Vivisecting Media

Why does conference call audio suck?

I had a wonderful conversation at my day job today (FS is not my full time job, yet. More on that later this month). One of the things we deal with at the office is routine conference calls. We have multiple offices around the world where we often have to call in remotely and this can often cause a lot of problems. Usually the people who call in have issues hearing the conversation and this caused Mike (one of my co-workers) to pose the question: “With all of today’s technology, why can’t we build a mic that mimics the human ear so that hearing people on a conference call is not a problem?”

As Mike pointed out, it’s only the people calling in that have the problem. If you are in the meeting room you have no problem hearing anyone speak, so if our ears can pick it out and our brains can decipher it why can’t a mic do this? After roundtabling this for a while discussing mic technology, active filtering by the brain, human ear construction and general overarching philosophy we settled on the fact that it is probably the delivery platform that is the major limitation, not the microphone. This is by no means a definitive or scientific explanation but we are pretty happy with it:

The problem with the phone is that we are taking a sound source that is usually heard by a stereo pair (i.e. ears), convert it to mono, compress the hell out of it for leveling and then down sample as an analog signal that is distributed via copper wire. What this boils down to is that phones pretty much butcher the sound source.

By doing all these horrible things to the audio we severely limit our brain’s ability to process it. First, we take away the stereo input. When sitting in a room with someone having a conversation we use our ability to place distance and position to process and then filter out the sounds we want to focus on. This means that during a conversation where multiple people are talking we can no longer use stereo processing to determine what is the proper placement of the sound and therefore make it much harder to decipher.

Next, the audio is compressed before sending it out. This is so that all the sounds stay in a relatively similar level over time. Louder sounds are made quieter and quieter sounds are made louder to keep it nice and even. There is a lot more to compression then this, but let’s use this simple generalization for now. The benefit of compression is that by losing some of the dynamics of the sound, you can even everything out and the conversation is usually easier to understand this way. The challenge of using compression is that multiple sounds sources get mixed in together and then evened out so that quieter sounds are now louder, louder sounds are quieter and separating them aurally is now a lot harder.

Finally, we take the mono, compressed source and then downsample it for transmission. Downsampling is the process of removing frequency data to make the audio single smaller and easier to transfer. When you downsample, this also causes details to be lost, once again making it harder to pull out the relevant information. By the time the audio reaches us it has been so hacked to death that even with the best equipment it can be nearly impossible to decipher what is going on in a busy meeting.

Anyway, it was a fun conversation and I had a great time with Mike, NJ and Rebecca trying to figure out what was the main cause of such horrible conference call experiences.

Betamax v2.0?

Being a self-described technofile I like to keep my eye on new technologies and watch them mature into real products. One of the hot topics that are finally starting to make waves is the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle. Blu-Ray is Sony’s high capacity DVD media format that will allow distribution of HD content (ex: HD film transferred movies). HD-DVD is Toshiba’s offering of a very similar technology. The hitch? Neither format is compatible with the other’s, so once again we are seeing a Betamax vs. VHS battle royal.

Jack Shofield wrote an interesting article over at the Gaurdian about how VHS trumped Betamax and took over the market. The points that Jack made back in 2003 are really important in the upcoming Blu-ray/HD-DVD consumer battle in 2006 and the success of “the whole product”.

This week we have seen the gauntlets thrown down and all the media producer juggernauts are throwing their hat into the ring. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Sony rolled out their first Blu-Ray consumer players, Toshiba is showing off their HD-DVD Players, HD-DVD backers such as Warner and Universal are promising 24 movies on March 28th and Blu-ray backers such as Fox, Lionsgate, and of course Sony are promising 20 some titles when Blu-ray is launched. Some companies, such as HP are not taking a specific side and are offering both formats, but the lines are being drawn.

Looking at the current DVD world, many people have huge collections of movies and the hard core fans will start to port their collection over to the new technologies. But, in the meantime will consumers want to have multiple players to view both their new and old content? Or would they prefer convenience of one player that supports both new and old DVDs?

