Apple is working on a new digital music format

http://time.com/3393297/u2-apple-new-digital-format/

by lalmachado • 12 years ago

30 77 12 years ago

time.com

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

If it's going to be a proprietary DRM-locked file format - just don't bother, Apple.

Nicholas_C• 12 years ago

I would bet money that it will be.

rustynails• 12 years ago

Some potential ideas - pay per listen, local cache - embedded lyrics, photos - extra sound bytes (exclusive to track owners) - optional videos - asynchronous Comms with the band: FAQs. News, interviews, etc

There are many things you can do that link purchased content with other content. Adding lyrics that appear in realtime would also be handy.

My ideas are now patented. Pay me 5% of all future sales please... Isn't that how patents work? State the obvious and rake in cash for doing very little?

SideburnsOfDoom3• 12 years ago

That and/or "high definition", "above CD quality" digital audio.

There's a lot of noise in the digital music industry about high quality audio at present. U2 may be following in Neil Young's PONO footsteps.

There may be doubt whether high quality audio can deliver what it promises - i.e. an improvement over MP3 320 that is noticeable to normal people's ears. But the Pono kickstarter proves beyond any doubt that there's money it it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-wh...

dagw• 12 years ago

The recording industry have tried the "above CD quality" thing to get people to re-buy their music several times before. Each time it flopped, and I fail to see why this time will be different.

antimagic• 12 years ago

I doubt they're talking about a new encoding format or anything like that. If I had to guess, I would be thinking more about something like the recentish NiN album that came with Garageband files so that you could remix the music yourself. Or which provides synchronised lyrics embedded in the music, or something like that.

stephenr• 12 years ago

Why would it be? iTunes tracks started transitioning to DRM-free 7 years ago - as far as I can see from some quick research they were one of if not the first music store offering DRM free music from any of the major labels, and absolutely gave immense weight to the DRM-free push before many of the current competing services even existed.

So, if your comment is going to follow the typical apple bashing, history ignoring model, just don't bother.

potatolicious• 12 years ago

Not to mention sales of music downloads are tanking through the floor. Consumption is predominantly streaming now, and that's the way people like it.

I simply don't see any static, local file format succeeding regardless of DRM-encumbrance. It's simply less useful to mainstream users than the streaming equivalent.

The battle isn't about which format your files should be in, it's about whether or not you have any files at all.

zamalek• 12 years ago

Whatever it becomes it's going to have iTunes lock-in. So glad I never bought into that walled garden.

tmuir2• 12 years ago

From TFA, it sounds like they might finally understand the dynamics of piracy and drm:

"Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music"

Stopping piracy isn't accomplished by punishing users, its done by making legitimacy easier/more appealing in the first place.

However, if it's truly irresistibly exciting, but $1.29 per song, that implies DRM, as one can safely assume the exciting aspect is not the act of purchasing the music.

imaginenore3• 12 years ago

Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music

Bono, I will tell you a secret. It's the good music that's irresistible, not some DRM garbage which you don't even have the balls to discuss.

pain_perdu• 12 years ago

Well-put sir, thank you for this.

zeruch• 12 years ago

This is the band with the most sociopathhic manager since Peter Grant, who has been trying to push DRM before: http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507 (disclosure, the link is my own write up of a speech by Paul McGuinness at a Medem conf)

snowwrestler5• 12 years ago

I am fully supportive of the idea that musicians and songwriters should get compensated for their work in proportion with its popluarity. Just because people love to make music, that doesn't mean they don't want to save for retirement, buy a house, send kids to college, maybe do some investing, etc. If you pirate an album you like, instead of buying it, you're taking advantage of those artists.

[steps off soapbox]

That said, I have a hard time seeing how a new digital music format is going to affect piracy at all. AAC is already technically superior to MP3, but everyone still trades MP3s.

And I really hope this is not a veiled reference to a new DRM format.

72deluxe3• 12 years ago

You're right - it seems popular even on HN where people make a living that musicians are exempt from earning a living through recording and selling music. Wrapped in daft phrases like "music wants to be free", it seems fashionable to engage in copyright infringement for music, and I think it stinks. Arguments that record labels ("fat cats") get a cut of the earnings are not relevant - the musician signed with the label (correct) but does this mean that the musician said his recorded music is free? (incorrect!)

