Music Explosion

I’m finding it harder than ever before to manage all the music I have accumulated over the years.  I suppose I began buying music around age 8, though I couldn’t pay for it myself yet.  My mom or grandmother would take me and my brother to the mall, and sometimes we would get an allowance with which to entertain ourselves.  With about $10 a pop, I could usually afford a cassette or 12″ record at the local record store.  I would come home and practically wear out the music I bought on my little boom box or mom’s turntable.  Some of my first purchases were Van Halen’s 1984, Falco 3, and Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express.

This 16GB Zune HD is probably my favorite music player. It's very small, has a built in HD Radio tuner, and it sounds great. But it won't play my iTunes-purchased music.

In 1987 I got my first CD player, and now the tape and 12″ album collection I had built began to diversify into this new medium.  I also started buying more music at this time, and both Depeche Mode and New Order began to dominate my collection.  Later, when some of my friends and I could drive (and had jobs), we would drive from the suburbs into the city and check out all the myriad record shops for better selections than we could find at the mall.  I also could afford to spend more on music, and that’s when I began to notice that it was getting harder to manage all the pieces of music I could play.

Of course, I didn’t stop there.  In college I began to DJ, both at the university’s radio station (WRCT at Carnegie-Mellon, shout out!) and at local parties and clubs.  At this time, DJing was still all about vinyl.  Sure, the radio station had some CD decks, but they did not have pitch control.  They definitely didn’t have any kind of tactile interface for cueing.  So while my personal listening collection of CDs grew, so did the collection of vinyl I used in my DJ toolkit.

The Diamond Rio PMP-300, my first digital music player. It had 32MB of solid-state storage for music.

The next prong of media diversification in my personal music library happened in about 1996.  The MP3 compression format from Fraunhofer enabled the storage of literally tens of thousands of songs on a server at my employer that we could play throughout the day.  I was excited by how good the compressed songs sounded and impressed at their tiny file size.  It sounds so quaint today, but this was truly a giant leap forward.  Without advances in audio compression technology, we would never have digital music players with such vast libraries that we have today.  Forget about selling digital songs over the internet unless you’re ready to suck down linear-PCM encoded files clocking in at about 10MB per minute.

So as my nascent digital library grew, I thus began to buy digital music players so I could listen to them anywhere.  Sure, like every other kid in the 1980s, I had a Sony Walkman, but these new digital players were different.  The first one I bought was the Diamond Rio PMP300 (1998), which had 32MB of storage on solid-state memory.  Solid state!  That meant I could jog around outside with the player and not have to listen to tape sag each time my foot hit the pavement.  Plus, it was very small. The drawback?  32MB of storage just didn’t seem like enough, even with the new affordances of MP3 compression.

The Special Edition of the Rio had 64MB of storage for music. But it was still not enough!

The next step up from the original Rio was the same thing, only with more memory: the Diamond Rio PMP300 Special Edition (1999).  This one had double the memory, and I also bought a 16MB card for it, bringing its storage capacity to a whopping 80MB.  I ultimately decided that it just wasn’t enough fun to have to decide which 14 songs I want to put on my player.  Sure, I could compress with a lossier bit rate, but that sacrificed the quality of the songs.  If this were truly progress, shouldn’t I be able to listen to good quality and have more than one album on my player?

Somehow I skipped the first iPods, and the first one I owned was the iPod mini (2004), which had 4GB of space.  This was finally enough, I thought.  It wasn’t solid state, but rather it used a new tiny hard drive called a microdrive.  But the microdrive was resilient enough to withstand walking or running, and the battery on the iPod lasted a pretty long time.  The only trouble was, by this time my music library had grown past the 4GB point.  I think I had about 7GB of music at the time, and it was beginning to get tiresome deciding what to put on the player and what to leave off.

My first iPod was one of the 4GB minis. Finally, 4GB seemed like enough space, but somehow the music library was growing faster than music players' capacity.

Since then, my digital music library, listening habits, and music players have all transformed significantly.  I bought a 30GB iPod Video to hold the entire music library on one device.  I began to buy music digitally from Apple’s iTunes digital music store.  And I went to work for Zune to develop music recommendation algorithms and social information processing code — of course, when I arrived at work I got a Zune there, too.  Now, I’ve owned two cellular telephones that also are music players, and I have a 1GB iPod shuffle for working out.  I still have my Zune Pass “all you can eat” music store subscription, which means I have an unlimited supply of music at my disposal.  My iTunes library clocks in at over 8400 items, representing 32 days of music at 82GB.  Oh yeah, and I also have a giant physical music collection of both vinyl and CDs.  I’m feeling overloaded.

