Last week, I posted about metadata. One of the comments mentioned the grouping field, which reminded me that it’s time I shared some tips on getting the most out of iTunes. It’s not the perfect jukebox application for a classical collection, but it’s pretty good, and with a bit of fiddling, you can make it better. Here’s what I suggest:

1) Use the grouping field

On the face of it, iTunes doesn’t include support for works. Dig a little deeper, and you discover that works are supported in the player, just not on portable devices.

The somewhat enigmatic “grouping” field will help you here. If you use this field for the work title, you’ll be able to browse all recordings of an individual work, though the “Classical” playlist that’s created automatically when you install iTunes.

2) Fix up your data

You can edit multiple fields at once, for example:

Use search to identify all the many versions of Mozart’s name. Select all the tracks you want to edit by holding down shift and clicking on the first and last in a list, or by holding down CTRL (on a PC) or Command (on a mac) and then clicking on all the tracks you want. Then use CTRL+I (Command+I on a Mac) to edit the data for all the tracks at once. Remember to only touch the fields you want to change, as this will overwrite the data on all the selected tracks.

3) Use smart playlists

You can set up rules to automatically create playlists of all the tracks from a certain composer and/or genre, or where the album or track title contains certain words.

Used cleverly, this allows you to create a browse interface tailored to your own personal style of listening.

More instructions here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1801?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

 

4) Use sort artists and compilations

iTunes doesn’t know if it’s looking at one album with tracks by lots of different artists, or tracks from lots of different albums that all happen to be called the same thing.

You can help it in two ways – by using a “sort artist” which is the artist it will use when it sorts all your albums by artist – and by checking the “compilation” box, which tells it that the album contains tracks by lots of different people.

This all works perfectly until until you actually DO have lots of albums with the same title. Then you’re really going to want to…

5) Upload cover art

iTunes will try to find the cover art for your albums online, but there are so many ways of formatting classical data that it rarely has much luck. Still, if you can bring yourself to track down the covers for your albums as you import them, you’ll never be stuck wondering what you’re listening to, and you’ll be able to browse your collection visually, instead of scrolling through lists.

When we talk about digital music, we use “metadata” to mean the artist, title, and other information that comes with (or is attached to) a recording.

I’ve spent a big chunk of this week on several projects involving classical metadata. Since “the right way to tag classical music” has been an ongoing theme for my entire career, I thought I’d share a few lessons I’ve learned.

 

1) There is no perfect system

We live in an age where I’ll regularly rely on atomic clocks flying thorugh space at 8,700mph to remind me where I parked my car (this is how GPS works), so you’d think we could build a database to coherently store music, right?

Well, we can, but there are limits to categorisation. When you set about designing a database to store music, you start with the obvious things: you’ll need a list of people, and a list of pieces of music, and perhaps a list of albums or tracks. Then you start joining them up. You tell the database what people did on each recording, so the computer knows who was the composer and who was the conductor. It all starts to look easy, so you decide to store a bit more information. You categorise pieces, add some dates, maybe biographies and sleeve notes.

Then you start to stumble upon exceptions:

• Walter Carlos became Wendy Carlos half way through her career. Are they different people in the database, or do you build a system for people who change their names? Either way, you can handle Cat Stevens’ switch to Yusuf Islam, but you might struggle with the period when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, or with an artist who uses different names for different styles of music.
• Stravinsky revised The Firebird several times. These aren’t quite different pieces of music, but nor are they the same. Do we build a system to handle versions of the same thing?
• How much input can an arranger have before they’re effectively the composer? Where do you credit the author of a cadenza? Can the rules you apply to classical music also work with jazz?
• The movements of a Mozart symphony are all easy to identify, but Puccini operas are through-composed, and different recordings chop them up in different places. How do you handle that when identifying recordings of the same aria? What about excerpts from operas that have had final cadences added? Are they arrangements? Who arranged them?
• Overtures are pretty straightforward. We know they go on the beginning of operas. And plays. Except sometimes they don’t. Do we call concert overtures something different?

Anybody who has ever interviewed a band has heard a phrase like “It’s not easy to categorise our music”. Musicians almost seem to conspire against us here: any time a boundary appears between two distinct traditions, it’s only a matter of time before somebody comes along to knock it down. I swear they do it on purpose.

 

2) The better a system fits, the more complex it is

There are some pretty complicated taxonomies for classical music. Every so often, a well-intentioned and sometimes well-funded utopian scheme emerges to build a database of every song ever written. Many fall at the first question: “what’s a song?”