We have disgust for software piracy here (particularly if it something we have written), yet the same disgust DOES not translate to music or musicians. It is wrong.

I think it is an attitude that needs to change. And the argument that "if I like it, I'll buy it" is wrong too; do we all pirate Microsoft Office and decide if we'll buy it after using it for a while? I don't! I buy Office if I need Office / enjoy using Office (not likely with that daft ribbon interface!).

MeadowTheory4• 12 years ago

No, no, no. Emphatically no.

I am speaking a musician here: by the time you are earning an appreciable amount of money from album sales, you are no longer just "making a living". Most musicians that support themselves through music do it by touring and selling merchandise (including physical recordings), and musicians that get famous have usually been doing this for years before they start making money off of recordings. The only exceptions are "manufactured" pop stars, like Miley Cyrus or Ariana Grande, who get big contracts right away through high-powered connections and nepotism.

And yes, the record "fat cats" earnings are perfectly relevant in this situation. They are exploiting musician's work to become wealthy, and by supporting them, you are implicitly supporting their actions. If you want to support a band, go see their shows and buy their merchandise.

MeadowTheory4• 12 years ago

Musician weighing in:

Musicians and bands had been making a living for thousands of years before the recording industry was invented, and they will continue to do so for thousands of years after the recording industry has crumbled to the ground (mostly due to their own greed and stupidity). While the recording industry certainly allowed some musicians to become filthy rich, that was mostly through exposure. Musicians have never made very much from the sale of recordings alone, and have always relied on touring and merchandise for the majority of their revenue. Today, even very popular bands, the ones that get the juicy contracts, are making pennies on the dollar on the recordings they produce (and before this gets brought up, so are the engineers and producers, most of the money goes to marketing and distribution, and then a big chunk to the various executives and agents). The situation is much worse for smaller and rising acts.

The truth of the situation is that the recording industry and their distributors have been exploiting the labor of hard-working musicians for the last 100 years. Many of the old blues men from our earliest popular recordings were never even paid, although men that they never even met grew rich from selling their work. The recording industry has been selling the same snake oil to us sense then, just packaged differently according to the musical tastes of the time. There will always be a collectors market for physical recordings, but it is time that we acknowledge that digital content can be delivered for essentially zero marginal cost, and that free knowledge and art have cultural benefits that drastically outweigh any financial gains that may be made by restricting access to them. (And if you are someone that can only be swayed by economics, I would argue that by encouraging innovation and free exchange of ideas, you will reap greater economic benefits overall, even though certain industries may suffer initially.) Moreover, as an artist, by sharing my music for free, I feel that I am being much more honest and forthright with my audience and that am able to reach far more people than I would otherwise.

The only people really exploiting artists are recording industry executives. If you buy an album you like, instead of pirating it, you're taking advantage of those artists. Go see them play live or buy a fucking t-shirt instead.

snowwrestler5• 12 years ago

The idea that piracy hurts big labels is laughable. They long ago read the writing on the wall and started signing new acts to 360 deals that give them a cut of every revenue stream.

"Buy a fucking t-shirt"? There are two possibilities.

1) The artist is signed to an exploitative label deal. If this is the case, the artist is not seeing any more money from that t-shirt than they do from an album sale. Nor are they taking home their gate, so seeing them in person isn't helping either.

2) The artist is signed to a limited or ethical deal. If this is the case, then they have a good relationship with their label, and pirating music will hurt them either directly (lost royalties) or indirectly (hurting the label and forcing succesful bands to sign with a major).

I'm sure you play music, but I think your sense of the industry is incomplete or not up to date.

stevekl• 12 years ago

Great, another proprietary format.

While I want everything to be open and interoperable, I personally work in a startup that aims to make profit. So I also understand the commercial reasons of proprietary technologies.

So, I am torn, what should be proprietary and what should be open?

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

Open: anything required to survive. Prop: anything optional to survive.

Slackwise• 12 years ago

Formats should never be proprietary. That's just holding user data hostage.

