Hollin Jones
Apple’s digital music ventures have had their upsides, but there have also been a few downsides for musicians.
I’ve ruminated on Apple’s domination of the pro audio world before, and that’s something I don’t see changing any time soon. As I’ve also observed before now, Apple has found huge success in broadening its customer base beyond professionals to regular people, generally through iPods and iPhones, but also the MacBook, Apple’s best-selling Mac ever, and the iMac. In other ways, it has also changed the way we interact with and think about music, and this is something that’s particularly important for independent producers and musicians.
The technology behind producing music is easy to access on any Mac. Everyone with a new Mac gets a copy of GarageBand, while the more adventurous can pick up Logic Express, Logic Studio or one of the other Digital Audio Workstations on the market. However, once the music is made, Apple still wants to be involved. When the company introduced the iTunes Music Store (as it was then called) back in 2003 off the back of the success of the iPod, it managed to do what other companies, unsure of how to proceed in the face of Napster and other then-illegal file sharing networks, had failed to do. It got the major record labels to agree to flat-pricing structures, and also that no album would be a single entity – customers would be able to pick and choose tracks.
This was unpopular among many big bands, who tend to feel that their albums are a body of work best enjoyed in the track order they’ve decided. When asked about this, one high-up record company guy remarked that the issue had gone ‘all the way to Steve Jobs’ desk’. The major concession that Apple made to the labels was the inclusion in music files of digital rights management (DRM) technology. An attempt by the labels to maintain some control over the content, it was always doomed to fail, since it could be circumvented by simply burning tracks to CD and then re-importing them, as clean as a whistle, into iTunes. In fact, Apple had form on this one – its publicity campaign for early iMacs back in 2001 encouraged us to ‘rip, mix and burn’ our music. Not that it meant anyone to contravene copyright, of course, but it’s a little ironic that a few years later the major labels would be forced to admit that Apple had the best system going for selling music legally online and jump on board. DRM would be dropped from iTunes music several years later in the face of competition primarily from Amazon, although the protection remains on movie files.
Apple didn’t invent digital music sales, it just found a way of doing it right, a bit like it did with the iPhone. iTunes isn’t perfect – neither is the iPhone – but that hasn’t stopped them from being wildly successful. And anything so successful becomes the ‘place to be’ for hopefuls, so before long small labels and independent producers wanted in on the act as well. Approaching Apple directly about this was a non-starter but, gradually, online services began to spring up that could get your music onto iTunes as well as other online stores through having a standing arrangement with Apple.
If most people buy their digital music from iTunes, you want yours to be on there. There are loads of these websites around – I use Tunecore. It’s not a great surprise that Apple doesn’t get directly involved in handling individual submissions from musicians, who aren’t always the most organised or coherent bunch. The systems seem to be mostly automated anyway and judging by the distinctly MOR nature of the acts that tend to close Apple presentations these days and the slideshow music you get with iPhoto, they might not ‘get’ a lot of it anyway.
The iTunes Store has been massively successful and, in line with Apple’s master plan, continues to drive sales of iPods and phones. However, there’s a school of thought which suggests that its success has had a detrimental effect on music and the way we perceive it. Not really from a piracy point of view – that would have happened anyway and is something nobody seems to be able to stop – rather, it’s about overload. It’s great being able to get your music onto iTunes, but so can everybody else, and so the playing field is as crowded than it was in the days when people used to send mountains of cassettes to John Peel.
Trying to get ahead by setting up a MySpace page and linking to iTunes has been compared not altogether inaccurately to ‘screaming into the void’. Everybody does it, so in order to make any headway, you need an approach that’s far better planned. Old-fashioned things such as radio pluggers, press campaigns and even a manager are really a necessity in tandem with all the online stuff. That, and lots of hard work. Don’t believe the PR people who tell you an act went from playing in their bedroom, got a million fans on the web and is suddenly touring with U2. It just doesn’t happen like that.
The other factor that Apple has contributed, or at least made popular, involves the capacity of its players. The iPod classic currently has a capacity of 160GB, which Apple estimates as 40,000 songs. But could anyone actually listen to 40,000 songs? Is it not more likely that you would listen to a maximum of about 500 and barely even scratch the surface of the rest? The digitisation of music that began with the MP3 file has devalued music, whether people realise it or not, and made it a more throwaway commodity. That’s not Apple’s fault, but it has helped it along. If Apple hadn’t done it, someone else would have and, having seen competing MP3 players, I’m still glad it was Apple and not someone else. It recently attempted to restore some of this perceived value with the iTunes LP format, incorporating bigger artwork, animated lyrics, liner notes, videos and other bonus material. It’s okay, but it’s still digital, and that doesn’t have the ‘hold in the hand’, tangible quality of a vinyl or even well-produced CD package.
The fact remains that flogging music is as difficult as it ever was, despite the huge technological changes pioneered mainly by Apple over the past decade. Digital has to be one branch of your strategy, but rarely will it suffice on its own. Many bands survive by doing limited-edition hardware pressings and selling them to loyal fans. In fact, this is something I’d love to see Apple get into. You can order a professionally printed album or calendar through iPhoto, and they look great. Logistics notwithstanding (you’d probably pay a bit of a premium), couldn’t Apple manage a CD pressing service directly from Logic, GarageBand or Waveburner, or maybe even vinyl pressing? I admit that vinyl probably isn’t very high up on Jobs’ list of priorities, but you get the idea.
With a recent, detailed patent emerging that shows Apple looking seriously into a system of selling concert tickets (see <strong><a href=”http://www.patentlyapple.com” target=”_self” rel=”nofollow”>patentlyapple.com</a></strong>), it is clearly keen to exploit the other avenue by which bands are said to make money – live performance. For all the hype, they’ll be aware that digital isn’t the be all and end all of music, and that people like something real that they can see and feel.
