challenges within each sector. Even more important in the long run, these partnerships will produce a major public benefit extending far beyond the self-interest of each group: improving the cognitive functioning of American youth, thereby improving American competitiveness in the world economy.
3. GROUP INVOLVEMENT:
a. Music Industry:
(1) Music Industry Baseline Situation: The music industry is approaching a crisis. It must compete with interactive entertainment newcomers, while dealing with piracy and supply problems. Even if it is able to maintain its diminished share of the entertainment market, the future looks bleak since fewer musicians have been trained due to cutbacks in music education. Just as a reluctant movie industry was forced to accept home video technology (which now forms a revenue stream comparable to box office receipts), the equally reluctant music industry is being forced to implement licensed Internet download systems. Unlike the movie industry, however, the music industry has a powerful potential partner whose strategic interests dovetail with its own.
A contemporary album seems to offer more real value compared to 1973, when an analog $5 album (>$20 in current dollars) may have been shorter than 45 minutes. A current digital recording costs relatively less, is longer, and sounds better. Unfortunately, a contemporary album may offer a lower perceived value to consumers because: (a) The Internet, cable and gaming offer serious competition for consumer discretionary time. (b) Music is easily downloaded from pirate music websites, despite problems with sound quality, inconsistent labeling, and the threat of spyware and viruses. (c) The quality of contemporary music is arguably lower, even to untrained ears.
Despite greater sound fidelity, today's 25-year-old Artist may say less musically, because he never received a music education. Either "beats and rhymes," or computer generated loop tracks, comprise many contemporary sound compositions. If melody, harmony and rhythm are essential aspects of music, then some modern tracks do not qualify as music. They have no melody. Unfortunately, musicality is often irrelevant in the music industry. The record industry chose to focus on pirate downloads, rather than the quality of its product.
The five major labels may have finally agreed to license downloads at a standard price, perhaps using a Digital Rights Management System which will digitally "watermark" downloaded music to identify the licensed consumer. Rather than attempting to quickly institutionalize licensed download systems, the record industry is threatening to hack into consumer computers to detect and neutralize pirated songs. According to a landmark study by Forrester Research (Cambridge, MA), however, their two-pronged strategy will fail (see http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,3 97,FF.html).
Beyond lower demand from consumers, the music market is also threatened by music supply problems. The Recording Artists Coalition may defeat long-term artist contracts, preventing large investments in individual artists. Smaller investments in more artists may result. Compounding the burden of this change is the smaller musician pool. With the demise of music education in the 1970s, fewer adolescents learned to play instruments. Many frustrated artists, however, learned turntablism, sampling and remixing techniques. They became seriously interactive with recordings. From MP3 playlists, to Bedroom DJ, to record producer, they used music without ever studying music. (See http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:FCnEjf7fCP8C: stacks.msnbc.com/news/760513.asp+%22bootylicious+b eats%22+%22remix%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 or search google for "bootylicious beats" and "remix" to view the Newsweek article on this trend, and search for "mash-up" for the latest information on this trend.)
(2) Music Industry Actions Under Project Camelot: Record companies should make a virtue out of the necessity of licensed downloads, which must be worth their cost to the average music consumer. File portability (the ability to transfer music files between devices) is essential. Licensed download promotional campaigns must exploit their advantages:
(a) Consistent Track Identification: Pirate track identification is notoriously inaccurate. Users often find that downloaded tracks are not the songs they expected. Rather than directly hacking into pirate computers, music industry goals would be much better served by a major spoofing campaign, in which bogus music files are unleashed into major pirate networks through dummy members. When added to their inherent problems, pirate downloads will become increasingly less palatable compared to licensed downloads.
(b) Consistent Sound Quality: Pirate track sound quality varies considerably due to various encoding rates and other limitations. Not only would licensed downloads have consistently higher sound quality by using high bit-rate MP3s, but they could have a further advantage by using higher fidelity technology such as the "Advanced Audio Codec" adopted by Apple.
(c) Safe Downloads: Pirate networks have been reported to contain both viruses and spyware (which reports Internet activity to 3rd parties). Licensed downloads would have guaranteed content.
(d) Faster Broadband Downloads: Download speed is much faster than upload speed with most broadband ISPs, according to broadbandreports.com (see http://www.dslreports.com/archive for speed comparisons). Upload speed may be less than 10% of download speed. This difference is extremely significant for pirate networks because every pirate download requires an upload from another broadband member. Upload speed of the source determines download speed of the recipient. Effective pirate network download speed may therefore be only 10% of broadband download capacity. Since licensed download services will be configured for maximum capacity, licensed downloads may be ten times faster than pirate downloads.
