I’m down with this “digital music” thing. I really am. I’ve undertaken the digitizing of my voluminous music collection, something which, at a modest rip-rate, will take any number of months. I’m doing this so that I can portably enjoy subsets of my musical library via my iPod. And after too many run-ins with the faults of a cheap wireless router I’ve decided to invest in an Apple Airport, which will allow me to wirelessly stream music from my computer to my sound system. Nice. No more swapping of single CDs in and out of the CD deck. Now I can do what everyone else on the bandwagon can do, create playlists, randomize, blah blah blah.

I have some people over and I’ve got my iPod hooked into my mixer. The music stops and someone takes the initiative to play more. They pick up the iPod, twiddle around a bit and then say “I don’t recognize any of this, what is this stuff like?” And the problem we’ve known about and complained about showed itself, namely that digital music (currently) has no face. You can look at a trance compilation cover and know for sure that this is a trance album. The garish colors, 3D rendering, trippy motif… you’ve seen them. Can’t get that on an iPod unless a JPG the size of a chicklet happened to come with the album you bought because iTunes doesn’t download it from CDDB or anywhere else for that matter when you rip a CD from your collection. Look at the cover and see a person playing a trumpet you kinda get the idea that there’s trumpet music on the album. But that’s not the only issue. There’s something more here.

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Last Friday night I had the pleasure of attending “Yuri’s Night 2007″, hosted by NASA at their Ames Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif. What was “Yuri’s Night?”. It is “a celebration of humanity with a focus on space, technology, art and performance” in honor of Yuri Gagarin who, in 1961 at the age of 27, made the first flight in space by orbiting once around the entire earth and then landing in the plains of the former USSR.

I showed up with friends a little on the early side and found myself at a downsized mixture of a technology expo, Burning Man, and a dance party. The event was contained in and around an airplane hangar, and attractions were spread out all over the floor of the inside space and surrounding tarmac. Inside were vending booths selling anything from water, funky clothing to food, as well as a slew of interesting demos. One of the more interesting exhibits displayed samples of these things called “microbial mats”, which are moist, pond-scum looking ecosystems that host thousands of different bacterial life forms. The reason this is interesting is that NASA is using data collected from studies of these things on Earth in research on Mars, and the possible discovery of ancient microbial mats there. Finding traces of microbial mats on Mars will have implications on where life here on Earth came from, if it is found that ancient bacteria on Mars shares DNA and RNA ancestry with our own. It could mean that we’re descendant from Martian life forms. If microbial mats are found on Mars that bare no resemblance to life here, that is also very interes ting because that means that life as we know it is not something unique to Earth. This in turn greatly increases the likelihood that there is life in greater abundance throughout the universe, and in much truer sense, we are not alone. Chris McKay, a scientist from the Ames Research Center working on this Mars project gave an interesting, informative, and entertaining talk on the subject.

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The recent NY Times article announcing the death of the album has been on my mind a lot lately and I really started to ask myself and others whether or not we can really say that with certainty. I asked “If single songs are so popular, who or what is driving the demand for them? Is it consumer preference, music industry influence, a combination of the two or something else entirely?” Over the past couple weeks I’ve had numerous conversations on the topic with a variety of people, and interestingly the reason to buy singles boils down to the same points.

#1) the price of a CD album is a rip-off

We know this but it is by-and-large the single, most-mentioned reason for people pirating music and preferring to acquire individual songs. We were lead to believe that music would be come more and more affordable with CD technology yet the opposite happened. The application of the qualification “IMPORT” on a CD package only exacerbated the trend. After talking with so many people on the topic, I firmly believe that if CDs were more fairly priced piracy could have been more effectively circumvented. People don’t mind buying a whole album, they simply don’t want to get gouged. When faced with an unjust price to pay, who in their right mind would not be tempted by the low-hanging fruit offered by piracy and individual song purchase? It is natural programmimg that species do not unnecessarily expend energy or resources to get what they want. Music piracy and buying individual songs are simply permutations of a more general biological urge. Reduce the required expenditure and things will change. Ask any music buyer and they’ll generally agree.

#2) many pop music albums just aren’t good enough to justify buying in entirety.

Let’s face it, anybody can produce music on their own now. But just because it’s possible for someone to make music doesn’t make their output good. Someone may strike a vein of good groove, or interesting sound but that doesn’t guarantee a new pipeline of creative insight. The result is an ever increasing pool of musical offerings with a declining percentage of really good talent. The music industry adds fuel to the fire by giving up on the artist-development front. They admittedly look to new artists to pump out a few good singles, cash in on internet and conventional radio play, then turn their backs.