If your system allows for all the exceptions above, and the hundreds more that will crop up when you add ten million tracks to it, it’ll be pretty complicated.

That’s fine if it’s self-contained, like Naxos Music Library. We control the data coming in (we enter it ourselves, and it’s a big job) and we control the software that displays it (we wrote that too). What happens, though, when you don’t control it all?

 

3) The more complex a system is, the less interoperable it is

Once you let your data out into the big wide world, you can’t control how other people will use it. No matter how beautifully tagged your tracks are in your software, they might look terrible in somebody else’s. The way we tag MP3 and AAC files for downloads would allow us to add extra fields for “conductor” and “instrument” and “soloist” and “catalogue number”, but what would be the point? We have no idea how, or even if, they might be displayed on a customer’s computer, because we don’t write the software that does that. We could write software that did that, but it would be expensive, and wouldn’t necessarily work with the other music our customers own.

Devising a data scheme that provides detail but is robust to omissions is a major challenge, and all workable solutions inevitably include a certain degree of duplication.

 

4) It’s tempting to fiddle with the fields, but this is risky

Several people have told me they’ve found the solution to classical tagging in digital collections, and then gone on to explain some variation on “use the album field for the work title, use the artist field for the composer and use the composer field for the artist”. A complex version of this scheme is explained in detail here.

If you apply this system to your entire collection, you’ll notice several things.

• It takes a really long time to do it
• It works really nicely on old iPods
• It makes a total mess of the menus on a new iPod
• It doesn’t play nicely with the non-classical stuff in your collection
• You have to edit every single bit of data on every single track you add to your library

That’s fine for a small collection, but it quickly becomes unwieldy. It’s also a hack: you’re using it for something it wasn’t designed for. Sometimes, that’s fine. In my office, I use binder clips to turn the edge of the suspended ceiling into a picture rail. This is pretty low-risk, because they don’t bring out a new version of the suspended ceiling every few months, and even if they did, it wouldn’t take me long to think of a new way to hang my pictures.

What about all this data? What if iTunes or Windows Media Player or your smartphone gets an update that improves the way classical data is displayed? When they finally fix this, the software’s going to need all the data in the right fields. Then you’ll have to enter it all again.

 

5) Here’s how most people do it, and why

So what should you do? Well, the future-proof method is to use the fields for what they’re basically intended for, in a way that’s consistent with the way the same data is handled by the people who invested the most in it. iTunes isn’t going to re-tag 15 million tracks just to update their user interface, so at this point, we have an established convention.

Name/Track Title/Song

This is for all the information about the piece of music (except who wrote it). When we deliver something to iTunes, they demand:

Work Title, Catalog Number: Movement Number. Movement Title

So thats:

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67: I. Allegro con brio

It’s long, but it’s all there. One day, somebody is going to realise that everything before the colon is the work title, and present it that way wherever the tracks are listed together. That colon is the future of your data.

Artist

This is for the performers. When we put it in a database, we use different fields for the artists. It would be nice if we could tag all the artists independently on downloads, too, but that’s not how any mainstream application reads the data, so we put them in a comma-separated list:

Takako Nishizaki, Stephen Gunzenhauser & Capella Istropolitana

There isn’t an established convention on ordering, so this is really up to you. I suggest putting the most important one first, since it’s unlikely you’ll be able to see the full list all the time when you’re browsing your library.

iTunes and Windows Media Player both support a composer field, so we use that. In iTunes, you can ensure the composer field is displayed in your library by going to View > View Options and checking the “Composer” box.

Composer

Here are some of the many options I’ve seen:

• Bach
• Bach, J.S.
• Bach, JS
• Bach, Johann Sebastian
• Bach
• Bach, Johann S
• BACH
• J.S. Bach
• Johann Sebastian Bach

None of these is perfect. We identify some composers by their last name (Haydn), some their initials and last name (J.S. Bach) and some by their full names (Philip Glass). Sometimes all this isn’t enough, and (as with the Strausses) we have to number them as well. Some names are transliterated differently in different countries, so two albums from different places might not even agree on spellings. It’s all maddening.

So what do you do?

We use the most common form of their full name, and that’s what most stores do as well. Anything else is going to drive you crazy in the long run, especially if you try to browse your collection by composer.