(e) Bonus Instrumental Versions: Licensed downloads should include the option of free instrumental versions of the same tracks. Instrumental versions are extremely useful for remixing and other interactive music applications, and are often unavailable through pirate services.
(f) Mixing Information Tags: Licensed downloads could contain mixing information tags, perhaps within each digital watermark. Adding this information should cost little more than administrative processing, since producers should be more than willing to provide it. Functioning as a "program guide," this information would enhance interactive music applications, and thereby enhance the value of licensed downloads. Unlicensed downloads have no watermarks, and therefore could not be automatically categorized by interactive music applications.
(3) Benefits of Music Industry Participation: Promotion of consumer interactive music applications will offset much of the decline in CD sales attributable to pirate music downloads. In the short term, adding song key and speed information to licensed download tags would immediately boost song usability in consumer interactive music applications. Depending on the level of consumer interactivity, these CPU-intensive applications mix and otherwise manipulate songs according to the principles of harmonic mixing. Tagging licensed downloads with mixing information (speed/key data) will provide a significant advantage over unlicensed downloads, while providing a backdoor approach to music theory, for interactive music consumers.
In the mid-term, this project would greatly expand not only the market for music technology, but would also remedy the dearth of musical innovation that is stifling the recording industry. The long-term cognitive value of music education ("Music Making & The Brain") is well documented at this page of the American Music Conference website: http://www.amc-music.com/brain.html. Essentially, America will be more competitive in the intellectual marketplace.
b. Technology Industry:
(1) Tech Industry Baseline Situation: Consumer demand is flat for leading edge CPUs, and is driven primarily by extreme gamers and audio/video applications. Celeron processors below 2Ghz are quick enough for virtually any other consumer application. While business applications will demand continuing CPU speed improvements, most consumers need no further speed improvements. If consumers have little use for CPU speeds above 2Ghz, and if the power: price ratio continues to double every eighteen months ("Moore's Law"), then consumer CPUs will become virtual commodities with diminishing profit potential for technology leaders.
(2) Tech Industry Actions Under Project Camelot: While project implementation requires no initial tech industry involvement, long-term success requires a financial commitment to supporting music education in American middle schools. This commitment may best be coordinated with music education advocate organizations such as the American Music Conference.
(3) Benefits of Tech Industry Participation: Consumer interactive music applications will help the tech industry by radically improving the market for CPU power, while enhancing the effective intelligence of American youth.
(a) Short-Term Costs & Benefits: The tech industry will incur negligible short-term costs, but it will receive substantial short-term benefits. CPU manufacturers need consumer applications with insatiable demands for fast CPUs. Interactive music applications have insatiable demands. They are a "killer application" for CPU speed. For Intel, Apple and AMD, they will rescue the consumer computer market from oblivion. (This is a major opportunity for Apple to wrest market share from PC manufacturers, especially since "iTunes" music management software is now designed for licensed downloading.)
(b) Long-Term Costs & Benefits: Corporate sponsorship of formal music education will promote student use of computer interactive music applications, thereby expanding the market for advanced hardware to run these applications. Formal music education will also enhance the long-term prospects of both industries, by improving not only the intellectual development of American youth, but also by producing a larger pool of recording artists with music training.
c. Music Consumers and Educators:
(1) Five Levels of Music Consumer Interactivity: The music market has mutated. This market traditionally had two distinct segments. Music production included musicians, their instructors and technical support. Passive consumers, and their equipment suppliers, formed the second segment. However, frustrated artists and digital technology have fundamentally changed the traditional market structure, and spawned an intermediate interactive segment. Millions of music consumers are no longer passive, and may progress through five levels of digital music interactivity: acquiring, assembling, mixing, remixing and "producing" their own music. Each process requires increasing levels of technology, and offers new profits. Each level blurs the distinction between consumer and artist.
Now that the five major record labels will license digital downloads through services such as listen.com, entire libraries may soon be downloaded, and must be managed. Download systems present an unparalleled opportunity for savaged telecommunications companies, especially since it may absorb some of the excess capacity that burdens giants such as MCI. Directly serving the "Bedroom DJ," however, also presents enormous profit. The Bedroom DJ is essentially a music student with enormous demand for technology, because the Bedroom DJ is not a passive consumer.
The music market now has a third segment: the interactive music consumer who functions as a DJ. Some DJs have progressed to the "production" level without music education, because software such as Sonic Foundry's "Acid" enables music creation without musical knowledge. An unmelodic, repetitive, looped creation, such as "The Funk Phenomena," may become a hit. Anyone can use "Acid" to remix past hits, by mixing computer-generated bass and rhythm loops with the original midrange. Millions of interactive consumers use bootleg download services for their compilations, while millions more make compilations from CDs. The key to moving bedroom DJs up to the next profit level, in the short term, is harmonic mixing. The key to long-term progress is music education.