An interesting tidbit about HD-DVD is that the format provides backwards compatibility with standard DVD formats. Backwards compatibility is a huge advantage and is considered one of the key points to the Playstation 2’s success over the Gamecube and Xbox.

Why do I bring up game consoles? Well, here is the perfect example of content is king. When PS2 launched it had the ability to play all of the PS1 catalog. So right out of the gate PS2 owners had a massive selection of titles to choose from, and if you already owned a PS1 you could play those games on just one machine and not have both your PS1 and 2 set up at the same time, proving that customer convenience is a selling point.

Continuing on the console topic, Microsoft announced yesterday that they would be releasing a new HD-DVD player for the Xbox 360. In my mind, this could be a huge blow to Sony and both their Blu-ray technology and the upcoming PS3. When the 360 launched in November, Microsoft announced that they would not be including an HD media technology in the console. I feel this was a brilliant move because at the time there wasn’t really any public backing of either technology by media producers. One of Microsoft’s goals is to make the 360 a next generation entertainment media center that is the core of the HD system. For them to put a stake in the ground before any public announcements by the media giants would be a risky gamble, especially if the media producers choose the opposite technology Microsoft picked.

Now that a lot of the major studios are picking sides, Microsoft is throwing in their chips and this may help swing other studio’s choices in future media production. If you look at it this way, a studio wants to make an offering to the largest consumer base that wants HD content. Because the 360 is so HD centric, this means many of the owners of the Xbox will have HD TVs and therefore the system owners will want HD content. Now that Microsoft has established the 360 as a hit (some will debate the reality of this, but for arguments sake let’s say it is considered a marketing success) then studio’s will want to produce media in the format that the 360 supports because it is one of the earliest HD market player penetrations.

From what I have been reading it really looks like HD-DVD is jumping into a strong lead. But, Sony still has some cards up its sleeve. The PS3 is in the wings and having a huge base a fans this could be a huge boost to Blu-ray. On top of this, Sony is a major movie producer and they have also been buying rights to many major titles over the years. In 2004, Sony bought MGM and received licensing rights to such franchises as James Bond. While Sony was buying rights they were also investing in firms that specialize in super high resolution film transfer technology that will actually produce much higher scans then even today’s HD can support. This all boils back to content… if the movies you want are in a specific format you will buy that format.

The Extra Second

There have been a lot of posts, articles, and discussions about the leap second, so I am not going to rehash it. What I do want to do is point out a brilliant little project started by Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music. He asked his readers to create 1-second music blurbs and he then compiled them into a single piece. Sadly, I found out about it after he stopped taking request (what I get for not reading over the holidays) but what was created is really interesting.

So in honor of the extra second I give you this short post linking to a great collaborative idea: Leap Sounds: 1-Second Music for the Leap Second

Narrowcasting (and why I love it)

Over the holidays I was lazily watching TV and surfing the web on my laptop, talk about being the ultimate couch potato. Anyway, I realized I hadn’t popped over to the iTunes podcast portal in a long time so I fired up iTunes and took a look-see. One of the first things I noticed was the push of video podcasts, which of course makes sense because Apple wants to encourage video iPod adoption.

Under the new and notable they had a whole section dedicated to Skateboarding, Skiing and Snowboarding vidcasts. Hmmm, now my interest is peaked. I am an avid snowboarder, as you can probably tell from my photo, and I can spend all day watching ski and snowboarding videos. I started checking out some of the casts and wound up downloading and watching episode two of Snowfix.

Snowfix is Negative Gravity’s show that is hosted by Charlie and Tim out Val d’Isere in the French Alps. It’s a well produced show that I thoroughly enjoyed watching. I was curious about their background and after looking at Negative Gravity’s website I saw that custom video is the focus behind NG.

Finding content like this brought back my initial excitement when I was first turned on to podcasts by my friend Jack Herrington. What made it so exciting then was that we were able to find new music and content that was totally inaccessible previously. I was able to listen to unsigned local acts out of the UK, music that would never had made it to San Francisco if it wasn’t for podcasting.