Album Title

The album title is important because it generally contains the composer names, which are otherwise not visible on most mobile devices. SInce most modern jukebox applications will also show you the album art, the combination of the two should give you a pretty clear idea what you’re listening to, regardless of the other data you can see.

If you tag your music this way, you will be able to see everything you need. Your main complaint with most interfaces will be that they don’t show you enough of each field. If the entire classical music community should get together and ask for something from the tech world, it should be this: “Make sure we can always see the composers*, and give us support for long fields. We can figure everything else out ourselves”.

 

6) While imperfect, it’s still easier to find music on a computer than in a record store

If you’ve followed the steps in (5) above, then you should always be able to work out what you’re listening to, and it should always be possible to find the recording you have in mind.

The trick, here, though is to rely on search, not browse.

In a closed, controlled environment like the Naxos Music Library database, we can be sure we always called composers the same thing, and we consistently applied naming conventions. That means we can give you a nifty browse interface where you can pick the names of artists, composers and genres from a list.

Even with fairly nice data, it just doesn’t work this well once the music has arrived in your library. The artists are all joined-up, and you can rarely sort the track titles by anything useful. Any inconsistencies in composers’ names makes it a total mess.

While a lot of people are working hard to find a widely-accessible solution to this problem, I suggest that, in the meantime, we don’t allow our enjoyment of digital music to depend on them finding an answer any time soon.

When I want to listen to something on my computer, I only ever use search. Even the simple “and-contains” search in iTunes* allows you to make quite specific requests very quickly. While this can be a bit clunky when you’re looking for something among the store’s millions of tracks, it’s an extremely effective way to find things in your own collection, even if it is very large. Type “Mozart” and you’ve got a list of everything with Mozart somewhere in it. Add “Symphony” and you’ve got everything with Mozart AND Symphony somewhere in it. This could include the odd overture, but it has excluded 99% of the irrelevant music, and given you a manageable list. Add the name of an artist, and you’re right there, at the recording you were looking for.

I have a fairly large CD collection at home, shelved alphabetically (by composer and artist). It’s about the size of a small specialist record shop. I’ve taken great care to be systematic about shelving music, because I know that, otherwise, I may never find it again. On my computer, meanwhile, I’ve been sloppy with data. The music just arrived too fast for me to spend much time on it. Still, there is no way I could find a CD on the shelf in the time I can find it on my computer.

This makes me wonder: when people complain that metadata is a serious barrier to downloading classical music, what, exactly, are they comparing it to?

* Spotify doesn’t show you the composers. Just try to find a specific classical recording on Spotify, and you’ll quickly see how maddening this is: the content is all there. You just can’t sort through it. Spotify is, though, a relatively young company, and I think they’ll probably fix this in time. If you want a really good classical streaming experience, you might prefer to use Naxos Music Library or Classics Online.

Today, I want to talk about headphones and cables. It’s nerdy, but useful.

Just about every audio system has some wires coming out of it. Whether you bought cheap cables or expensive ones, these are often the most neglected part of any set up.

As a general rule, it’s a good idea to try to keep the power cables away from the audio cables¹. Mostly, though, once you’ve set up your stereo system, you’re not going to look at all these wires. They’ll hang out around the back, getting dusty, and doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, the poor wires on your headphones will be earning their living the hard way. Now, I’m rather fond of headphones. I use them a lot. I regularly use three pairs: a big set for the office, a folding big pair for traveling, and little ones for public transport.

These are all well-constructed and reliable, but the reason they’ve survived many years of extremely heavy use is because I take good care of the wires. In fact, after destroying many pairs of headphones in the past, this has become a little bit of an obsession for me.

The big pair and little pair both have long, straight cables. These easily get tangled up. Whether it’s a pair of headphones, a hair dryer or a computer power supply, the natural thing to do when we want to put it away is wrap the wire around it.

The trouble with this is it twists the cable, and twisted cables tangle really easily. Twisting also weakens the electrical conductors on the inside, and in time causes the thing to stop working.

If you coil the wire in a figure-8 instead, the twists cancel each other out, and the whole thing unrolls every time without any tangles. The way I see it, this will easily double the life of your headphones, which makes it okay to spend twice as much on them. I use a velcro cable tie to keep them in place, and I never have to untangle anything.

This figure-8 thing really is great. It works on just about any appliance.

For longer cables and extension leads, try folding instead of coiling. This also avoids introducing any twists, and it’s much easy to get them undone. Fold them in half, fold them in half again, do it a third time if you need to, and then tie the whole thing in a big loose knot. It won’t be twisted when you undo it.