Really, nothing should be proprietary, or at least not proprietary forever.Take note of Id Software's approach of open-sourcing their engines X years after release of the accompanying game.

If we keep releasing proprietary systems, nothing will be archived or usable in the future, if the source is never released. Hundreds of video games are going to be inaccessible in the future due to DRM servers, or proprietary backends.

I mean, I can ramble on forever, but it's pretty clear that non-free[1] software is bad for the future of people and society. Snowden proved RMS right.

[1]: Free as in freedom: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html (You can still charge money for free software or related services. Not everyone can run their own Google, even if they open sourced it all. But that's a whole 'nother set or arguments.)

startupfounder• 12 years ago

Apple should buy Pono, Neil Young & Jon Hamm's music "high-resolution" 24-bit 192kHz audio company and have Neil play some real Rock & Roll at Apple events.

tmuir2• 12 years ago

I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but Pono is bound to fail. Throughout the evolution of widely adopted audio formats, the sound quality has always decreased. The average listener doesn't care about fidelity. They can't tell the difference. They care about convenience.

Cassette tapes were better than vinyl records, because they were more portable. CDs were better than tapes, because you could skip tracks. Mp3s were better than CDs, because you could fit thousands of them in your pocket. But at each step of that progression, the sound got worse.

Young's testimonials are from professional musicians, the extremely small subset of the public that actually cares about the quality of the sound. These are not the people he needs to convince. This is obviously aimed at the general public, who have proven time and time again that convenience is king.

The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.

mikeash• 12 years ago

The sound got worse when going from tapes to CDs?

ssharp2• 12 years ago

The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.

I don't think the vast majority of people could either tell the difference or care about the difference between much larger compression gaps than that.

I received three free months of Sirius radio when I purchased a certified used car. After a few minutes of flipping through the channels, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to such highly compressed music with tons of artifacts, yet lots of people pay for subscriptions.

SideburnsOfDoom3• 12 years ago

Neil Young was born in 1945 and has been rocking since 1960 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young

If his ears can still tell the difference between "high-resolution" audio and MP3 320, then it is a miracle of geriatric audiological medicine. Seriously, medicine should get on that, there's something unknown to science going on there.

sp332• 12 years ago

I'm betting on Freemium DRM. Listen to the crummy version for free, or plug the file into a totalitarian DRM system to pay for and decrypt the good version.

ceejayoz2• 12 years ago

Given the big deal Apple made about dropping DRM, I doubt that. It'll probably be something to support extended content. iTunes has some packages that come with video, PDF, etc. content as well as the music already.

adamnemecek3• 12 years ago

hockeybias: you are shadowbanned and have been for the last 5 years

dandelany• 12 years ago

Here's something I've always wanted: A consumer music file format that preserves all of the underlying tracks ('stems') so that they can be adjusted while you listen to the song.

Imagine listening to a recording and going "ooh, that bassline", and then turning up the bassist and turning down everything else to hear it better. Or easily "remixing" while you listen by eg. applying a filter to only the drums. You could even save presets to listen to "your" mix of the song again. Maybe this only appeals to hardcore music fans, but I know it's something I'd love to play with.

Of course it would have to be supported by major user-friendly software like iTunes, and would have to implement a nice interface for interacting with a tracks. But I've always thought Apple was very well positioned to take this on, if they wanted to.

dubcanada• 12 years ago

That would be awesome...

ceejayoz2• 12 years ago

I imagine this being greeted with fury and lawsuits from the artists. I remember a company in Utah that made family-friendly cuts of popular movies being sued for the modifications.

imaginenore3• 12 years ago

There are tons of formats like that. Midi, old tracker ones (s3m, xm, mod).

But very few artists are willing to publish the "source code" of their work.

johnchristopher3• 12 years ago

What about rock bands and other recording music with their instruments rather than through samplers ?

jaimebuelta2• 12 years ago

It sounds cool, but it will be a disaster. Does anyone remember the "ultra boost" button on the old Walkman to raise the bass to insane levels? Or all the equalizer voodoo, where people will "tune" moving levels and buttons forming shapes?

The sad truth is that audio engineers are way better than anyone else in mixing the music and making it shine. The better approach is not to mess with that and just trust them.