The DJ is often the spiritual descendent of the uneducated blues musician, who also could not read music. But at least the blues musician learned the basics of melody and harmony, to complement his rhythm. Melody was everywhere in early 20th Century America. From gospel choir to speakeasy and radio, melody dominated and disharmony was taboo. Today disharmony is rampant, from hiphop to dance music. Without music education nor a youth culture of musicality, today's adolescents may not acquire the taste for melody. The blues musician may not have had formal music education, but he enjoyed a culture of musicality.
(2) The Decline and Fall of Musical Literacy: Since the beginning of the Rock Era, the pop music pipeline has primarily involved 20-something musicians producing music for younger consumers, many of whom were learning to play instruments in middle school. With the decline of music education in the 1970s, however, the first class of Generation X adolescents in 1977 had fewer musical options as they entered the 7th Grade and puberty. The pool of beginning musicians shrank each year. While their Baby Boomer predecessors continued to supply music to Gen. X teenagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, each class of Generation X became increasingly unable to pass the torch of musical innovation to their juniors. Coincidentally, teenagers began embracing the double blasts of recycled melodies (e.g., "Rappers Delight") and unmelodic "phat beats" of limited musicality, enabled by music technology. When the last class of Gen. X reached middle school in the mid-1990s, many would become musically illiterate.
This second wave of Gen. X, born just as music education was declining in the 1970s, is now the main source of music marketed to 21st Century teenagers. Pop music innovation stagnated because fewer were trained. Pop music consumers are responding accordingly. When you starve the Golden Goose, the results are predictable: This second wave has comparatively little to offer musically. Fewer artists command a larger share of the market, and resent subsidizing the 90% of artists who are unsuccessful. If the Recording Artists Coalition changes the subsidy ratio, then more artists will receive smaller advances, because the record industry will put smaller eggs in more baskets.
Many consumers are unwilling to pay for pap, but will download it for free. Artistically inclined consumers, however, do more than download. Although they may not have learned to play separate notes to produce songs, interactive music technology now allows them to play song samples to produce mixes. Just as the principles of melody, harmony and rhythm guide the musician's transformation of separate notes into music, so too do the principles of harmonic mixing guide the interactive music consumer's transformation of song samples into musical mixes. Playing a sequence of related tones is like playing a sequence of related keys. They require similar cognition when performed in real time. Their cognitive value is similar. Harmonic mixing has cognitive value similar to playing an instrument. It is a crude form of music education in itself, certainly superior in cognitive value to merely listening to music.
(3) Music Educator Actions Under Project Camelot: Music education advocates have recently received significant commercial support from sources as different as MTV's VH-1 and American Express. The recently updated website of the American Music Conference (http://www.amc-music.com), along with the bountiful website of the National Association for Music Education (http://www.menc.org), reflect the diverse effort currently expended. VH1's Save The Music Foundation (http://www.vh1.com/partners/save_the_music/home.h tml), however, has reportedly restored the music programs of 900 public schools in 75 cities, putting instruments in the hands of more than 400,000 children. Since VH1 is so successful in restoring music programs, it is the most logical organization to coordinate tech industry support for music education programs.
4. EACH LEVEL OF MUSIC INTERACTIVITY OFFERS SHORT-TERM PROFIT:
a. Acquiring Music: Telecommunications and computer companies are the primary short-term beneficiaries of this first level of music interactivity. Download and storage of music, regardless of compression technique, is hardware intensive and requires significant consumer investment. While video and games are graphics intensive, mixing music is data intensive. Gaming evolution requires increasingly sophisticated graphics processing units (GPUs), but average Central Processing Units (CPUs) are more than adequate. For consumer applications other than interactive music, there is little need for faster CPUs. Indeed, in Microsoft's X-Box, the installed Nvidia GPU reportedly costs more than the Intel CPU. If hardware manufacturers want to sell more powerful CPUs to consumers, they must promote power-hungry consumer applications such as music interactivity.
b. Assembling Music: Current jukebox software does not musically assemble playlists. Jukebox software, using harmonic mixing principles as a program guide, will produce audibly superior playlists, especially when used with short overlaps between songs. To apply harmonic mixing principles, however, individual songs must be tagged with key and speed information. These tagged songs will enjoy another advantage over pirate site downloads, since licensed downloads will already have consistent sound quality and identification. Including mixing information will cost virtually nothing, and may well add value critical to the success of licensed sites. Consumer jukebox producers already benefit from this second level of consumer music interactivity. The music industry, however, will benefit only when licensed download sites are sufficiently superior to pirate sites to offset subscription or download fees, much as cable and satellite services justify their fees.