My folding headphones have a coiled wire like a telephone handset³. This is nice and tidy when you’re using them, but a total liability the rest of the time, because coiled wires get so easily tangled when, for no apparent reason, a few of the coils decide they want to twist the other way now. The phone on my desk does this all the time.

You can fix this, both on your headphones and your telephone, in four steps:

1) Uplug the cable. Hold it up by one end to make sure it isn’t twisted.

2) Gently work any backwards-loops to the end of the wire. They’ll mostly disappear, but the places they used to be won’t quite look right.

3) Being careful to keep the ends of the wire dry, put the twisted sections into a cup of near-boiling water. This will soften the rubber coating, and let the coils return to their natural shape. Dry it and let it cool down before you plug it in.

4) Don’t try to wind up this cable. It’s already coiled. Instead, just drop the whole lot into a drawstring bag when you’ve finished with them, and they’ll reward you with years of service. Obviously this part won’t work for your phone.

If you have any other great cable-management tips to share, please use the comments. Have a great weekend!

¹This is because any wire carrying a current creates a magnetic field around it. Any cable carrying AC creates a constantly changing magnetic field around it, and this will cause a current to flow in any wires passing through that magnetic field. This is called induction. When you turn this into sound, it becomes a 50 or 60Hz buzz or hum.

The hum is pretty quiet, so unless they run past a power station, you don’t need to worry too much about your speaker cables. Mains hum is mostly a problem on cables carrying very quiet signals – particularly those from turntables – into the amplifier.² The problem can be exacerbated if either of the wires is coiled up, since this multiplies the effect of the magnetic field. You can avoid this by coiling any excess wire into a figure-8.

² Most studio gear avoids this problem by using balanced cables, where the signal and its inverse are both sent along adjacent wires. At the other end, the sound is read as the difference between the two signals, which cancels out any current induced along the way. This is particularly important for microphone cables, which carry very quiet signals over very long distances before they’re amplified.

³ For anybody under the age of 18, a telephone handset is like a mobile phone, but it is fixed to the wall with a long twisty wire.

My last post was about the frequencies missing from MP3s.¹

Today, I want to talk about bit rates.

To make sensible decisions about bit rates, it helps to understand a bit about how MP3 encoding works. When your computer makes a CD into an MP3, it has three main ways of making the music take up less space:

1) It throws out sounds you probably can’t hear – either because they’re “masked” by louder sounds, or because they’re only audible to a very small proportion of humans. Done right, this is an elegant exercise in efficiency. Done wrong (or too much) you music sounds tiny, thin and empty.

2) It describes the sound in terms of the shape of the wave, instead of as a big long list of values. If the wave isn’t a very complicated shape, it can do this with virtually no loss of quality.

Here are two MP3s of the same sound – a simple 440Hz sine wave. This is just about the easiest thing to make into an MP3. Although the first file is 10x the size of the second, they sound identical because you don’t even need 16kb to record 1 second of sine wave. Like a stick of rock, the file just says “440hz at -3dBFS” all the way through.

Here it is at 160kbps (mono)

Here it is at 16kbps (mono)

With our nice simple sine wave, there’s no extra data to throw out, so they sound the same. If we give it something really complicated, though, we’ll start to notice a difference.²

Here’s a bit of Debussy’s La Mer³, as a very high quality MP3:

That sounds pretty good to me, but here it is again, a tenth of the size:

Suddenly it sounds like it’s being played down a telephone. A file this size can happily hold a simple sine wave, but in trying to describe the complex harmony and sonority of Debussy’s orchestration, it has to make some cuts. All the notes are still there, but we’ve lost a lot of what is beautiful about it. When we’re looking for a bit rate that works for us, this is the outcome we’re looking to avoid.

3) Once the fat is trimmed off (1) and the important sounds reduced to their component waves (2), the computer looks for commonly-occuring patterns in what remains, so the information in them only needs to be recorded once.

In our first example above, that means saying “440Hz, -3bDFS” to define the single note, and “ditto” for the rest of the file.

With La Mer, the opportunities are less obvious, but if you see time in 44100ths of a second like the computer does, there’s plenty of repetition here. By itself, this third type of compression is lossless – you get exactly the same data out as you put in, but it takes up less space while being stored.

