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Digital Music

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• Guests
• For Your Files

Digital technology is changing the face of the music industry. In this episode, we learn how digital music is recorded and transferred, and how these new formats are changing the way musicians and record companies are doing business.

Guests

For Your Files

CD music and MP3 music sound the same, but Steve Nyugen said CD music is usually in what’s called a “wav” format, or a standard audio format that’s not compressed.

"When you transfer that to the computer to digitize into an MP3, there’s a conversion process that needs to take place. It’s an encoding process, where the MP3 encoder will squash the file size down usually from about 50 or 60 megabytes down to about 5 megabytes."

MP3s maintain audio quality, and the fidelity is just as if it was from the original CD.

Steve Nyugen also discussed the MIDI, or Musical instrument digital interface, file type. MIDIs are a series of instructions that the computer uses to tell a musical instrument what to play.

Radio K’s Mark Wheat said money is the main reason bands have gone to the Web with their MP3 files:

"Astronaut Wife, for example, was one of the first bands to send us a CD-R of a track that they had. In other words, they put out their own single. But, they only sent it to us as a radio station so that we could play the single and tell people that it was out there. And people went to the Web site and used an MP3 format to listen to the singe again, and other singles that were up there. It’s much cheaper for the band to do that, because they’re basically only making one copy, and it’s going strait to somewhere that they hope is going to play it, i.e. a radio station. Then they don’t have to make all the extra copies hoping somebody else is going to buy it. What usually happens is that a fan will become interested in a band and go to the Web site, and then they they’ll go to a gig- a live performance of the band. And that’s normally, these days, where they’ll buy their first CD, because the bands will have copies at the shows where they sell them directly to the customers. It cuts out a lot of the middle people, and is much cheaper for the band. "

The music business is changing. For the companies that record it, and for the stores that sell music. Mark Wheat has some guesses on how music stores may evolve:

"We could see them go to the size of a telephone kiosk. Because essentially what you need is a very quick connection, so that you can connect to the Web and download the music from wherever it’s stored on a hard drive. You could make your own CD. The store [would just give] you your own CD-R, and say, ‘Here, just put it in that slot, and press the buttons for which songs you want.’ If you want 10 songs, they’re a dollar each, it’s $10 for the compilation. Essentially, that’s where people think the business is moving."