Technology in music series; (part 15) Hardware and software – on demand and on your hip (V)

Record producers not only had to concentrate on where to edit hit singles, but also had to separate out 15-second snippets of songs for potential ringtones. “Once considered a passing craze,” trumpeted one ringtone website, “ringtones now account for more than 10 percent of the global music market and are over-taking CD sales sooner than expected.”

“That’s something the artists are really into, especially producers,” said Greg Clayman, MTV’s VP of wireless strategy and operations. “They began to think about all the different places where their music is heard – booming from cars, computers, stereos, iPods, and also from phones.”

In slightly less than a year, for example, a company called Bling Tones sold over four million ringtones. “Artists are playing with a medium that isn’t fully formed,” said Bling Tones’ VP of A&R Jonathan Dworkin. “Mobile content can be used for retail and promotion… . It’s a powerful promotional tool they built into an actual product.”

On an episode of the hit television show CSI: New York for example, one of the characters’ cell phones rang with the song “Let’s Talk” by the band Coldplay, and the public availability of the ringtone was announced in a commercial aired right after the scene.

Artists have also started exploring other digital means of delivery. Ted Cohen helped make the Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang available not only on CD, but also on a memory card for phones and computers. Similarly, Canadian pop stars the Barenaked Ladies released a recording that was only available on a USB flash drive. Called Barenaked on a Stick, the device contained 29 songs, album art, photos, videos, and a variety of other goodies

While it took half a decade, MP3 players in general have gone mainstream in the wake of the iPod. For one thing, the big box stores have finally seen the digital light. For under $40, a consumer can buy a CD player that will spin that 11-hour CD of MP3s, or a disc player compatible with DVDs, CDs, and burned MP3 discs that will hook up to a television and stereo.

For the record companies, the mainstreaming of digital music almost felt like capitulation, succumbing to the inevitable. Since hardware manufacturers owned so many of the software companies, they opted to play so carefully that the upstart technology nearly walked away with the business. Some predict that Apple will become the dominant player in the music business, from both the hardware and the software perspective, taking over a majority of the retail market share and perhaps even acquiring its own content for distribution.

In an almost symbolic victory, the company retained the right to use its logo on its digital music products, though the Beatles’ Apple Corps said that Apple Computer had violated a 15-year-old agreement that gave Apple Corps the exclusive use of its similar trademark in the music business. Perhaps the upstart Apple’s conquest of the former upstart Beatles’ corporate interest indicated the record business’s inevitable course.

One music business expert recounts; Back when we were in high school, my friend Mike had the good fortune and good grades to spend his summers working at Bell Labs. He would come home very excited about the stuff he’d seen. “Man,” he would tell us, “they have things there that they’re doing with computers that you aren’t going to even see for another 25 years, until everyone catches up to the technology.”

Unfortunately, it took the record business more than 35 years, and it has yet to get up to speed. In spring 2006, many record labels, including all of the majors, renewed their licensing agreement with iTunes. For months before that – in the fashion typical of a business that either kills all the geese that lay golden eggs, or exhausts them until they start laying lead – they lobbied to raise the price on “front line,” new, hit recordings from the 99c the website charged to $1.49, leaving everything else at the 99c price point.

Jobs laid into them mightily, chiding them for being greedy (really, Steve?). He insisted that the 99c price point was essential to the continued success of iTunes, and that the service held the record business’s only possible hope of success in the digital domain. It certainly marked the first time that anything even made a dent in the “free music” ethos, and did it by creating a simple, comprehensive, and legal way of getting content for digital players. The revolution finally became portable, with absolutely no thanks to the record industry. Ice-T must be pleased.