The combination of these three techniques allow us to make the files much, much smaller. Even the highest-quality MP3s are just a fifth of the size of the original files, but they can be much smaller.

The goal is to find the smallest file size that sounds good to you.

Let’s start with a 16kbps file. At this size, you could fit more than five days of music on a single CD:

I want you to make up your own mind, but I think you’ll agree that sounded pretty bad. This next one is twice the size, at 32kbps. This would let you put 54 hours of music on a CD.

This one is twice the size again: 64kbps. You’d get 27 hours of this on one CD.

Next is 128kbps, or eight times the size we started at. You’d get thirteen and a half hours of this on a CD.

Double that again, and you’re at sixteen times the size we started at. At 256kbps, you’d get six hours and 47 minutes of music on a CD. The Amazon MP3 store delivers music in this format.⁴

Finally, the highest bit rate supported by the MP3 format is 320kbps. That’s 20 times the size we started at, and 22% of the size of the original. You’d get about five hours and twenty minutes of this on a CD. If you buy music from ClassicsOnline this is what you’ll get.⁵

You can try all this with your own music, indeed I’d encourage you to. Hook up your computer to your stereo, make some MP3s (and other files), shuffle them up, and try to tell them apart. Remember: bigger is not always better. If you want a fast car, you don’t buy the one that uses the most petrol. You buy the one that goes fastest. If you’re looking for an audio format that sounds good,  don’t go for the one that uses the most data. Go for the one that sounds best, and have fun.

 

Corrections:

I originally (and wrongly) wrote that the Amazon MP3 store delivered 320kbps files, not 256kbps files. This has now been corrected.

A typo in one of the footnotes said of Variable Bit Rate encoding “there’s no good reason to now use it” which is the exact opposite of what I meant, which is “there’s no good reason to not use it.”

 

Footnotes:

¹All the files on this page are MP3s. This has become the format of choice for many mainstream download stores (including ClassicsOnline and Amazon) because it works on almost everything. Many of the same basic principles apply to both AAC (used by iTunes) and Ogg Vorbis (used by Spotify). These are both more sophisticated formats that avoid some of the more complex inherent weaknesses of MP3 at the expense of ubiquitous compatibility with all players. In general, either AAC or Ogg Vorbis should sound better than MP3 at a given bit rate, so if getting the best possible sound out of the smallest possible file is a priority for you, I’d suggest you check them out.

²Simple sounds are easier to encode than complicated music, so it tends to be that you only notice that you’re listening to encoded music when something complicated or sudden happens. It’s in these places where the bit rate isn’t high enough. To overcome this, modern MP3 encoders use “variable bit rate” encoding, where a small amount of data is used for the easy bits, and a lot of data is used for the difficult bits. It averages out at the overall target bit rate. I haven’t addressed variable bit rate encoding in the main body of this post because it’s pretty ubiquitous now, and there’s no good reason to not use it.

³This album was produced and engineered by Tim Handley, who has won numerous Grammy awards as a producer.

⁴iTunes also delivers 256kbps files, but in the AAC format¹.

⁵If that doesn’t sound good to you, then you might like to try theclassicalshop.net, eclassical.com or hdtracks.com - all of which will sell you full CD-quality downloads of just about any Naxos record, and many of those from the labels we distribute.

I’ve been putting together a blog post on the way to get the best sound out of MP3s, but there are so many elements to deal with, I thought I’d tackle it in pieces. For this post, I’m just going to talk about the missing frequencies in an MP3.

One of the ways we can fit more music into an MP3 is by discarding the least important information. High frequency sounds have a lot going on very quickly, and they can take up a lot of space, so there’s a lot to be gained from getting rid of them.¹

Still. We don’t want data to be missing. If the range of human hearing is 20-20,000Hz, and everything above 16,000Hz is missing, that feels like a lot. It seems like that would be 20% of the music.

That’s not how frequencies work, though. Every time we go up an octave, the frequency doubles. Going up like this, numbers can get pretty big, pretty fast, and it makes the high frequencies look a lot more important than they really are. If you wanted to make a piano covering the entire range of human hearing², you’d need to give it 120 keys instead of the normal 88. If, halfway through building it, you decided you only wanted it to go up to 10,000Hz, not 20,000Hz, you wouldn’t remove half the keys. You’d only remove 12 of them – seven white ones and five black ones.

