Oh yeah…
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Somewhat lost in the spectacle of the iPhone announcement was the companion announcement of the apple tv. Or what you will.
My first response to this announcement was “who cares?” Of course, I knew that some people would be excited about it. I knew it didn’t strike me as terribly interesting and we were all hanging on waiting for the announcement. Which we knew would come at the end.
And of course, in the intervening weeks we’ve all been thinking about other things. For me it’s been subscription music, Ibrahim Ferrer and that Soul Coughing album I never did go out and buy. For the guys who write about this sort of thing for a living, perhaps it’s been dealing with the consequences of the iPhone announcement and more recently Vista’s impending release. apple tv has noticed the lack of discussion and pushed to the front of Apple’s page.
It occurs to me, finally, that something bothers me about the whole thing? Apple, promoting a set top box so that iTunes video content can be seen on a slightly larger screen? For some reason this feels like finding out your best friend has been making meth in the bathroom. It’s not just that suddenly Apple is competing with such corporations with limited hip cred as HP and Microsoft. The whole TV thing bugs me. Somehow I don’t think the ads are going to show privledged, hip people enjoying, what, The Sopranos? The image I get is more like someone watching 24. I mean, I know there are people out there who have their entire music collection on an iPod shuffle and it consists of works by such musical geniuses as Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson. And that’s fine. I’ll judge their taste in music but I don’t look down at them for it. TV is just such low entertainment, it feels wrong to associate it with something as aesthetically pleasing as an iPod.
It really doesn’t help that Apple’s appletv page includes the words “The revolution will be televised,” similar to the phrase I caught Dell using in their TV ads. What is it with computer companies and that song?
You mean other people buy cars for their iPods too?
This past weekend, the NY Times ran a story about the ways automakers are adding music player connectivity (iPod connectivity, really) to their cars. So none of the talk of automakers adding iPod connectivity is that surprising…but are they doing it the best way possible?
It took a few days to hit my consciousness but of course I find the idea more than a little interesting. I turned my CD collection into mp3’s in 2001, before I had ever owned a car. When I bought my first car (sans working stereo of any kind) in early 2002, I thought it would be slick if I could play those mp3’s and thereby have my entire CD collection in my car at all times (without hurting the 1.6L engine’s ability to get me up hills.) So, I bought an aftermarket CD player that played mp3 discs. But when my system was torn out less than a year later, my enthusiasm for aftermarket systems waned a little. I replaced the system with the same model and stuck it out a few more years but the whole removable faceplate thing got to me. As much as I’d planned to continue to buy used cars, when I finally decided to buy another car I was looking at the new models. The Civic won me over because it not only had a line in jack, it would also play my old mp3 discs. I quite literally bought a car, if not for my iPod, for my music.
When I moved to Kentucky and faced the spectre of a 40-minute commute with the same songs I’d been listening to, I realized I really had to either finally put all the CD’s I’d bought on fresh mp3 discs or find another way. Oh, by the way, my iPod was gathering dust. A trip to Radio-Shack for a 1/8″ to 1/8″ plug put me on the road to hours of iPod-generated listening bliss. I set up a random playlist of my favorite songs that I hadn’t heard in awhile and just let it play.
At this point, Honda’s Music Link system would have looked very attractive. But there I go, throwing complexity into every system. I decided I wanted subscription music. If you’ve been paying attention (I forgive you if you haven’t) you know this has been my recent craze. If I drop 200 bucks on that, I’ll still have the same problem with my Zen V. And really, that’s the more pressing problem since I certainly won’t have songs and artists I’ve never heard of on my iPod at 99 cents a song. It would help me a lot more if the Zen could display song info on the dashboard.
What’s fascinating is that they are talking about using a USB plug to connect your car to you music…so you can download it to a hard drive on the car? Why on earth would you do that if it’s already on your player? Why not teach the car to talk to the player and allow it to control the player (and hopefully it can talk to more players than just the iPod) in a user-friendly way? I’m talking about displaying track information, allowing navigation through the controls already on the dashboard, etc? Would that really be that hard? I mean, do they call it “Universal” for nothing?
More on mixtapes, tech and the direction
A little more evidence, courtesy the NY Times, of how technology influences music (and perhaps to a certain extent, vice versa).
The underground hip-hop scene goes 20+ years, fueled by cassette tapes, without a problem. Suddenly CD burners make the stuff easier to distribute, which seems like a good thing. But it ups the ante, gains some attention and suddenly it looks like it could significantly change the way things are done in that scene.
Now who saw that coming?
Plays Fo’ Sho’
Speaking of things that we’re still waiting to see from Apple…how about a subscription service?
I’ve been using the Yahoo Music service for about two years…It was good for digging up things I hadn’t heard in awhile and maybe doing a little exploring. But I really haven’t been spending gobs of my time in front of a computer for a few years. After getting a little kick back, I started spending time with new music again. Yahoo fit this better than iTunes. One thing that kind of intrigued me was the idea of transfering subscription songs to a portable device. Of course, this requires a Windows “Plays for Sure” device, and I’d heard bad things about the standard. But a couple of weeks ago the allure became too much.
