Today, music is... mastered to play on quality sound systems. Everything is super clean, like high definition television, where you hear things as though they’re under some kind of sonic microscope! I don’t want this. Seriously, it makes me anxious! This type of noise shouts in my ears. | | | | I've got a fever and the only prescription is Howard Hesseman as Dr. Johnny Fever on "WKRP in Cincinnati."
(CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Today, music is... mastered to play on quality sound systems. Everything is super clean, like high definition television, where you hear things as though they’re under some kind of sonic microscope! I don’t want this. Seriously, it makes me anxious! This type of noise shouts in my ears.”
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| | rantnrave:// Item A: MUSICALLY's white paper on the prospects (and perils) of the booming smart speaker market, which is very much worth your time, notes one of the particular challenges devices like the AMAZON ECHO and the SONOS ONE present for record companies: a need for much better metadata. The ALEXAs and SIRIs of the world need to know a song's year, its genre, its writers, its moods, "its place in culture and other context-rich topics" if they have any hope of answering complex voice requests, MusicAlly's STUART DREDGE writes. And if the labels don't provide the info, the tech companies might step in and do it for them. Which I believe is meant to be read as a warning, not a friendly offer of cooperation. “In a voice world... we don’t have the luxury of returning a bunch of search results, returning 10 results above the fold, and as long as one of them is right, we’re good," AMAZON MUSIC's RYAN REDINGTON tells Dredge. "We just have to start playing music." Item B: AMAZON doesn't seem to know who wrote the BEATLES' "LOVE ME DO." I'm being a little unfair here. But only a little. I have no doubt someone in Amazon's music licensing department knows who the song's two reasonably well-known composers are. But that's not what the copyright paperwork tracked down by the feisty MUSICTECHPOLICY blog says. Are they not looking hard enough? Or is someone not telling them? Is a publisher or a label or a distribution intermediary or someone, anyone, sending the info, attached to the song, in a way that that Amazon's system can read? Is Amazon doing enough to make sure its system *can* read? Who to blame? And does it matter? Shouldn't every one of those entities be working to make sure each other gets it right? That's one piece of metadata out of millions, and one of the easiest, I would think, to get right. How will everyone, from publisher to label to distributor to music service and beyond, work together to capture, and connect, all that information going forward? And when someone asks their smart speaker to play the new RIHANNA song, whose job will it be to figure out what "new" means and what "Rihanna song" means? Those are the challenges. And the dangers... In not unrelated news, PANDORA buys digital audio ad tech giant ADSWIZZ... JIMMY IOVINE reportedly stepping away from a day-to-day role at APPLE, as most of his former BEATS ELECTRONICS partners have already done. Helluva quote from LOUP VENTURES' GENE MUNSTER: “If you ask the question, ‘Did [Apple] need Beats?,’ the answer is no"... YOUTUBE's LYOR COHEN says the service plans to increase the ads that some of its heaviest users see between music videos, to nudge them into subscribing to YouTube's coming subscription music service. Helluva quote #2, from Cohen: "You’re not going to be happy after you are jamming ‘STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN’ and you get an ad right after that." Crazy suggestion: Instead of making the existing service worse, why not show users how the new one will be better? (Also: YouTube is designed to make you keep listening to music, always recommending new videos and then auto-playing them. Why punish users for doing what the service wants them to do?)... ULTRA buys the WINTER MUSIC CONFERENCE... THE FADER takes down its ANTHONY FANTANO takedown... SPRINGSTEEN ON BROADWAY extended again. As tends to happen at Springsteen concerts. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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