In any case, 20,000Hz is the highest anybody can hear, not the highest everybody can hear. Above that, your pets might notice, but you won’t. Our sensitivity to high frequencies deteriorates with age, so for most adults the ceiling is more like 16,000Hz. Your kids can probably hear things you can’t, and your pets can hear things your kids can’t.

If, like me, you’ve spent a lot of time around very loud music, your hearing might top out even lower. I can’t hear much above 13,000Hz.

Try it for yourself: this is a 30-second sweep across the full range of human hearing, from 20hz to 20,000hz. Hit the play button, and listen until it goes quiet: that’s as high as you can hear.³

[If you're reading this in a feed-reader, you might have to scroll to the bottom of the page or visit the site the see the player]

 

It goes up by 666Hz/Second, so the frequencies are:

Start: 20Hz
1 Second: 686Hz
2 Seconds: 1,352Hz
3 Seconds: 2,018Hz – The highest note in the Queen of the Night’s Aria
4 Seconds: 2,684Hz
5 Seconds: 3,350Hz
6 Seconds: 4,016Hz – The highest note on a piano⁴
7 Seconds: 4,682Hz
8 Seconds: 5,348Hz
9 Seconds: 6014Hz
10 Seconds: 6,680Hz
11 Seconds: 7,346Hz
12 Seconds: 8,012Hz
13 Seconds: 8,678Hz
14 Seconds: 9,344Hz
15 Seconds: 10,010Hz
16 Seconds: 10,678Hz
17 Seconds: 11,342Hz
18 Seconds: 12,008 Hz
19 Seconds: 12,674 Hz
20 Seconds: 13,340Hz – This is where it goes quiet for me ⁵
21 Seconds: 14,006Hz
22 Seconds: 14,672Hz
23 Seconds: 15,338Hz
24 Seconds: 16,004Hz – Very few adults can hear anything above here
25 Seconds: 16,670Hz – A 192kbps MP3 won’t have much above here
26 Seconds: 17,336Hz
27 Seconds: 18,002Hz – A 256kbps MP3 won’t have much above here
28 Seconds: 18,668Hz
29 Seconds: 19,334Hz – A 320kbps MP3 won’t have much above here
30 Seconds: 20,000Hz – Still audible to other animals⁶

There’s an argument that, while these frequencies might be inaudible by themselves, they add character to other sounds in ways that are perceptible to our ears. If this were true, it would be relatively straightforward to prove it and, as far I can see, nobody ever has. It also doesn’t stand up to common sense. Sounds simply don’t become more noticeable when there’s other noises, indeed, the opposite is widely accepted.

So there you go: unless you’re a dog, you can test your hearing and pick and MP3 format that only excludes frequencies you can’t hear. There are, of course, other aspects of MP3 encoding that affect the quality of the sound. Next time, we’ll look at bit rates, fixed and variable, and the effect these have on the sound.

¹The point I wanted to make here is way too nerdy for the first footnote.⁷

²Most notes produced by musical instruments are a combination of several related frequencies, overtones or harmonics. In the piano analogy, I’m only talking about the lowest (and loudest) of these frequencies, called the “fundamental”.

³This is a bit of fun, not a diagnostic tool. If you’re concerned about your hearing, you should see a professional. If you’re interested in playing around with acoustics, though, you should check out the tools at this site. The sound clip on this page is a linear sweep at constant amplitude (-3dBFS). If it seems to get louder and quieter over its range, that’s because your hearing is more sensitive to certain frequencies, (normally around the range of the human voice). This clip is itself encoded as an MP3, but because it contains an extremely simple sound, it doesn’t need to filter out the high frequencies. The MP3 specification is quite flexible on encoding, but all decoders are essentially the same, so I can be confident that your computer will decode the same sound that I get from this file, regardless of the software used to play it back.

⁴The fundamental frequency of the highest note on the piano is 4186.01Hz, but its overtones will extend upwards beyond the limit of human hearing. If you’re interested in this stuff, I’d recommend this video and, if you still want more detail, this one.

⁵I won’t speculate on what happened to the top end of my hearing, but Google Scholar is a good place to explore the considerable research on hearing loss in orchestral musicians.

⁶Dogs can hear up 60,000Hz, mice up to 90,000Hz and bats up to 120,000Hz.

