The Sahara Desert is moving at a rate of between five and seven kilometres every year. This is no joke to North Africans, especially when you consider that the Sahara is the size of the United States, and one of its sand dunes, the Libyan Erg, is the size of France.
Shifting sands
But the world’s largest desert is practically crawling compared to the shifting sands that the music industry now finds itself built on. Not only must it deal with downloading (legal and illegal) of first music and then video, now it has to deal with a man called Michael Robertson. Robertson was a thorn in the music industry’s side when he founded MP3.com, which offered music downloads. Nothing unusual about that, is there?
But what made Robertson’s service different was a small applet which allowed you to download the tunes you’d bought onto any computer or MP3 player, no matter how many you own. Robertson had, in effect, circumvented all of the different music playback standards, and all built-in digital copyright management devices. No sooner had MP3.com announced this service than it was deluged with lawsuits from all of the major record labels, as well as several major artists.
Corporate sell out
Robertson sold MP3.com to Vivendi Universal in 2002, and after working on a few other web-based projects has returned to digital music with MP3Tunes.com, and his new music locker service, called Oboe, which offers even more accessibility. “When I started MP3.com, I was far from rich,” Robertson said in a recent interview. “Fortunately, I had some success.
Now with MP3Tunes I have the economic wherewithal to push the world in a direction that I think is good. I also think you have an obligation to do more for society than just play golf. That’s what motivates me to promote open standards and an open format.”
On his personal web site, Robertson explained how he hoped to avoid legal conflicts with his music industry nemeses: “Oboe is different because consumers are requesting that we store their files, which are uploaded one by one rather than from a master database of CDs the user and the company had previously purchased.”
Classic instrument
Oboe offers two levels of membership. The free account allows you to collect tracks from the Net and load them into your locker (“side loading”), and then you can access this music through any web browser. Pay a flat annual fee of just $40 for the premium service, and you can upload and store your entire music collection, access it from anywhere and download it onto any machine that will play back music. MP3Tunes is also beta-testing a programme that will allow your Tivo box to browse and play the contents of your music box, so you don’t even need to have your computer switched on. (This would be useful at parties where they have a good home entertainment set-up, but a crap music collection. Just log into Oboe from their computer or Tivo, and you can spin your sounds for the assembled revellers.)
Oboe works with Windows, Linux and OSX, and with all online music programs, including iTunes. It also recognises all major music file formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA, AIFF and OGG.
Virtual back up on tap
The prospect of having a virtual back up to your library is appealing (after all, you can never have too many back-ups), especially if you have paid for dozens of digital downloads, never mind the logistics of re-loading hundreds of CDs or re-digitising your vinyl. But early users report ponderous up-load times, computer crashes and freezes.
More problematic is the fact that although there is no restriction on the amount of music premium subscribers can store, the maximum file size you can upload is 20Mb. This is fine for MP3 files, which rarely exceed half that size. But AIFF files (the format used to save digitised music in most sound editing programmes) can easily be twenty times that size, so you will have to face into individually converting every AIFF track you have saved into MP3 format, before you can upload them into Oboe. (I have well over 1000 AIFF files on my iBook alone.) With reports of just 200 songs uploaded per hour on a broadband connection, this would require a huge time commitment. But once the initial loading-up graft is completed, Oboe’s file-synching software will automatically make an online copy of any new music added to your computer.
Interesting alternatives
There are other music locker services coming on stream, including Musicbank.com, and Navio, which is a sales and storage portal from which you purchase and then download tracks as you need them (without having to repurchase them). Also coming is Streamload’s MediaMax, which is aiming to fully integrate all of your media (photos, video, TV, etc) into its online locker, and to do all synching and uploading in the background, something Oboe is still working on.
There’s no doubting the fundamental importance of these developments. As Robertson says, “Everybody’s focused on the iPod. But that’s like carrying around a pocketful of nickels because you want money anywhere you go instead of a credit card.” If you’re in the music industry these days, you’d better be growing camel-like webbed feet or prepare to be subsumed by the shifting, whispering sands.
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