c. Mixing Music: The Bedroom DJ likes to mix music. He may specialize in turntablism, which requires specific equipment and vinyl support, or he may mix CDs in analog or digital format. Many manufacturers provide DJ equipment, and the mixing software industry has millions of potential customers.
d. Remixing Music: The Remix Market is largely untapped. "Mash-Ups" or bootleg remixes, as explained in Newsweek's "Bootylicious Beats" article, are rapidly expanding without market support. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), or another trade association, should support licensed download websites by providing a remix marketing mechanism. These remixes could form the core of another licensed website advantage, by providing high quality mixed programs for download. These mixed programs may set mixing standards, which interactive music consumers would seek to emulate. They may also enable the music industry to sell the same music more than once, just as many consumers pay for the same movies in theaters and again for home video.
e. Producing Music: The Production Market already supports skillful, but untrained, DJs whose product is common in the hip-hop and dance music sections of music stores. Broadband download is a much more efficient means of transfer than the CD. As the pool of copyrighted music is released by standardized licensing, a wave of mixes should result. Only those mixed harmonically, either by use of a mixing system or by trial-and-error, will be judged superior. As those who neglected harmonic mixing suffer, the artistic value of mixing in key will be obvious.
5. CONCLUSIONS: By neglecting musicality, the recording industry neglected an organ vital to its corporate health. It allowed the supply of music to dwindle along with demand. Record labels apparently lack strategic planning. They must LEAD the technology industry into supporting music education. They must show the technology industry that large profits are available through partnership rather than through confrontation and wasted effort. In our post 9/11 culture, leadership is more valued. A leadership opportunity of irrefutable social value, combined with substantial profit from public service, is an industrial dream come true. Consumer music interactivity will engender industrial economic interactivity. Project Camelot will help the technology, music and education sectors enhance the intellectual abilities of American youth.
The recording industry will take this action only with persuasion. As an incentive, the Recording Artists Coalition could be persuaded to phase in contract protections, rather than insisting on everything at once. As new talent is grown through formal music education and informal consumer music interactivity, smaller investments in more musicians will be possible. The Coalition could grow, and become institutionalized. The recording industry could become healthy.
The recording industry could be approached directly, or by a public service association such as the American Music Conference, VH-1's "Save The Music" campaign, or America's Promise.
Regards,
Mark Davis
P.S. Your ideas and comments are welcome. Please pass this to anyone else who may be interested.
Our solution will simultaneously remedy major short and long term problems of the music industry, offer significant profit potential for technology companies, enhance music education and interactivity for consumers, and improve the cognitive abilities of American youth. It is a winning situation for all sectors.
1. ASSUMPTIONS:
- Record companies suffer from "market myopia." The entertainment market is generally a zero sum game, with newer forms of entertainment displacing established segments. The music market is shrinking as interactive entertainment (video games, websurfing, enhanced DVDs, etc.) takes an increasing share of discretionary income within the entertainment market. Even within the diminished music market, the CD market is also shrinking as CDs are displaced by music DVDs and broadband streams offering greater perceived value to music consumers. Although these newer attractions have displaced CDs, record executives' tunnel vision isolates the CD market from broader entertainment markets. The record industry refuses to deal with this new reality, and instead blames pirate downloads for their revenue drop. Pirates are convenient scapegoats. Unless the record industry can meet the challenge of interactive entertainment, it will continue to shrivel.
Anti-piracy arguments presume that consumers would have otherwise purchased free downloads, but this presumption ignores the principle of "price elasticity of demand": If all pirate downloads were stopped, consumers would only purchase a fraction of those songs. In the total absence of pirate downloads, CD sales would have dropped because many consumers now prefer interactive entertainment. Passive electronic entertainment (CDs, broadcast radio & TV) has lost market share.
- Record companies cannot block pirate downloads. They now seek a competitive advantage over pirate networks such as Kazaa, but have yet to design a viable business model for licensed downloads. Partnerships such as the Echo Network, and enterprises such as Listen.com, will offer licensed downloads with varying degrees of success. Apple's iTunes system serves as a model for enhancement, by newcomers Microsoft, Amazon.com and AOL. Licensed download systems will position themselves with other premium media, offering similar value over pirates as cable systems enjoy over broadcast TV, and broadband enjoys over dialup ISPs.
- Music consumers will pay for licensed downloads only if their perceived benefits, including portability between various devices, outweigh their costs. Licensed downloads offer the inherent advantages of speed, accuracy, safety and sound quality. Their appeal would increase with additional features useful in interactive music applications, such as bonus song versions (instrumentals, a cappella versions, etc.) and mixing information (key and speed data). Encouraging consumer interactive music applications could double sales of leading edge home computers. These applications could be as much fun as videogames, yet much more beneficial to all involved.
