Revolutions

On the first LP I ever owned was Tchaikovsky's Serenade, Ravel's Bolero and Smetana's "Bartered Bride" Overture. It was soon joined by many more vinyl discs, but the problem of storing these 12" leviathans soon became a limiting factor. Things grew rapidly worse when I discovered the wonderful if even bulkier Vox Boxes, with their irresistible promise of "complete X", where X might be Bach flute sonatas or Mozart piano variations.

Fortunately, as the floor of my flat was in serious danger of ceding under the weight of hundreds of boxes and LPs, the CD came along. For reasons that escape me, my first CD was Virgil Thomson's "The Plow that broke the Plains", but this was soon joined by hundreds and then thousands of others.

Once again storage - and organisation - became a crucial issue, and once again, I was saved by technology, this time in the shape of the MP3 file. I bought one of the earliest MP3 players, the Diamond RIO PMP300. This came with a massive 32Mbytes of RAM, allowing up to an hour of listening (albeit at lower quality).

It was an important moment not just for me, but also for the industry, as Wikipedia explains:

On October 8, 1998, the American recording industry group, the Recording Industry Association of America, filed an application for a Temporary Restraining Order to prevent the sale of the Rio player in the Central District Court of California, claiming the player violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act.

Judge Andrea Collins issued the temporary order on October 16, but required the RIAA to post a $500,000 bond that would be used to compensate Diamond for damages incurred in the delay if Diamond eventually prevailed in court. Diamond then announced that it would temporarily delay shipment of the Rio.

On October 26, Judge Collins denied the RIAA's application. After the lawsuit ended, Diamond sold 200,000 players.

This was one of the earliest attempts by the RIAA to derail the future of music, and luckily on this occasion it lost.

Of course, once music became digital, Moore's Law ensured that things kept on scaling. Silicon storage capacities went up, and prices went down, until today I have dozens of Gbytes of MP3 files of music stored on various media.

And yet I rarely listen to them, because streaming in the shape of Spotify came along a couple of years ago. Although I understand the issues about not owning the music you listen to, I'm lucky enough to have vast amounts of the music that is most important to me available in multiple backup formats - LPs, CDs and MP3s. If Spotify disappears tomorrow - say, as a result of being destroyed by a patent troll - I can just go back to listening to these. In addition, I feel increasingly guilty about owning anything in a depleted world drowning in stuff, so streaming seems like a good idea anyway.

It's of course regrettable that Spotify isn't open source, but it has certainly taken my experience of listening to music to a new level. The ability to leave the complete works of Mozart, say, running in the background for days, or to hear the same movement of a Beethoven symphony played by 35 different orchestras has never been so easy; both change how you regard well-loved pieces because they provide new contexts that allow you to listen to them more deeply.

Moreover, Spotify gives me the unprecedented capability of listening to something - now matter how obscure (well, almost) - the moment I come across even the merest reference to it. It really is like having practically all music instantly on tap, anywhere there is an Internet connection.

As such, it's a foretaste of how things will soon be for all digital artefacts, when every text, image, sound and video ever created will be just as instantly and effortlessly available. The only thing standing between us and that amazing, mind-expanding world of digital abundance is an 18th-century law that replaced earlier censorship with a framework for the "encouragement of learning" in an age of analogue scarcity. Once anachronistic copyright has been abolished, my journey from LPs through CDs and MP3s will be complete, and the ultimate knowledge revolution can begin.

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In the Digital Age, Analogue Makes the Money

Further hints that the way to make money with digital content is to go analogue:

Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today's music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices.

"For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release," said Matador's Patrick Amory. "The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music."

Yup, yup and yup.