✘ HiFi audio is like 4K video - consumers don't actually want it
And: How music merch works; Amapiano's sonic evolution; Australia's explosive streaming growth; Community unchained; A glass house and unstoppable stones
Supremium is what Spotify will allegedly call their new HiFi audio tier. They’re only two years late, and if anything the market of streamers has shown in that period that they don’t care about the audio quality. This isn’t unique to audio. Think about the images you put into web pages or emails. Compression rules there to speed up loading times and increase the user experience. Similarly, 4K video was supposed to take over our screens. And while the manufacturers have done an excellent job at phasing out HD television screens, consumers rarely make use of the capabilities of their 4K screens. Going back to audio, the streaming services will survive, because we as listeners love having access to the entire history of music. We simply love having plenty of something and we can only have that when it’s small. At more lossless formats, audio files are bigger, take up more server space, and require faster internet connections to keep us streaming without hiccups. We don’t want that last part, we like it smooth. As such, we care less about the quality of the audio, and more about the ease of use.
Compress until it’s just recognizable
The MP3 is a triumph of what’s called ‘perceptual coding,’ which
“is a compression technology for audio signals that is based on imperfections of the human ear. Perceptual encoding is a lossy compression technique i.e. the decoded bitstream is not an exact copy of the original digital audio bitstream before compression.”
It basically deletes everything that the human ear most likely won’t perceive anyway and takes away any signal that will most likely fall by the wayside of a louder signal that sits close to it. It’s a great feat of engineering power. It also almost never became popular. As Stephen Witt expertly narrates in How Music Got Free, a team came together in the late 1980s at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany to figure out how to reduce the file size of audio files. They used perceptual coding to do it and arrived at the 128kb MP3 file. They struggled to get the format officially recognized and had basically given up on it, when peer-to-peer file sharing catapulted the MP3 into popular consciousness. Why was it so popular? Because it was small, easily transferrable, and still sounded like what you thought you would hear when playing a specific song.
On the materialities of the digital
When we think about MP3, we think about file-sharing and the computers that we used for that. We also think about the MP3 players and iPods that we all walked around with. Nowadays, we think less of the format as it plays out via a streaming service through our phones. And yet, the materialities haven’t changed. As Jonathan Sterne explained in his wonderful book MP3: The Meaning of a Format:
“Software formats like MP3s exist in the form of configurations of electromagnetic signals. They take up space, which is why MP3 are measured in terms of the bandwidth they require when played back, that is, in kilobits per second.” (p. 7)
There are, then, certain properties that determine the design process and help the transmission of the data as much as the creation and how it can be stored. This may seem philosophical, but it helps in understanding the social and cultural impact of a digital object such as an MP3. It exists when it’s stored, but it also exists in its transmission. Moreover, it exists when it’s perceived, which in the case of the MP3 is also when it becomes sound in someone’s ears and brain. It can be stored and it can be played. Bringing those two together is what makes the MP3 so valuable as a format - it optimizes for both affects.
Why HiFi then?
If the MP3 is so brilliant, why does the market profess that we, the consumer, want high fidelity audio? It is, first and foremost, for the same reason that TV manufacturers tell us we want 4K video - to increase profits. Happy with your HD TV? No, you need a 4K TV, because the image is so much better, the colours are so much more impressive, etc. It’s not untrue, it’s just that we mostly don’t care enough to actually pay for it. Similarly as with the move from SD to HD, consumers don’t want to pay extra for the extra quality.
There is a subset of the market who does care, and who does want the highest and best quality. It’s why there’s super expensive loudspeakers, amplifiers, and headphones. The market isn’t big, even the leading magazine Audiophile Review put the number of audiophiles at 150,000. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be profitable. These are mostly people, and mostly men, with the money to spend more on their gear. They would probably also happily pay $20 instead of $10 for better quality audio. But they will probably also already be subscribed to Qobuz or Tidal to take advantage of their lossless audio quality subscriptions. Thinking about it like that, Spotify is either trying to squeeze the last bit of revenue from a very saturated market or they’re simply bringing a higher quality audio format in because they can.