- Home computers operating below 2GHz are quick enough for the vast majority of home applications. Only some extreme games and audio/visual applications can effectively use the speed of leading edge home computers. Since consoles dominate extreme gaming, and since consumer video applications are still in the early adopter stage, audio applications can drive the market for leading edge CPUs.
- Although popular music has increasing rates of dissonance and disharmony (due primarily to random sampling, production and remixing by non-musicians), music consumers still prefer harmony to disharmony.
2. OVERVIEW:
Despite compelling evidence confirming the cognitive value of music education, it appears that neither the technology industry nor the recording industry support the music education lobby. Microsoft, Intel, and the recording industry are conspicuously absent from VH-1's "Save The Music" campaign sponsors. The recording industry's horizon is limited, concerned primarily with exploiting current assets, and fighting pirate download systems. The tech sector's lack of enthusiasm is also unsurprising, given that music education would seem to present, at best, a long-term investment in human capital. There is limited congruency of interests. If we could demonstrate substantial short to mid-term profit potential to both industries, however, then tech sector investment and recording industry cooperation could be assured.
Harmonic mixing is the missing link in this equation, the "Rosetta Stone" which will translate corporate music education investment into corporate profit, and which will induce music consumers to choose licensed download sources instead of pirate sources. Simply the process of mixing music in compatible keys, harmonic mixing serves as a "program guide" for interactive music applications, and provides a backdoor approach to music theory for those without formal music education. It will not only make youth more receptive to conventional music education, but will also promote household investment in advanced computer hardware and software, as youth become interactively involved with music technology.
This solution requires strategic planning and cooperation between the music and technology industries, which may be secured most readily by education advocates such as the American Music Conference. We might call this effort "Project Camelot." Two synergistic concepts, neither of which has been fully promoted, form the nucleus of Project Camelot: the cognitive value of music education, and the value of harmonic mixing to interactive music applications. The Project will parlay consumer music interactivity into greater demand for licensed music download services and computer hardware. It provides the tech sector with short-term incentives for sponsoring music education, which results in long-term improvements to America's work force. The Project also provides short-term cognitive value to interactive music consumers, through the process of harmonic mixing. As each sector acts in its own self-interest, the public good is enhanced.
Project Camelot will create, in essence, a "music ecosystem" with four primary participants: the technology industry, music industry, music education professionals, and music consumers. Acting in their own self-interest, each group receives benefits significantly higher than their costs. This "music ecosystem" may be envisioned as a virtual tower built on four corners, representing these four groups which currently have limited interaction.
The beauty of this system is its ability to forge strategic partnerships where common interests had not been identified. These partnerships will form a structure of economic and social benefits, including solutions for challenges within each sector. Even more important in the long run, these partnerships will produce a major public benefit extending far beyond the self-interest of each group: improving the cognitive functioning of American youth, thereby improving American competitiveness in the world economy.
3. GROUP INVOLVEMENT:
a. Music Industry:
(1) Music Industry Baseline Situation: The music industry is approaching a crisis. It must compete with interactive entertainment newcomers, while dealing with piracy and supply problems. Even if it is able to maintain its diminished share of the entertainment market, the future looks bleak since fewer musicians have been trained due to cutbacks in music education. Just as a reluctant movie industry was forced to accept home video technology (which now forms a revenue stream comparable to box office receipts), the equally reluctant music industry is being forced to implement licensed Internet download systems. Unlike the movie industry, however, the music industry has a powerful potential partner whose strategic interests dovetail with its own.
A contemporary album seems to offer more real value compared to 1973, when an analog $5 album (>$20 in current dollars) may have been shorter than 45 minutes. A current digital recording costs relatively less, is longer, and sounds better. Unfortunately, a contemporary album may offer a lower perceived value to consumers because: (a) The Internet, cable and gaming offer serious competition for consumer discretionary time. (b) Music is easily downloaded from pirate music websites, despite problems with sound quality, inconsistent labeling, and the threat of spyware and viruses. (c) The quality of contemporary music is arguably lower, even to untrained ears.
Despite greater sound fidelity, today's 25-year-old Artist may say less musically, because he never received a music education. Either "beats and rhymes," or computer generated loop tracks, comprise many contemporary sound compositions. If melody, harmony and rhythm are essential aspects of music, then some modern tracks do not qualify as music. They have no melody. Unfortunately, musicality is often irrelevant in the music industry. The record industry chose to focus on pirate downloads, rather than the quality of its product.
