The Golden Age of Infinite Music 294
Over at the BBC, music journalist John Harris speculates on what may become of the music business now that we have entered the golden age of infinite music. "I've just poured the music-related contents of my brain into a book, and I would imagine that 30-ish years worth of knowledge about everyone from Funkadelic to The Smiths has probably cost me a five-figure sum, a stupid amount spent on music publications, and endless embarrassed moments spent trying to have a conversation with those arrogant blokes who tend to work in record shops. Last weekend, by contrast, I had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled. At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer. Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity..."
Re:Choice (Score:2, Informative)
This is precisely why services such as pandora, last.fm, Imeem and the rest exist. Put in a few names from bands you know, and pandora will pop up half a dozen or more suggestions, more often than not, they are pretty good.
it doesn't broaden your horizons all that much, but Imeem will, because it's idea of suggesting music is to load the page with the best ad income, even if it's an entirely different genre. However, while this practice is less than savory, it does tend to expose you to things you would otherwise not be aware of. I also find that streaming radio station that have good DJs tend to be an endless source of new music.
Estimation of life in some cases (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's yhy anti-piracy is a BAD thing... (Score:3, Informative)
>>>The original poster's statement was incorrect...
No it wasn't. Reread: "In the USA, life + 70 literally means that, at best, anything created in your lifetime will not become public domain until you are 70." In other words if Lady Gaga released a new CD today, and a baby was born today, and Gaga died in a horrible accident later tonight, her CD would not become public domain until the baby was a 70-year-old man. That's best case.
Worst case is Gaga might live to be 120, then 70 years on top of that, means today's released CD would not be public domain until around the year 2180.
The original 1790 Copyright Act was saner. 14 years with possibility of renewal, for 28 years max. That's reasonable length of time for a monopoly, and it gives the artist plenty of opportunity to recoup his labor costs via sale of the book/song.
"Infinite Music" is coming. Musicians will hate it (Score:3, Informative)
We already have a form of "infinite music" - DJing. But so far, DJs can't do very much to the music. They can play with timing and mixing, and maybe do some scratching, but that's about it.
Now look at Vocaloid 2 [google.com]. Load up a singer model, a lyrics file, and a MIDI file, and out comes reasonably good music. [crypton.co.jp] (It's in Japanese; this was the #1 program for sale on Amazon Japan for a while.)
Currently, building a singer model for Vocaloid requires about a week of work by the singer. Working backwards from existing music to a vocal tract model and a style model isn't yet available. But as machine learning techniques progress, that problem should be solved.
When a DJ has the option to play any song with any musicians, then we'll have infinite music. The day may come when musicianship will be an archaic art like calligraphy and oratory.
(Even better, the RIAA can't stop it. These are "covers", even though they're machine-generated. You have to pay the small statutory royalty to the composer, and you owe the musician and the recording company nothing.)