When trying to get to terms with technological shift, often the best strategy is to question the question.

I received an email from the nice people at Music Tank — an organisation that puts on superb Music Industry events, predominantly in London. They asked me to their next seminar, and asked a simple question as a kind of straw poll. Think I had a simple answer?

They wrote:

Whether or not you are attending this think tank, we would be grateful if you could consider the following 2 questions posed by the event’s keynote speaker, Gary McClarnan.

1) As a music fan, if your favourite band offered you the freedom to choose the price of their download, what would you pay for it?

2) iTunes have just employed you and your first task is to re-appraise the price of iTunes downloads. What would you charge?

To respond, hit the reply button, put REPLY in the subject field, and numeric answers only, please, to questions 1 & 2.

Of course, in order for me to answer a couple of questions like that, I needed more than just a few digits. I wrote:

Hi,

With the best of intentions — and sorry to be a drag — but neither of those questions actually contribute to the debate, or advance it beyond the mere quibbling over price point. The issue is far more fundamental than that: digital music downloads don’t adhere to the same rules of economics that apply to physical products.

There is no scarcity of supply, and nor is there scarcity of shelfspace — and consequently there’s more going on here for music business than “how much should this cost?”

Try something like “what does it mean that our company now has infinite stock of everything we have ever released, and overheads have dipped to near-zero?” — or “how do we replace the simple retail model of music-commodity-for-cash with an economic exchange that makes sense of the fact that music is no longer a tangible commodity at all?” — or “now that music is free (by a factor of 40:1 in 2006), how should we now make our honest livings as intermediaries between artists and music fans?”

They seem more sensible questions than just “how much further should we keep discounting what we do in order to hang onto every last vestige of a model that is well and truly on its way out?”

Oh, and if you must have a numeric answer then I’d go with 10p for now… but reduce it to a single penny per track once hard drive storage is typically in the terabyte range, and broadband speeds average in excess of 8Mb/s. Give it, say, three years.

If you want to hang onto the retail model, then all you can continue to do is undercut in the hopes that consumers will simply buy everything ever.

Sorry I won’t be in attendance on the 6th — but I’m sure that will at least help the day run smoothly. Enjoy.

I won’t be there — but if you can, perhaps you should be. Here are the details — and you should know that I have never come away from a Music Tank seminar feeling I had wasted my time. They are always recommended.

We all know that professional music production technologies have become more and more within the grasp of those of us on something of a budget. But it might surprise you to learn that a free bit of consumer playback software has become the mastering choice of one of the world’s most notoriously fussy musicians.

The New York Times reports that guitarist/producer Ry Cooder recently struggled with the sonic integrity of a folk/blues concert record concerning a cat in a mythical American music landscape. The usual processing wasn’t cutting it — and when he played back in his car (a tried and trusted objective test of listenability), it just sounded processed.

However, listening to a CD that he burned using iTunes, he noticed that it all sounded much nicer. One of the studio engineers explained to him about the default setting in iTunes called “Sound Enhancer“, and so he decided to investigate.

Cooder concluded that, in fact, it was exactly the sound that he’d been after — and so the final mastering on the album consisted of nothing more than a trip through the iTunes software.

It’s a nice story. I’m not sure to what extent it’s rooted in fact, since mastering is actually about more than just sound-sweetening, but does raise interesting possibilities.

Even though Sound Enhancer is meant to treat finish digital files that have already been through the mastering process, Cooder seemed to think that the process was enough of a mastering system itself. That, of course, has a lot to do with the genre of music and, in a way, makes sense simply because professional studio mastering can often get quite heavy handed on the compression front under pressure from the labels to put ever louder records.

Unlike Rock, Hip Hop and Dance music, which require a certain body and punch, folk and blues music (like jazz and classical) benefit from dynamic range, acoustic space and room for the instruments to breathe. That kind of treatment only comes with the slightest of processing. A light touch.

Sounds like the iTunes software has just the right type of the slightest of processing for this kind of job. I just listened to some unmastered folk music through the Sound Enhancer (which can be found in the Playback settings), and cranked it up to about 75%.

He may have a point.

Not sure what we conclude from that — but maybe it’s of some use to you.

Hard drive failure, theft and loss are just facts of life. But they are facts that online music business has failed to account for, and that the insurance industry has overlooked. Something needs to be done.

I don’t know why it happens, and I don’t know how I manage to forget that it happens, but every year since 2000, the coming of the New Year coincides with disastrous computer failure — and I’m always surprised by it.

Perhaps I was the only person to catch the Millennium Bug, and it’s recurring.

In this instance, it was the external hard drive that sits attached to the main home Mac G5 where I keep all the music. Due to a slight malfunction, it irretrievably lost a few of its albums. Over 1,000 of them, in fact.

Now, that could have been a disaster if I didn’t keep backups, but even so, it’s a tremendous hassle — and there were quite a few on there that I had acquired since the backup.

Which got me thinking about insurance. As yet, insurance companies have not managed to get their heads around personal data loss. If someone breaks in and steals my CDs, I know I can get an insurance company to cover the loss. If my house burns down and my records all turn to melty pools of plastic, then I can get replacements. If my hard drive is stolen, burned, or smashed, I can get the device replaced — but not the thousands of files that were on it.

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