The five major labels may have finally agreed to license downloads at a standard price, perhaps using a Digital Rights Management System which will digitally "watermark" downloaded music to identify the licensed consumer. Rather than attempting to quickly institutionalize licensed download systems, the record industry is threatening to hack into consumer computers to detect and neutralize pirated songs. According to a landmark study by Forrester Research (Cambridge, MA), however, their two-pronged strategy will fail (see http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,
Beyond lower demand from consumers, the music market is also threatened by music supply problems. The Recording Artists Coalition may defeat long-term artist contracts, preventing large investments in individual artists. Smaller investments in more artists may result. Compounding the burden of this change is the smaller musician pool. With the demise of music education in the 1970s, fewer adolescents learned to play instruments. Many frustrated artists, however, learned turntablism, sampling and remixing techniques. They became seriously interactive with recordings. From MP3 playlists, to Bedroom DJ, to record producer, they used music without ever studying music. (See http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:FCnEjf7fCP8C
(2) Music Industry Actions Under Project Camelot: Record companies should make a virtue out of the necessity of licensed downloads, which must be worth their cost to the average music consumer. File portability (the ability to transfer music files between devices) is essential. Licensed download promotional campaigns must exploit their advantages:
(a) Consistent Track Identification: Pirate track identification is notoriously inaccurate. Users often find that downloaded tracks are not the songs they expected. Rather than directly hacking into pirate computers, music industry goals would be much better served by a major spoofing campaign, in which bogus music files are unleashed into major pirate networks through dummy members. When added to their inherent problems, pirate downloads will become increasingly less palatable compared to licensed downloads.
(b) Consistent Sound Quality: Pirate track sound quality varies considerably due to various encoding rates and other limitations. Not only would licensed downloads have consistently higher sound quality by using high bit-rate MP3s, but they could have a further advantage by using higher fidelity technology such as the "Advanced Audio Codec" adopted by Apple.
(c) Safe Downloads: Pirate networks have been reported to contain both viruses and spyware (which reports Internet activity to 3rd parties). Licensed downloads would have guaranteed content.
(d) Faster Broadband Downloads: Download speed is much faster than upload speed with most broadband ISPs, according to broadbandreports.com (see http://www.dslreports.com/archive for speed comparisons). Upload speed may be less than 10% of download speed. This difference is extremely significant for pirate networks because every pirate download requires an upload from another broadband member. Upload speed of the source determines download speed of the recipient. Effective pirate network download speed may therefore be only 10% of broadband download capacity. Since licensed download services will be configured for maximum capacity, licensed downloads may be ten times faster than pirate downloads.
(e) Bonus Instrumental Versions: Licensed downloads should include the option of free instrumental versions of the same tracks. Instrumental versions are extremely useful for remixing and other interactive music applications, and are often unavailable through pirate services.
(f) Mixing Information Tags: Licensed downloads could contain mixing information tags, perhaps within each digital watermark. Adding this information should cost little more than administrative processing, since producers should be more than willing to provide it. Functioning as a "program guide," this information would enhance interactive music applications, and thereby enhance the value of licensed downloads. Unlicensed downloads have no watermarks, and therefore could not be automatically categorized by interactive music applications.
(3) Benefits of Music Industry Participation: Promotion of consumer interactive music applications will offset much of the decline in CD sales attributable to pirate music downloads. In the short term, adding song key and speed information to licensed download tags would immediately boost song usability in consumer interactive music applications. Depending on the level of consumer interactivity, these CPU-intensive applications mix and otherwise manipulate songs according to the principles of harmonic mixing. Tagging licensed downloads with mixing information (speed/key data) will provide a significant advantage over unlicensed downloads, while providing a backdoor approach to music theory, for interactive music consumers.
In the mid-term, this project would greatly expand not only the market for music technology, but would also remedy the dearth of musical innovation that is stifling the recording industry. The long-term cognitive value of music education ("Music Making & The Brain") is well documented at this page of the American Music Conference website: http://www.amc-music.com/brain.html. Essentially, America will be more competitive in the intellectual marketplace.
b. Technology Industry:
(1) Tech Industry Baseline Situation: Consumer demand is flat for leading edge CPUs, and is driven primarily by extreme gamers and audio/video applications. Celeron processors below 2Ghz are quick enough for virtually any other consumer application. While business applications will demand continuing CPU speed improvements, most consumers need no further speed improvements. If consumers have little use for CPU speeds above 2Ghz, and if the power: price ratio continues to double every eighteen months ("Moore's Law"), then consumer CPUs will become virtual commodities with diminishing profit potential for technology leaders.
(2) Tech Industry Actions Under Project Camelot: While project implementation requires no initial tech industry involvement, long-term success requires a financial commitment to supporting music education in American middle schools. This commitment may best be coordinated with music education advocate organizations such as the American Music Conference.