This idea of focused media has been labeled Narrowcasting because it is intended for a more limited audience. There is not a need to boil down content to the most common denominator because you need the largest listener base possible to please the advertisers or sponsors. Here is a medium were your intended audience may only be a handful of die hard fans (or paying subscribers like Satellite Radio).

It was very pleasant to stumble on to a Narrowcast subject that I am really interested in. I wasn’t expecting it and I feel the surprise of finding it was just as much fun as seeing the quality behind the show. Anyway, keep up the good work Chris and Tim and it looks like you guys are getting the snow dump that you were looking for…

Getting Out There

Ever on the lookout for interesting articles, Cyrus sent me one he found in the New York Times. The article is about how the Internet is allowing Independent labels and artists to tap into a much larger market. The article is a good overview of the changes the Internet is creating and hints at the core of the issue, the ever-present distribution bottleneck.

Getting to the audience has always been one of the challenges faced by artists. By taking advantage of online networks many are finding new ways to reach listeners. Just because there are new ways to find an audience, this does not mean (using the old Field of Dreams line) “If you build they will come”.

This is a topic that has come up with multiple artists that we work with and I feel this is something that a lot of artists face. The artist sees or reads about an act using the Internet to make a name for themselves and the artist feels that they can do the same thing. The reality is that it takes an incredible amount of hard work and dedication to really take advantage of these new networks.

An example of this is kind of dedication is Geoff Byrd. I’ll be honest, I am not a fan of his music, but I do respect what he has done (and we interviewed him so I have a better feeling for what he went through). Here is someone that used Garage Band to build a name for himself, get signed to a major label and then tour the country doing radio interviews and establishing national airplay. Both reading his interviews and listening to the one we did for Fake Science really impressed upon me how much work Geoff had to go through. Call after call, push after push… he was his pushing his new music day in and day out for over a year before it really started to break.

For me, the most impressive aspect of Geoff’s success is that he did not give up. He was continually shot down and he got back up and kept pushing. This is something that I have been talking to a few friends about, you have to get out there and keep pushing what you are doing. If finding an audience is important to you as an artist then you must do this. If you don’t mind just making the music, then awesome but I feel that part of making music is sharing it with others.

I also feel that in the States we forget about the people that work their ass off to get where they are. We idolize the instant success or did not know (or care) that a band was unknown for 10 years before they got their break. This creates an unneeded pressure on both young and established artists. “If I don’t get instant success then I must be a failure”. This is totally un-true and all the great lasting acts worked their way up. I can’t think of one instant success that has lasted beyond an album or two.

What I am trying to get at is… yes, we do have new ways to get our music out there but just putting it out there won’t guarantee that people will hear it or even check it out. You still have to get out there, meet people, talk to people and let people know that your music is there for them to hear.

A New Toy

About 15 years ago I borrowed by father’s cheap nylon stringed classical guitar and decided I would become the next Slash or maybe Jimmy Page. It depended who I was listening to at the time. After learning how to play The Animals version of “House of the Rising Sun” I was hooked.

After playing with my old man’s guitar for a few months it was time to go electric, ‘cause I wanted to be so metal it hurt. I tried to scrape together a few bucks here and there and over the next few summers I upgraded from one crappy used guitar to the next crappy used guitar. I kept trying to convince my parents that they should get me a nice guitar, but there was a lot of pushback because “you would just stop playing and it would be a waste of money”.

Finally, after a few years of nagging and also complaining that my little sister got a piano (sure it was “technically” for the family) they gave in and got me a decent acoustic guitar for my high school graduation present. Jump ahead 11 years and I still have that thing. It was a nice little Alvarez, but about a year ago the bridge started to pull up from the body. This is what you get for putting on way too heavy strings because it had such a great tone.

Recently the guitar picked up a bad buzz from the bridge damage and since I pretty much sit around every night playing it I might as well go out and get a new acoustic. Initially I wanted to get a Martin dreadnought but I ended up going with a Taylor. I went down to the new GC in San Francisco, sat down and played about 18 guitars in my price range.