⁷Ok. You’ve been warned. An MP3 describes a complex sound wave in terms of lots of little bits of a sine wave: “At this point, the wave goes up with a bump this tall and this long”. If you want to lose the rest of the day in articles about mathematics on Wikipedia, then it might help you to know that this is called a Fourier Series. The reason I bring all this up is because if you’re encoding music this way, the high frequencies take up a lot of space: at 20Hz, there are 20 wobbles in the line to describe each second of music. At 20,000Hz, there are 20,000 of them. By getting rid of a small number of high frequencies, you can get rid of a very large amount of data. The trick is to find the frequencies you won’t miss.

A lot gets written about streaming music. It isn’t all true. Perhaps even more frustratingly when it is true, it isn’t always the whole truth. Here are ten misconceptions about music streaming, which I’ve attempted to explain. If you have questions, please use the comments section, and I’ll do my best to answer them or, at least, to explain why I can’t.

1) Streaming services are all basically the same

Streaming services are not all the same. They all play you music over the Internet, but that doesn’t make them the same. They use different technologies, have different content, different ways to find music and they don’t even all sound the same. We run four different streaming services at price points from $19.95/year to $300/year per subscriber. There are lots of others.

2) Royalty rates are scandalously low

There’s a big range of royalty rates paid by streaming services. We have deals with services including Rhapsody, Napster and Spotify, but we also have our own streaming services (Naxos Music Library, ClassicsOnline and Naxos.com) so we get to see a lot of the figures. Services pay us between three cents a track and a quarter of a cent per track¹.

Whether or not this is low depends on what you’re comparing it to. If your reference point is a paid download², then yes, it’ll seem low, but the two simply aren’t comparable. A stream is ephemeral, a download is permanent. In this regard, a stream has much more in common with radio than it does with either a download or a CD.

When one of our tracks is played on internet radio in the US, we get about a quarter of a cent per listener³, comparable with the very lowest streaming rates. We get a little over half that from satellite radio, and nothing at all from traditional radio.

The royalty rate correlates closely to the degree of interactivity. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got the download, which is yours to play whenever you want. At the other end is traditional radio, where fixed playlists and a small number of stations give you very little choice indeed.

This correlation even applies among streaming services, where Naxos Music Library (an academic research tool designed for people who really need to hear a specific track in detail) pays a higher rate than consumer-focussed sites, which are more likely to be used for background music.

3) Streaming services are not for serious listening

This accusation has been levelled at just about every innovation since letting common people into the concert hall. The gramophone reduced serious symphonic works to 7-minute soundbites. LPs lacked the clarity and immediacy of shellac. CDs sanitised the sound and took the tactile ceremony out of listening. The iPod reduced serious symphonic works to 7-minute soundbites. Streaming made us careless consumers who don’t really pay attention to what we’re listening to.

The idea⁴ is that if you don’t have to pay for music before you listen to it, you don’t have much of an investment in it. You’ll pick the singles, skim over the album tracks, and get stuck in an ever decreasing circle of superficial instant gratification.

It’s a plausible argument, but it’s the answer to the wrong question. We’re not looking at a world in which streaming subscriptions become the only way of consuming music – just a world where they’re one of many options. Streaming has been around for about a decade, and it shows no sign of taking over. People still press vinyl, CDs are very popular and downloads have a growing share of the market because they all have different advantages, and each is the best solution to a different problem. The same goes for streaming.

It’s true that streaming services mean you don’t have to make a financial investment in a piece of music before you hear it, but there are foreseeable positives to this too: with nothing at risk but your time, you can take a chance on new repertoire.

Public libraries didn’t turn out to be bad for literacy in the long run. In the same way, we think the wider availability of music will be good for music appreciation.

4) Streaming is bad for artists and/or independent labels

We’re adults. We look carefully at each contract before we sign it⁵. If we thought streaming subscription services were bad for labels, we wouldn’t have started our own and we certainly wouldn’t have signed up with others.

There are some widely-reported examples of artists receiving very low payments from streaming services⁶. It’s worth remembering these payments are made under the artist’s contract with the label, to which the artist agreed as a consenting adult, and that contract may involve the deduction of a proportion of those royalties. You can’t work out what the service is paying the label by looking at what the label pays the artist.

5) It’s all a scam cooked up by the major labels

It’s not a scam. It’s a deal. Consumers should do it if it makes sense to them, labels should do it if it makes sense to them, artists should do it if it makes sense to them. If a lot of people do it, it’s because a lot of people think it makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense to you, don’t do it.

6) It’s the end of the record collection

As a consumer, if you like records, there’s nothing stopping you from buying them. Almost all releases are still available on CD and as downloads. Vinyl is growing in popularity.