In a similar way to how the major video streaming services are phasing out 4K video offerings, we might see HiFi audio disappear from audio streaming services in the near future. Most of us consumers listen to music through crappy headphones, or through good headphones but with a Bluetooth connection. There’s only so much we can hear, and everything we don’t need to perceive can be left out.
LINKS
👕 Music merchandise keeps artists afloat. But how does it work? (Katherine Bassett)
“In the future, tapping into fan-led creativity could prove to be a profitable—and rewarding—area for artists to mine. While major labels have been notoriously litigious about fan-made merch, some artists have begun co-creating with fans, either through designing merch lines with their fans, or promoting fan-made merch lines in exchange for a small stake in the profits. This strategy has the dual benefit of generating incredible goodwill from superfans, as well as resulting in merch lines perfectly tuned to their fan's interests.”
✘ Covering everything from how-to to strategy and a potential future of merch, this article does a lot. I feel it’s one of those articles people will come back to over time to find some inspiration.
🔊 From Johannesburg to Coachella: Amapiano’s Sonic Evolution (Will Betts)
“A decent portion of amapiano’s new reach is also tied to collaborations with international artists like WizKid and Tiwa Savage. With these collaborations and crossovers have come evolutions in the genre’s sound. But can we measure amapiano’s sonic evolution? Yes. When we analyse each year’s amapiano uploads on SoundCloud, the message is clear: Amapiano is becoming more musically diverse.”
✘ I love the Amapiano sound and this article is a great entry into exploring how the genre has evolved over time. Starting in the townships of South Africa to now being a globally recognized genre, this article takes a data-driven approach to telling that story.
💥 Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Salutes Australia’s ‘Explosive Growth’ (Lars Brandle)
“For so much of the world’s population, Australia is the great southern land, down there, far away, but a new report from Spotify reveals its music market is worth a much closer look, one with a thriving streaming business that’s punching above its weight class. In the year 2022, as lockdowns lifted and borders reopened everywhere, revenues generated by Australian artists from Spotify topped $250 million, according to the tech giant’s annual “Loud & Clear” report.”
✘ The article mostly focuses on the growth that Australian artists have had through Spotify’s streaming revenues. However, I think it’s more interesting that a market like Australia also still has the bandwidth to be a growth driver in terms of subscription revenues.
⛓️ Community Unchained - the new media of belonging (rafa the builder)
“Under the hood, DAOs and NFT collections had provided the missing ingredient to digitized relationships and community: ownership. Without ownership, relationships had been temporary rented connections, distorted by the lack of agency. Not any longer. Relationships, in their digital form, were now owned by each of us. We could finally weave networks of intimacy, loyalty, and trust outside of social media’s walled gardens.”
✘ Thinking about ‘community as media’ helps to understand how we can cultivate community as a self-owned and self-perpetuating meme or project. Every person involved plays a role in running the world that is being crafted.
🪟 A glass house and unstoppable stones (Mallory Hawk)
“Before I dig into the fun complexities of a hyper-saturated music market, I want to emphasize that the purpose of this essay is not to discourage anyone from pitching their music or shooting their shot. It’s a recommendation to pitch effectively and with kindness, because the struggles of independent artists and record labels overlap. There’s a human on each end of communication, and we’re all shouting something into the void at any given time. I’ll end the essay with what I think makes a strong and courteous pitch.”
✘ Mallory covers a lot, but my biggest take-away here is to remember that whatever side you’re on, the other on the other side is also always a person. We’re in a fully human-to-human business. Not getting a response isn’t the end, but pushing over the top hard to get a response also dehumanizes someone. Here’s to a balance that doesn’t exist but that we need to be reminded about more often.
MUSIC
There’s a new Aphex Twin track. It’s called a suitably Aphex Twin name too: Blackbox Life Recorder 21f. Do I need to say more? It’s a track with a counterpoint between symmetry and asymmetry.