#3) downloading an album is time-consuming

Downloading a whole album online is painful to some, even over DSL. If I had to download the fist-full of albums I recently bought at a local CD shop, it would take forever. But I deal with it on a one-at-a-time basis. Nevertheless, download time is another barrier to entry for the album into mainstream sales. Fortunately things will get better, we just have to be patient.

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I can’t stress enough how important it is that independent bands and bedroom musicians get their music into the hands of internet radio stations and get listed in database sites like Discogs. Over the years I’ve bought so much music using these two resources that it would be difficult to tally it all. Putting your music online with a net-label like Thinner or an online distributor like FakeScience, iTunes, eMusic or whoever and expecting to make significant revenue off that fact alone is, in my opinion, a little like putting the cart before the horse. You’ve made your music available to buy for those who want to, but you haven’t necessarily made it available to hear by those who need to in order to want to buy it.

I’ve been listening to streaming radio since the company I worked for in 1997 (Phoenix-Pop Productions) re-skinned the long defunct “TheDJ.com” real-audio player. Like any technology related service the number of those offering the service has gone from a few to countless but what remains constant is the far reach online radio has into people’s ears. One of my favorite sites is out of Detroit. College radio is a great resource, but if it isn’t streaming online, it can’t compete.

Getting listed on discogs, while seeming like yet another web-presence to maintain, is important for two reasons. First, these sites have high search ratings and come up early on search results pages, which can help in ways that don’t need mentioning. Second, they serve as an archive. A minimum of information about your band and your releases means people will be able to research your material long after the netlabel, or your own website go away or you move on.

Personally speaking if I hear and I like, I buy (someone translate that into Latin and I’ll get you a donut given that you actually live close enough to collect). When I like a song I hear streaming from one of my favorite online radio stations, I do a search for the band name on discogs, paw over the list of releases until I find the one that has the track I just heard, take note of the album art, and surf my palette of online vendors looking for it (or the local, independent shops if it is available in physical form).

Selling music online isn’t hard, it just isn’t as effortless as a one-step process. If you aren’t the type of musician or band to go on tour, play out and put your music in front of people, these simple steps can offer some help toward realizing return for your creativity.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend 2 out of 3 nights worth of the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, an eccentric event held at the San Francisco’s ODC Theater featuring a variety of avant-garde and experimental sound works by artists and sound sculptors both local and around the globe.

Inspired by early the ideas of sonic exploration and studio manipulation one would expect the material played at the Tape Music Festival to be anything but top-40. Nonetheless, the crowd seemed to contain everyone except the local, eccentric hipsters I expected to see and instead was comprised of regular folks, grandparents, and even a few couples on dates that seemed to pick an event out of the newspaper thinking “this sounds neat, honey, let’s go to this.”

The theater space, host to many a modern-dance performance, was set up with an audience of chairs on the floor before an array of almost a dozen and a half studio audio monitors stretching from the bounds of the periphery to behind and above. With little introductory fan-fare the show began at 8PM sharp, turning the lights completely out and getting down to business with a short, textural piece by Matt Ingalis called Fingerlette featuring quick sonic cuts between samples and a mixture of recycled sounds. Jen Boyd’s Rain Blossom, nearly 6 minutes, was a rather minimalist recording of rain falling on tree branches recorded through contact microphones, so the sound seemed really up close. Kotmun, by Suk-Jun Kim from Korea, at almost 9 minutes seemed to be more of a concept composition piece exploring the sonic essence of peering through peeking through ornamental doorways into secluded spaces and the imaginations that accompany the act.

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It seems that this old adage has come back to haunt the majors. Just this week in Cannes, France at Midem midem.com (a music industry trade show and networking hoe-down ) majors announced that they are considering releasing DRM-free music on the Internet within months, conceding to the power of the Internet and to their loss of control over music distribution. It seems that even Apple’s iTunes website (popular but still very pro-DRM) was not enough to make up for declining music sales in standard physical channels.

While the majors’ stance has always been that the control DRM offers is a way to fairly compensate copyright holders and artists it seems that some are developing new appreciation for non-DRM music for sale or made available for free for promotional purposes.

Sony BMG and EMI had already tested the non-DRM waters on Yahoo Music last year and are planning on doing so again this year. EMI is planning on offering free streaming music on China’s dominant search engine site Baidu.com.

An executive for RealNetworks predicts a shift among the majors toward non-DRM music could begin in the very near future.