For artists and labels, there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest streaming leads to an overall reduction in the sales of other formats. There’s plenty of speculation about how consumer behaviour will change, but the only way to find out for sure is to try it and see what happens. So far, from where we’re standing, it looks good.

Streaming services certainly do change our relationship with the recordings we hear. Unless you’re very young, it’s likely you already own a whole bunch of music, so a service like Spotify or Naxos Music Library becomes an addition to the collection.

For some people, it’s a way to check out recordings before buying them as downloads or CDs. For others, it’s a way to hear the music they don’t like enough to buy. Some might stop listening to their existing collections altogether, choosing instead to create playlists of favourite albums online. No matter how we use streaming services, we’re still actively involved in listening, and in curating a selection of music. It doesn’t look the same, and it doesn’t take up anywhere near as much space, but all the musically significant parts of building a record collection are there.

7) You’ll be locked in

If you spent your life putting together your record collection – if you’ve carted crates and crates of LPs and CDs from your parents house to college to your first flat to your first house to the place you raised your kids, adding all the time to a library of physical objects that together form a soundtrack to every special memory you possess – if this sounds like your collection, you might well be uneasy at the idea that your music might no longer belong to you, and that you’ll lose it if you stop paying for it at a price that could increase significantly at some point in the future.

This is, though, only half the story. You’ve still got your records, and a subscription isn’t going to take them away. Unlike a physical collection, any new playlists you create are stored on remote secure servers, can be easily copied, and will survive fire, flood or burglary in your home. Right now, a Spotify playlist isn’t compatible with Rhapsody, but as the market matures, it will become easier and easier to transport the playlist element of your collection from one service to another.

8) Successful pop artists are holding back releases from streaming

“Because Coldplay does it” is not a good reason to do something. If it was, I’d have a child called “Apple”.

In the film industry, it’s normal to release a film first in cinemas, then for rental, then to buy on dvd, and finally for broadcast on television, giving each platform a chance to play to its strengths. This works well for blockbusters, but smaller movies adapt the pattern to suit their own niches.

We may one day see a similar standard release pattern for music, although it’s unlikely we’ll see one plan work for everything.

In the meantime, you can expect to see more albums held back as our whole industry tries to work out what the ideal pattern looks like for each type of music.

9) Streaming services aren’t sustainable. They’re just trying to build interest so they can sell to Google (or somebody else).

Articles like this one contain a lot of speculation. I can’t speak for anybody else’s business, but I do know that Naxos Music Library is already profitable and continues to grow.

10) The audio quality is bad.

If this is your only objection, then you want to be wrong about this, because this one issue stands between you and great convenience. Research has repeatedly shown that our expectations have a big impact on our perception of the music we hear, so do yourself a favour and enlist a friend to help you with a blind trial. I suggest comparing Spotify on the premium subscription (which streams at up to 320 kbps) with a CD (or WAV/FLAC files) of the same music. Have your friend test you: if you can’t tell one from the other without peeking, sit back and enjoy the music.

 

Footnotes:

¹Streaming services typically pay out a fixed percentage of their revenue, shared out amongst the labels according to the proportion of total streams apportioned to that label’s content, so if your music was responsible for ten percent of total listening, you get ten percent of the total money. When a service has just launched, most users will be on a free trail, and the pre-stream revenue can be very low. Sometimes there are per-stream minimums built into the deal, but these don’t always determine the sum you actually get, and it isn’t the same every month, so it would be misleading to simply say “we get x per stream.”

² When you buy a track on iTunes in the US for 99 cents, we get 70 cents. We pay 9.1 cents in music publishing (if the work is still in copyright) and that leaves us with about 60 cents, which is somewhere between 20 and 300 times what we might get from a stream. It’s tempting, then, to say that unless users listen to their downloads an average of 20-300 times, they’d be better off with streaming and we’d be better off with downloads. This is an oversimplification: it assumes that users only stream or download, that nobody buys anything after streaming it, and that streamers and downloaders listen to the same amount of music, regardless of cost.

³ More on US rates for digital radio here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange

⁴ Gabriel Kahane puts the case eloquently here: http://gabrielkahane.com/?p=358

⁵ The deal terms described in this article are fairly accurate. What isn’t accurate is the analysis, which misunderstands the nature of a monopoly and wrongly presents the terms as onerous, unfair, or impossible to deal with.

⁶ This article describes one example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/13/spotify-songwriters