I decided to go first with the cheapest device that would do the trick. The Panasonic SV-MP010 had the “Plays for Sure” logo along with an additional icon that claimed it would play both downloaded and subscription content.
I got it home and found that it wasn’t on the list of subscription-approved devices for any of the major subscription services. I also discovered that the Plays-for-Sure standard pretty much only applies to computers running Windows XP or better. I’m not terribly upset about the whole XP thing. I knew Win2k would be obsolete pretty soon anyway. But I’m a little confused about the purpose of having a standard when the services to which that standard applies have even more stringent standards.
The Panasonic player was too cool to take back so I gave it away. The next day I went back to the store and picked up a 1 GB Creative Zen V player. I had a better feeling about that one because it actually had the Yahoo music logo on the side. It has a color screen a few more functions…it’s easier to scroll through playlists. Really, it will probably serve me better than the Panasonic would given how I envision using it.
The subscription service, including the upgrade to allow loading subscription content on a portable device is about $15.00 a month. This is more than the total I’ve been willing to pay on iTunes in the two years I’ve had an iPod. I liked David Berlind’s explanation of the “razors and blades” strategy and why Apple is counting on songs to be the razor (and not the blades as would seem to be intuitively correct.) So what if the market begins to see through this strategy?
In other words, I feel perfectly logical learning about new music on the radio and via Yahoo and the Zen player, continuing to buy music on CD (that was Bill Gates’ suggestion, too,) or in rare cases where I just can’t live without a song, on iTunes, and storing music on the iPod.
But, man are my pockets getting full.
Avoiding cingularities
Exciting as Jobs’ demo of the iPhone may have been, some of us are waffling on the idea of being tied to a particular wireless carrier.
For my part, I had no particular problem with Cingular (or AT&T Wireless) before last July. In July I went to a Cingular store here in Lexington to look at renewing my plan and changing my phone number to a local number. First, I was told that I would have to upgrade my phone. (They couldn’t have that old AT&T logo hanging around, after all!) Then, they didn’t have the phone I picked out (the most slimmed-down model they sold.) The sales guy promised to call us when the phone came in, probably the next day.
In the meantime, my wife suggested taking a look at T-mobile’s plans. When the AT&T salesguy never called, we were ready to switch. They didn’t have the phone I wanted either. But they were willing to drive to another store to pick it up. And deliver it to our house. So we switched. And we haven’t felt the need to switch back; their customer service has been great in an industry where customer service is pretty much the only thing you’ve got.
I’ve seen some new things the last couple of weeks that have soured me on Cingular even more. The first is this rebranding effort, in which we are being assaulted with ads proclaiming “Cingular is now the new AT&T.” Even putting aside the arguments against the AT&T/Bell South merger as monopolistic or a danger to net neutraility this campaign is obnoxious. Ok guys, we just went through this. Speaking of TV ads, you may have seen these Sprint ads which accuse Cingular of having a very limited wireless broadband network. I’m not one to trust advertising, so I checked it out for myself. Cingular doesn’t seem to be terribly forthcoming on this issue. (Do you think they could have made their EDGE network coverage area map any smaller?) It looks like their coverage is fine but it feels like they’re hiding something.
It’s likely that the iPhone wouldn’t be my dream device out of the block in any case. Being tied to one network (for the time being) will probably make it easier to resist.
2nd hand, layer 3
I’m back in Denver this week and had a chance to visit my favorite used music store. They were having a store-wide sale, buy three and get the fourth one free, and I panicked for a second. Surely things are so bad that they’d have to close down, too?
Maybe not, but something really struck me. Without realizing it at first, I think the bar for me has really been lifted. I need to be guaranteed a higher level of overall album quality to actually consider purchasing anything, even at used prices. They have scads of Beck CD’s, a couple of which I’ve been meaning to pick up for, hell, nearly a decade. Yet I passed on them today. I can rent them. I still couldn’t find the Good Will Hunting Soundtrack, the only way to get Elliot Smith’s Miss Misery. I did get a handful of discs. Stuff that was all pretty solid. For the most part, albums I’d known well enough to know they were solid. Three discs I’d missed from my days at KVDU. One artist I’d discovered back at WRUW-FM. One I’d discovered on my own.
So how does subscription or downloadable music change the CD landscape (beyond what it has already?) Everybody gets to try the music out before committing to it. Subscription services are like a listening station wherever you want it. CD’s aren’t going to disappear…computer files are like cassette tapes to LP’s. They’ll serve a different listening occasion. They’ll be what you put on your stereo system at times when you can actually hear the difference.
Soon enough file size will be less important and we’ll get even better sounding files in downloadable format. I’m optimistic and sad. Really, I’ll miss the funky smell of music stores and radio station music libraries. I’ll miss the seat in the record store from which I watched the world 10 years ago while I was contemplating buying Poi Dog Pondering’s “Wishing Like a Mountain, Thinking Like the Sea,” the album that got me through that last semester of high school. The seat I sat in this morning while I was contemplating buying Jolie Holland’s “Escondida,” which will help me get through…what? I don’t know yet.