(3) Benefits of Tech Industry Participation: Consumer interactive music applications will help the tech industry by radically improving the market for CPU power, while enhancing the effective intelligence of American youth.
(a) Short-Term Costs & Benefits: The tech industry will incur negligible short-term costs, but it will receive substantial short-term benefits. CPU manufacturers need consumer applications with insatiable demands for fast CPUs. Interactive music applications have insatiable demands. They are a "killer application" for CPU speed. For Intel, Apple and AMD, they will rescue the consumer computer market from oblivion. (This is a major opportunity for Apple to wrest market share from PC manufacturers, especially since "iTunes" music management software is now designed for licensed downloading.)
(b) Long-Term Costs & Benefits: Corporate sponsorship of formal music education will promote student use of computer interactive music applications, thereby expanding the market for advanced hardware to run these applications. Formal music education will also enhance the long-term prospects of both industries, by improving not only the intellectual development of American youth, but also by producing a larger pool of recording artists with music training.
c. Music Consumers and Educators:
(1) Five Levels of Music Consumer Interactivity: The music market has mutated. This market traditionally had two distinct segments. Music production included musicians, their instructors and technical support. Passive consumers, and their equipment suppliers, formed the second segment. However, frustrated artists and digital technology have fundamentally changed the traditional market structure, and spawned an intermediate interactive segment. Millions of music consumers are no longer passive, and may progress through five levels of digital music interactivity: acquiring, assembling, mixing, remixing and "producing" their own music. Each process requires increasing levels of technology, and offers new profits. Each level blurs the distinction between consumer and artist.
Now that the five major record labels will license digital downloads through services such as listen.com, entire libraries may soon be downloaded, and must be managed. Download systems present an unparalleled opportunity for savaged telecommunications companies, especially since it may absorb some of the excess capacity that burdens giants such as MCI. Directly serving the "Bedroom DJ," however, also presents enormous profit. The Bedroom DJ is essentially a music student with enormous demand for technology, because the Bedroom DJ is not a passive consumer.
The music market now has a third segment: the interactive music consumer who functions as a DJ. Some DJs have progressed to the "production" level without music education, because software such as Sonic Foundry's "Acid" enables music creation without musical knowledge. An unmelodic, repetitive, looped creation, such as "The Funk Phenomena," may become a hit. Anyone can use "Acid" to remix past hits, by mixing computer-generated bass and rhythm loops with the original midrange. Millions of interactive consumers use bootleg download services for their compilations, while millions more make compilations from CDs. The key to moving bedroom DJs up to the next profit level, in the short term, is harmonic mixing. The key to long-term progress is music education.
The DJ is often the spiritual descendent of the uneducated blues musician, who also could not read music. But at least the blues musician learned the basics of melody and harmony, to complement his rhythm. Melody was everywhere in early 20th Century America. From gospel choir to speakeasy and radio, melody dominated and disharmony was taboo. Today disharmony is rampant, from hiphop to dance music. Without music education nor a youth culture of musicality, today's adolescents may not acquire the taste for melody. The blues musician may not have had formal music education, but he enjoyed a culture of musicality.
(2) The Decline and Fall of Musical Literacy: Since the beginning of the Rock Era, the pop music pipeline has primarily involved 20-something musicians producing music for younger consumers, many of whom were learning to play instruments in middle school. With the decline of music education in the 1970s, however, the first class of Generation X adolescents in 1977 had fewer musical options as they entered the 7th Grade and puberty. The pool of beginning musicians shrank each year. While their Baby Boomer predecessors continued to supply music to Gen. X teenagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, each class of Generation X became increasingly unable to pass the torch of musical innovation to their juniors. Coincidentally, teenagers began embracing the double blasts of recycled melodies (e.g., "Rappers Delight") and unmelodic "phat beats" of limited musicality, enabled by music technology. When the last class of Gen. X reached middle school in the mid-1990s, many would become musically illiterate.
This second wave of Gen. X, born just as music education was declining in the 1970s, is now the main source of music marketed to 21st Century teenagers. Pop music innovation stagnated because fewer were trained. Pop music consumers are responding accordingly. When you starve the Golden Goose, the results are predictable: This second wave has comparatively little to offer musically. Fewer artists command a larger share of the market, and resent subsidizing the 90% of artists who are unsuccessful. If the Recording Artists Coalition changes the subsidy ratio, then more artists will receive smaller advances, because the record industry will put smaller eggs in more baskets.