The same thing goes for headphones. It's better to get something more or less neutral in the sound to listen music in the way is supposed to sound, not distorting it adding crazy bass.

malka• 12 years ago

It might not be for simply listening to the music, but for a moment 'hey this bassline kicks ass, I want to hear it alone to study it'

post_break• 12 years ago

Doesn't matter who's better at what. If consumers want to make smiley faces with their EQ let them. It's all about customization. Ask Metallica about how great their sound engineers were when they basically neutered their album.

People buy Beats because they like the way they sound (or because their idols use them). Even if you may think it's the same as ultra boost.

It's not about what sounds good, it's about what you think sounds good.

dbever• 12 years ago

People often comment on the lack of bass in my headphone choices - I describe it as 'clinical' and much prefer studio-style response.

ihsw• 12 years ago

The sad truth is that fashion designers are way better than anyone else in designing clothing and making it shine. The better approach is not to mess with that and just trust them.
The sad truth is that chefs are way better than anyone else in creating a delicious menu and making it shine. The better approach is not to mess with that and just trust them.

Who ever said that keeping people from dressing hideously or eating food that doesn't match was a good idea?

Some people might even make it sound better, but you're advocating we take that opportunity away from them without giving them the benefit of the doubt.

kevincennis2• 12 years ago

As someone who spent a number of years mixing records professionally, I can definitely attest to the fact that even talented musicians are usually pretty terrible at mixing. It's a subtle art, and it takes a lot of experience/practice to do even remotely well.

But I think the larger point is that most artists and labels would hate this. To a singer, having someone hear your soloed vocal track is like being seen naked.

I think most artists view their records as being a single work of art. The song, arrangement, equipment, mixing, and mastering are all part of something bigger. Artists don't really want people to be able to break that apart. It's not meant to be experienced that way.

johnchristopher3• 12 years ago

I'd agree with you if those audio engineers hadn't participated in the loudness war for the three last decades.

Pxtl3• 12 years ago

I believe Ogg has support for this, but who publishes oggs?

hazz• 12 years ago

I would love this, but the file sizes would be insane. We'd be talking hundreds of megabytes (possibly gigabytes?) per song. Unless each track was MP3 encoded first, but I'd imagine you'd have trouble mixing tracks together from lossy sources.

johnchristopher3• 12 years ago

Insane ? A standard DVD is 4.7 gigabytes. That would be 6 tracks and it would be ideal for any rock band and we haven't yet compressed the thing with loss (not technically true but you get the point.

I don't know about electronic music though.

ssharp2• 12 years ago

This could be interesting. Especially for artists using the Apple toolchain, namely Logic. It seems like a lot of stuff could then be duplicated on the desktop / mobile to give interested listeners control over various song elements.

I don't know how many people would actually be interested in that, though. It would be targeting a segment of music listeners that are extremely engaged with their music. I don't know if that market is really big enough to overcome the growing preference for streaming services.

Ryanmf• 12 years ago

Just yesterday I was investigating music/production startups, and one of the few ideas I came across that seemed halfway-interesting was Splice[0]. On the producer side they have plugins for a few DAWs that enable easier collaboration and version tracking and so forth. But what comes of that (and why it's relevant to your comment) is a Soundcloud-ish embeddable web player that breaks out all the tracks/stems into a timeline beneath the main player interface.

It's pretty interesting, although I don't know how much of an opportunity is there, for some of the same reasons mentioned in the other replies. Musicians and producers can be incredibly reticent about this stuff.

[0]http://splice.com

chiph• 12 years ago

I liked the new U2 album, but the amount of compression used was absurd. A new high-resolution format won't be able to fix poor decisions made in the mastering booth.

tonysuper• 12 years ago

This might be proprietary, but Apple's other major codec is open.[1] Hopefully this will be as well.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless

gillianseed• 12 years ago

It was proprietary was most of it's existence and was not opened until 2011, which in turn was likely as a result of everyone using FLAC instead.

I have no doubt this new codec will be proprietary, and only if it fails to gain any traction is there a chance of it becoming open.

shaggy2• 12 years ago

Above CD quality has been tried many times. Currently, the service with the most to offer in terms of catalog is https://www.hdtracks.com/faq. You do have to re-buy albums you might already own, but the choices are ever expanding and include a lot of great stuff.