Where do I go from here?  I know I’m not alone in this predicament.  I don’t think new music players with more capacity or smaller footprints are going to solve this problem for me.  Tagging, searching, and sorting my iTunes library helps, but the user interface is still more accounting in Excel than it is flipping through records.  To make matters worse, I now feel that my physical music library is just sitting there decaying.  I play records and CDs sometimes, but usually I am just dialing up a song on iTunes or Zune.  I read a lot of blogs, which just blast new music at me 24/7/365.  Smart DJ, Genius, and Pandora are all there to help me find music I want to listen to, and they do a decent job.  But I think what I really need is less, not more: fewer devices, programs, and sources of music — to savor the experiences music provides rather than to be such an avid consumer.  It’s hard to turn off all the voices pushing new music in my face, but I think that’s the only way to stop being a collector and to start being a listener again.

At Zune, one of the most striking pieces of analysis of our customers’ listening habits demonstrated that in general people listened to new music almost exclusively.  Building the histogram of play events against release date was telling.  I think music has been commercialized into a consumption culture for quite a long time, from the content producers to the distributors and also to the electronics vendors that create new formats, devices, and technologies.  But alas, I think now I am going to strive for simplicity.  I might just enjoy all that music sitting around here rather than find new ways to gobble up new bytes.

Even though I have some newish players with smaller capacities, overall the amount of music they hold is growing. Interestingly, though, I think people are starting to find they just don't need 100GB of music in a portable device. I'd guess that the days of the Microdrive devices with >100GB of storage capacity are numbered.

The 2000s

I remember working in the interactive television world in the mid to late 1990s, and the big push back then was convergence.  The idea was that computers would begin to displace televisions and other devices, and that people would begin to use personal computers in more shapes and sizes than ever before.  By the time I left Microsoft to join the heady rush toward Internet startups, the message became tired: no one wanted to trade in their TV, and no one felt like “mousing” around on their television screens to click on things to buy.  Moreover, the content industry behind television was adamantly avoiding any kind of screen overlay or feature that distracted viewers from the screen.  After all, the commercial content industry in television is all about selling advertising at the end of the day.

It is now safe to say that the convergence is finally happening.  But so much more has happened since those early days.  In the video world, we now have Tivo and countless other personal video recorders.  In fact, many of these devices are shipped to consumers via their cable operators.  The content owners were aghast that viewers could skip the commercials that ultimately pay them.  And toward the end of the 2000s, of course, Internet video is light years ahead of where RealNetworks’ RealVideo began.  Now, the iPod nano even records video that people can upload, edit, share, and exploit.  People can watch video on their cell phones, computers, XBoxes, Playstations, portable DVD players, and even the old venerable television set.  Televisions have changed, too, though notably the personal computer hasn’t displaced it just yet.

So what about music technology?  The past decade has exploded with new, interesting music technology, and people have completely changed the way they consume music.  At the beginning of the decade, compact discs were still the media king, and now Apple’s iTunes Music Store is the #1 music retailer.  Also at the beginning of the decade, Napster began to shape how people consume music, engendering the idea that music should simply be free (technically, Napster began service in June 1999).  Now we have the iPod, iPhone, Zune, SoundCloud, Rhapsody, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify, RockBand, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and multitudes of others.

Music production radically changed, too.  The personal computer has become powerful enough to play back scores of tracks at the same time, to implement synthesizers, samplers, effects processors, and more on a laptop with a single disk and a few pieces of software.  Ableton Live simplified the notion of playing studio tracks live to an audience, giving way to the “laptop performance.”  And Serato Final Scratch and other technology enables DJs to bridge the gap between the old vinyl world and today’s digital libraries.

On a personal level, I reached some of my own goals over the past decade.  My debut album was released in 2003 on a reputable independent music label, and a second sophomore album followed a few years later.  In between, there were compilation appearances here and there and another EP release.  Professionally, I spent over half the decade in startup companies, and in one of the two I supported entrepreneurs in residence at a venture capital firm.  We went on to ship our software to millions of people starting with nothing but an idea, and that company eventually sold to Cisco in 2008.  I also realigned my professional and personal interests by returning to Microsoft to work on data-powered media experiences, like video recommendations at MSN Video and social music experiences at Zune.

So instead of postulate what the next decade may bring, instead I am content to live in today.  Never before have we seen such a rich plethora of media technology ripe for the picking, whether we are music producers, consumers, or both.  Whatever is in store for the next decade, I’m ready.  But, let me take a moment to enjoy what we all have worked to produce in the 2000s.  I’m switching on the studio as we speak.