Please Self-Release Me, Let Me Go

Those artists who can afford to buy their own webhosts are not really an issue (as far as this thread topic goes), though those webhosts are only inexpensive while the bandwidth used is low, they will still be outnumbered by all the smaller self-release artists who use the one-click hosts. Small independant single product websites are a "find and retreive" operation - users don't want that - they want a one-stop shop - that is why oligarchies rule the internet.

 

In the past 20 years we have seen the number of TV channels increase but the actual original content decrease. Bandwidth is increasing but pot of cash to fund it and the revenue to sustain it is not increasing by the same ratio. In the world of TV shows get cancelled because they don't achieve the right Nielsen ratings which means they are not pulling in enough viewers to please the advertisers. The same thing will happen to the Internet, just by a different mechanism and route. There is no reason to advertise something if no one is buying. 

 

 

Well, since we know his works some 300 years later I would answer yes to that. The recording medium he used was not as volatile - the written manuscripts have survived and the Well-Tempered Clavier is still in print (ISBN-13: 978-1854726544). Also, even though his music (and Baroque in general) went out of favour soon after his death, but less than 50 years later the composers of the Classical period (Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn etc) were all "fans" because his manuscripts were still accessible to them.

stefolof wrote: 2. So what if music disappears. If no one is interested, is that such a bad thing? Isn't this cleansing mechanism, in fact, an answer to your first post?

This cleansing method would be arbitrary and non-selective and not quite what I had in mind. Having no one is interested in the music does not mean it is poor music, we could lose the world's greatest album of all time by that method simply because the artist was not very good at promoting himself and still praise the most generic piece of rubbish ever produced as being magnificent just because we believed the word-of-mouth hype, much of which was fabricated by payola, fake street teams, spamming and clever marketting.

stefolof wrote: Sometime ago, I saw an interesting talk by Jimmy Wales who's the founder of Wikipedia. WP is run by a number of enthusiast. He often gets asked how they maintain the integrity of the site when practically anyone can edit it. The answer is that there's enough users who are serious and active in keeping it clean. They believe in it. The analogy to what we're discussing here is that, I think if music is good enough, it will stand the test of time because it will be kept alive by people. The media it is stored on is less important.

That's more an indictment of stay-at-home fans (and the subject of my previous Blog: Live Prog-rock is Dying)

harmonium.ro wrote: Dean wrote: ...and that is basically my point - you have to do something. Just sitting back and assuming this data will last for ever is a mistake. It always was like that, just the speed of the process is indeed higher. From my own experience the CD is the medium with the longest life expectation. My cassettes and vinyls are the best example for me. But if we speak of digital releases...

Like vinyl, glass pressed CDs (and DVDs) are a mechanical format so the data they contain will not degrade, however the aluminium layer that reflects the read-laser is prone to degradation (so called CD rot) if the seal between the acrylic and the aluminium is porous - the predicted lifespan of CD is anything between 10 and 50 years. CDRs are an electronic format - the data is burnt into a dye layer - over time the data will degrade through exposure to light - no one in the data storage business will rate CDR more than 2 years - I'm sure all of us can recount stories of CDs and CDRs that play on one system but not on another, or of CDs that now skip and stick even though there is nothing apparently wrong with them physically. The next hurdle to overcome for CD to last another 26 years is for the transports (ie players) to still be available - has anyone got a 1984 Sony or Philips CD player still in working order? If downloads replace CD in the near future (as is currently predicted) then the player will last a few years after that, but forever? No.

 

Magnetic media is the best and the worse - tapes and cassettes are notoriously bad because they are very vulnerable to physical damage and suffers from sticky shed syndrome where the tape, glue and oxide start to degrade within a few years. Magnetic discs and tapes are hit worse by obsolescence - I've got music stored on mini disc, DAT and Zip-discs - all of it currently unreadable - I've music source files stored on 5¼", 3½" and 3" floppy discs ... none of those drive formats ship on the latest PCs and MACs (and that's without even mentioning 8" floppies, Bernoulli drives and all the faith IT experts put into backing up onto tape streamers a few years back) - I've already mentioned the planned obsolescence of PATA drives, then there is SCSI - try finding a SCSI IDE card for a PC now (or even USB to SCSI) - so what of SATA in 5 years time, or eSATA. Apple dropped FireWire a few years back, and now the iPad has lost USB - the shape of Apple's to come I think with everything going wireless. PCMCIA is history and the IDE bus is being phased out - it is all well and good having the media and the media transports, but if your computer cannot interface to them then they are as good as lost. Aside from all the 8-track and BetaMax jokes, how many of us have boxes full of VHS tapes and nothing to play them on but a 15 year old VCR? How reliable is your current CD/DVD player? Will that still work in 15 years?

 

The only way to protect your data is to keep it moving, continually copying it from old media to new media - that is why I said data storage is dynamic - you have to keep refreshing it.

harmonium.ro wrote: Dean wrote:   If an album gets forgotten it will disappear 10 times quicker in electronic form than ever it did in hard-copy. When a file can be deleted irrevocably at the click of mouse, or by a malicious virus, or simply by a hardware failure, or by an OS crash that's one thing, but when finding or recovering that data relies on something as tenuous as the Internet then it becomes even more ephemeral since the data is only as permanent as the server it is stored on and the links to it.   ... then you are very correct and this is a very important issue. I've witnessed the death of much online information due to dead links, unpaid hosting, lack of interest of the initial source.

Edited by Dean - February 12 2010 at 11:09

I'm a natural pessimist so a bad flip-chart is never going to convince me of anything. Word-of-mouth perpetuated the success of Part The Second, but it did not start it - without the initial impetus given by their prior history and Toby Driver's (cult) status that word of mouth would not have propagated far. If KD only drew 100 people at their London gig then that was result of venue size rather than low popularity - Blue Lambency Downward was available in every HMV I looked in when it was released.