Many consumers are unwilling to pay for pap, but will download it for free. Artistically inclined consumers, however, do more than download. Although they may not have learned to play separate notes to produce songs, interactive music technology now allows them to play song samples to produce mixes. Just as the principles of melody, harmony and rhythm guide the musician's transformation of separate notes into music, so too do the principles of harmonic mixing guide the interactive music consumer's transformation of song samples into musical mixes. Playing a sequence of related tones is like playing a sequence of related keys. They require similar cognition when performed in real time. Their cognitive value is similar. Harmonic mixing has cognitive value similar to playing an instrument. It is a crude form of music education in itself, certainly superior in cognitive value to merely listening to music.
(3) Music Educator Actions Under Project Camelot: Music education advocates have recently received significant commercial support from sources as different as MTV's VH-1 and American Express. The recently updated website of the American Music Conference (http://www.amc-music.com), along with the bountiful website of the National Association for Music Education (http://www.menc.org), reflect the diverse effort currently expended. VH1's Save The Music Foundation (http://www.vh1.com/partners/save_the_music/home.
4. EACH LEVEL OF MUSIC INTERACTIVITY OFFERS SHORT-TERM PROFIT:
a. Acquiring Music: Telecommunications and computer companies are the primary short-term beneficiaries of this first level of music interactivity. Download and storage of music, regardless of compression technique, is hardware intensive and requires significant consumer investment. While video and games are graphics intensive, mixing music is data intensive. Gaming evolution requires increasingly sophisticated graphics processing units (GPUs), but average Central Processing Units (CPUs) are more than adequate. For consumer applications other than interactive music, there is little need for faster CPUs. Indeed, in Microsoft's X-Box, the installed Nvidia GPU reportedly costs more than the Intel CPU. If hardware manufacturers want to sell more powerful CPUs to consumers, they must promote power-hungry consumer applications such as music interactivity.
b. Assembling Music: Current jukebox software does not musically assemble playlists. Jukebox software, using harmonic mixing principles as a program guide, will produce audibly superior playlists, especially when used with short overlaps between songs. To apply harmonic mixing principles, however, individual songs must be tagged with key and speed information. These tagged songs will enjoy another advantage over pirate site downloads, since licensed downloads will already have consistent sound quality and identification. Including mixing information will cost virtually nothing, and may well add value critical to the success of licensed sites. Consumer jukebox producers already benefit from this second level of consumer music interactivity. The music industry, however, will benefit only when licensed download sites are sufficiently superior to pirate sites to offset subscription or download fees, much as cable and satellite services justify their fees.
c. Mixing Music: The Bedroom DJ likes to mix music. He may specialize in turntablism, which requires specific equipment and vinyl support, or he may mix CDs in analog or digital format. Many manufacturers provide DJ equipment, and the mixing software industry has millions of potential customers.
d. Remixing Music: The Remix Market is largely untapped. "Mash-Ups" or bootleg remixes, as explained in Newsweek's "Bootylicious Beats" article, are rapidly expanding without market support. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), or another trade association, should support licensed download websites by providing a remix marketing mechanism. These remixes could form the core of another licensed website advantage, by providing high quality mixed programs for download. These mixed programs may set mixing standards, which interactive music consumers would seek to emulate. They may also enable the music industry to sell the same music more than once, just as many consumers pay for the same movies in theaters and again for home video.
e. Producing Music: The Production Market already supports skillful, but untrained, DJs whose product is common in the hip-hop and dance music sections of music stores. Broadband download is a much more efficient means of transfer than the CD. As the pool of copyrighted music is released by standardized licensing, a wave of mixes should result. Only those mixed harmonically, either by use of a mixing system or by trial-and-error, will be judged superior. As those who neglected harmonic mixing suffer, the artistic value of mixing in key will be obvious.
5. CONCLUSIONS: By neglecting musicality, the recording industry neglected an organ vital to its corporate health. It allowed the supply of music to dwindle along with demand. Record labels apparently lack strategic planning. They must LEAD the technology industry into supporting music education. They must show the technology industry that large profits are available through partnership rather than through confrontation and wasted effort. In our post 9/11 culture, leadership is more valued. A leadership opportunity of irrefutable social value, combined with substantial profit from public service, is an industrial dream come true. Consumer music interactivity will engender industrial economic interactivity. Project Camelot will help the technology, music and education sectors enhance the intellectual abilities of American youth.
The recording industry will take this action only with persuasion. As an incentive, the Recording Artists Coalition could be persuaded to phase in contract protections, rather than insisting on everything at once. As new talent is grown through formal music education and informal consumer music interactivity, smaller investments in more musicians will be possible. The Coalition could grow, and become institutionalized. The recording industry could become healthy.
The recording industry could be approached directly, or by a public service association such as the American Music Conference, VH-1's "Save The Music" campaign, or America's Promise.
Regards,
Mark Davis
P.S. Your ideas and comments are welcome. Please pass this to anyone else who may be interested.