The point in the article about the new format helping lesser known artists really shows just how little U2 and Bono actually get about the current state of the music industry. Artists are getting completely screwed by labels and must tour by necessity to make money. In fact, with the huge growth in the festival industry, small acts (and large acts of old) can make significant chunks of money they otherwise wouldn't. To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible. A new digital format isn't going to change that.

tzs• 12 years ago

To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible

Was Cole Porter a performer? What I see after a bit of searching indicates he was a songwriter/composer, so what would be the attraction of a Cole Porter tour?

shaggy2• 12 years ago

He was not a performer. He was a songwriter and composer mostly for Broadway and he was a great one. The draw would be something like "an evening with Cole Porter and his music" or "Cole Porter and his Broadway orchestra play his hits". You can imagine the marketing around hearing the music live, standing on its own. That kind of stuff makes money today, and lots of it.

mbesto2• 12 years ago

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/927/

adamnemecek3• 12 years ago

Can we please stop linking to this whenever there's a discussions about a new standard? There are other reasons for creating a new standard besides unification of the current standards.

mbesto2• 12 years ago

Why? The conclusion is always the same. I'm genuinely curious as to what these "other reasons" are.

Pxtl3• 12 years ago

The way Bono talks about it it really sounds like bringing back DRM, since he's focused on career songwriters in his little quote. Maybe improving the way albums and additional metadata are bundled for the non-audio content. Hopefully the audio files themselves will remain as-is.

One thing that disappoints me is the way folders have stayed un-typed in OSes. I've always wished that the Reiser concept of "a file that contains files" had caught on, as that would be much more appropriate for packing metadata and other information unrelated to the main audio stream into an audio file container.

colanderman2• 12 years ago

"a file that contains files"

How does this differ from a ZIP file? (Keep in mind all modern OSes support treating ZIP files like directories.)

Pxtl3• 12 years ago

First, because folders are far more performant for accessing child objects. That's mostly an implementation detail, but a big one - there are tremendous optimizations made on the filesystem that are not accessible for something like ZIP. Particularly relevant to bulk searching/listing - the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files.

Second (and this is more a problem in Windows where the 3-letter extension is more important) the OS needs to know which tools it can associate with which type. If a file is a .zip, then it's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's not a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music archive). But not both.

veidr• 12 years ago

There's no chance whatsoever that this is a new DRM-encumbered format[1]. None. So some people need to take a breath.

(And there's almost as little chance that it is going to matter any more than the Apple/Bandai Pippin @WORLD.)

If Apple is actually involved in a more significant way than grudgingly acting as fluffer to Bono's fantasies of heroically saving a nonsensical[2] industry that briefly emerged as an artifact of technological limitations of the previous century, I would guess it is some kind of super-metadata-laden format that includes art/video/interview/extras, maybe including built-in remixability or something, that is designed (but unlikely) to entice users to buy even more DRM-free $1.29 songs than they already do in MP3/AAC.

[1] http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_post... (Was astonished that Apple doesn't still host this, btw. But it's not gonna change.)

[2]: “Cole Porter wouldn’t have sold T-shirts. Cole Porter wasn’t coming to a stadium near you.” Right. So he would have sold his songs to somebody who was -- or else not made much money from it. So what. There are homeless drummers in SF better than Cole Porter, and no new media format is going to change any of that, nor should it.

bequanna• 12 years ago

I am having a tough time understanding this whole Apple + U2 'partnership' (or whatever it is).

It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant.

Hell, I'm almost 30 and few of my friends have any interest in U2. I just asked my 21 year old cousin and she can't name a single U2 song.

Maybe some of my contemporaries think this is interesting or cool, I just find it odd.

Mandatum• 12 years ago

    It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Apple circa 2004 nailed marketing. It seems recently they've stopped 'evolving' and are looking to past concepts that have worked, but no longer relevant.

Beats was cool because Dre is a legend and a celebrity. I hope Apple starts using some of Beats' marketing people for their own brand.

Apple is working on a new digital music format

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