The first guitar I grabbed was the Taylor 414-CE because it was actually the best looking one in the range. It is a really bright guitar (all Taylor’s I have played have been bright) and it played like a dream. I then grabbed a Martin that was the same price and it sounded dull and lifeless, and felt hard to play compared to the Taylor. I tried a whole bunch of other Martin’s and Gibson’s and I kept going back to the Taylor. Just for shits and giggles I grabbed one of the $4k Martin’s and that thing was way amazing, but far more then I was ready to spend (or even consider spending).

Anyway, I ended up getting the 414 and I am so happy that I picked it. The electronic pickups they have are stunning (and designed by Rupert Neve) and I can’t wait to sit down and mic this thing in the studio. Mmm… guitar.

Educating the Napster Generation

During one of our interviews with Cyrus Wadia on the Lab Report, we talked about how there is a need to educate the next generation of listeners about the costs behind making music. We have a whole new generation of music listeners who grew up with Napster and P2P systems. The concept of having to pay for digitally download music is a very foreign idea and unless we take the time to talk about what goes into making the music they won’t know why they shouldn’t get it for free.

I understood this would be an issue but it wasn’t until I had my first real experience with it that I saw how it would manifest. One of our artists was talking to a few of his younger fans (around age 15). They were excited about his release but were confused about the idea of going to the FS store and buying a download. They asked were they could buy the CD, and he told them there wasn’t one and that confused them even more.

I feel that this is one of the major disconnects for digital purchases, and not just for the Napster generation, but all music buyers. We are used to purchasing a physical object for music and we have this object in our hands when the deal is done. That makes sense. But to spend money on a few easily replicated bits can be hard to grasp. We generally understand the costs behind making a CD, the art, the cover and case, but we forgot (or don’t know) what goes in behind the scenes.

Most of the cost for a CD is spent in the making of the music and the marketing (recording, videos, ads, etc). If you read Chris Anderson’s now instant classic and Web 2.0 mantra “The Long Tail” you see that “the creative costs work out to about $7.50 per disc, or around 60 cents a track” (page 4, paragraph 9). Pull out most the marketing budget for indies, because they don’t have the money compared to the majors, we still have the cost of making the music.

This is where the education needs to begin. Consumers need to realize that artists spend an amazing amount of time and money making this music. Its not just studio time or gear purchases that cost a lot of money; it’s also the man hours put into it. We have to look at buying music as investment into future music. For the last 40 years music has been a commodity that we buy and sell and is very rarely seen for what it is; an art form. We should not look at music as a commodity to be traded, but as art that we are all Patrons of, and this is a revolutionary approach for almost all of us.

While we are letting everyone know what it costs to make the music we also need to work out a better way so that the artist can get reimbursed properly. Why can’t a musician live off their talent and their work (such as a programmer)? Why can’t we help fund their next project? Why do we have a system were the artist is always the last one to get paid? These are just a few questions that we as a community should think and talk about…

A Great First Step

This week the Association of Independent Music (AIM) announced that they will be providing a new licensing agreement for podcasters. This contract will allow podcasters to easily license any of the music currently available in the AIM archives. The archive will be constructed by member labels providing content from their catalog. The Labels will have full control of what material is made available to this archive. For a full break down read this report from Podcasting News.

What is exciting about this licensing agreement is that labels are realizing the potential podcasts have as a marketing channel. Here is a way for a label to reach many new listeners, both local and international, that many of these labels never had access to before. This also helps legitimize podcasting by making it a valid channel for labels to expose their artists.

One challenge that may face this service is that they are requiring the podcaster to pay for the music and provide statistical information. These are valid request by the service and labels, but this will more then likely stop a lot of the smaller podcasts from taking advantage of this service.

Currently the pricing is behind closed doors, so I cannot comment directly on the feasibility of the structure, but many of the podcast out there do this as a hobby and not as a profession. This means that many of the shows have very limited or no funds available to purchase a license and therefore this service may not be an option for a source of legal music.

For podcasts that make money off advertising and other services, they may be able to pay for this service. If AIM charges a percentage of the sites total income, like other licensing contracts, this may stop those podcasts from wanting to lose more of the small margin of income they already have.

Another issue that will be faced is statistical tracking of listeners that are required by AIM. In the podcasting community, we do not have a uniform system for tracking listeners. In fact almost every show tracks their listener base differently, and because of this we are seeing a huge discrepancy between shows supposed listener bases. This is a complex topic in itself, which I plan to dedicate more posts to, but lets just say that right now we have no way of guarantying the actual listener base of a show.

Overall, this is a really great step and I am excited that Independent Labels are taking a long hard look at podcasting as a valid channel for their music. Hopefully we will see more of these kinds of services and I look forward to seeing how they actually price this out.

The Frustration of Self Distribution

Earlier this year I was sitting with Josh and Chris talking about the process of releasing the ever in stasis Cell Culture EP “Revelations”. This EP was actually finished over 2 years ago and has been shelved due to so many different reasons at this point I can’t even recall them all anymore.

At the time we were just beginning to establish Fake Science and we started looking into how FS could release the EP and what kind of investment it would take. We really wanted to do this release professionally so we knew this would not be a simple CD-R release.

After a bit of research, this is how the pricing of the EP was looking like: First, we would master the EP. The EP is made up of 5 tracks and looking at local mastering houses we were confident we could get the album mastered for around $500. The pressing of the CD would be done with a single speed glass master, jewel case, 4/4 printing, silkscreen, shrink wrap and an UPC code. At the time we found a place in Marin that would do it for around $2100. Finally, we wanted professional artwork and layout done by our friend Molly, and the estimate was around $1500. All said and done we were looking at about $4100 to get the CD done to the level of quality that we wanted.

This process would produce 1000 CDs that we can distribute. Of the 1000, we wanted to pull 250 for promotion and giveaways. We would send the majority of the 250 to reviewers, labels, magazines, web sites, etc. The goal would be to build some momentum and start a marketing campaign to try and get some traction with the release.

After the campaign we would have 750 to actually sell and distribute. Since this release was a simple EP with 5 tracks we felt that asking $10 was out of the question for an unsigned artist. Even for an established artist, $10 for 5 songs seems like a ripoff. This meant that we would have to sell them for $5, just $0.90 over cost (18%). If we wanted to use a distributor (and still charge the customer $5) then we would have to sell them for around $3, losing about $1.10 per sale.

If we managed to sell all 750 by ourselves we would only make back $3750 and now we would be $350 in the hole and we don’t have any more CDs to sell. This means we need to do a second pressing and need another $2100 to start the process over. At this point you hope that you have some traction and you may make a little money back on this next round of sales.

Selling the first 750 is an exercise is marketing. You have to tap your friends, you have to start (or continue) playing shows to get the CD out there, you have to push the album and hope you get some press. You have to network with everyone and anyone you can to build the buzz to move the music. At this point, you have pretty much become a label without the benefit of an established distribution and marketing network.

Trying to establish a deal with a dedicated distribution channel (such as a distribution warehouse or CD Baby) for the CD can be a good idea, one that my friends Troll did for their first 2 releases. What you find out quickly is that this is just a distribution point for the CDs and the distribution house will not market you. They are not there to help you sell CDs; they are there to move them when someone asks for them.

In our example, let’s say you do get traction and move the first 750 and have the desire and capital to press the second run. You now enter the second thousand, which is where most album sales drop off. Many small labels consider selling 2000 CDs for a specific act and the label considers this a huge hit for them. I know multiple labels that never press the second 1000, and they still consider it a success if they sell most of the stock.

Sadly, the odds are not in your favor to make any money when doing your own pressing. One of the benefits of signing to a label is they usually have established distribution networks, have dedicated marketing and have networks to help move your music. Starting out on your own, you have to create this all from scratch and this can be an amazingly daunting task.

This is all changing though, with the revolution of digital distribution. Once you get the music made you can skip the production and distribution costs and go directly to market using digital files. You still face the challenge of marketing and networking but at least your initial investment is solely on the music and not on trying to press CDs that will probably just sit in a box in your room.

Note: the process of looking into self-distribution, researching costs, looking at online distributions for the Cell Culture EP is one of main influences on why we started the Fake Science Music Store.

The Return of Remote Media Storage Services?

With whispers of a new dot-com v2.0 in the air we are seeing more and more start-ups appearing. It’s is becoming an odd deja-vu experience for me the more I read and hear about what is in the works.

One thing that I am seeing is the return of one-stop media management services. For a while in the late 90’s / early Aught’s there were a few services popping up offering online media storage where you can store your media files, images or documents. Most were limited by storage or they faced the challenge that most users only had dial-up and due to the bandwidth limitation they were not realistic options for consumer usage.

With today’s growth in high-speed data services, the promise of plentiful bandwidth is finally coming true (10 years later then promised, but hey, its here now). Bandwidth is no longer the killer bottleneck that faced so many multimedia firms and services. Thanks to these shackles being removed we can now see some really exciting ideas being put into play.

A popular service, that I love but since my camera was stolen I have not fully exploited, is the wonderful Flickr. When I first heard about Flickr, I really didn’t get the service, mostly because the people I know where putting up funny photo sets like 404 messages or uploading directly from their shitty cell phone camera. Now that I have used it for a while it is amazing what it offers. At first glance it appears to be a storage bin where you can put and organize your photos, but with a seemingly simple twist, you can share these images and make them public.

With this option we have seen an amazing amount of things come out of this. At first it was simple things like image Memes, such as the cool “Transparent Desktop” or the 700 hobo’s image gallery. I kind of expected these kinds of memes to appear, but what really blew my mind was instant photo journalism. This became most apparent to me with the London Underground bombings occurred. Within minuets of the bombing, citizens where uploading cell phone camera pictures to their Flickr account. It was stunning, seeing unfiltered images moments after they occurred being supplied by non-mainstream media sources.

I am getting a little off topic here, but the reason I am mentioning the success and redefinition of Flickr is that other companies and startups are looking at what Flickr did and they are trying to offer similar services based on the initial concept. For example, over at Boing Boing they reported about the launch of the MP3Tunes Locker. Started by Michael Robertson, founder of the legendary dot-com MP3.com, MP3Tunes Locker is a service that allows you to store and manage your music using a dedicated remote service.

It seamlessly integrates with iTunes, offers remote access using the Oboe software were you can log in, sync and backup you music. It works with not only MP3s, but pretty much every known audio encoding type out there. Here is a way to manage your music and store it safely in a remote location, create playlists and then sync your machines. I have to admit that I am at the moment only intellectually interested in this service, and I will watch it, but it’s not something that just grabs me. If I did a lot of traveling or had multiple locations that I wanted to manage my music then this may be more interesting. I do have some questions about them, such as who is their target market? Can my friends stream my music? Why should I use this service, what are the benefits?

Another new service just launched called “Glide Effortless”. I found this site via Slashdot and it seems to be a true all-in-one media/document storage and media management system. Glide Effortless is offering sharing of your documents, personal contacts, email, images, videos, and music. The goal, I am assuming, is to provide you with one simple location with built in management and sharing tools to help organize your media.

Again, this is a very interesting concept and pretty daring to offer all these services at one time. What I feel will be the most interesting feature of this is how users take advantage of the system. What kind of communities will be built around this, what kind of adoption will we see? Will this kind of service take off? What needs are these services filling? Also, what kind of security do I have with this service? Are my files safe if I don’t want them public? Is this designed only for public files?

These are the kinds of questions I think of when I read about these kinds of services. At the moment this kind of organization and off-site management does not call out to me, but then again it was the same way with Flickr at first. It will be interesting to see what the early adopters have to say about the service and how they take advantage of it.

UPDATE: Here is a really good break down about Oboe http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000263070731/