How Apple can turn the U2 fiasco into a business model

I've been somewhat fascinated by watching the whole Apple / U2 fiasco over the last few weeks.  In case you missed it, as part of the iPhone 6 announcement, Apple worked a deal with U2 to give every iTunes user a free copy of U2's new album, Songs of Innocence,  by automatically placing it in the user's iTunes library and allowing them to download it for free before a certain date.

Now, I've been a U2 fan ever since the mid eighties, so I was quite grateful to Apple and U2 for doing this, but many people were not.  I get this.   If they put a Jay-Z album in my account, I probably wouldn't want it either, and would probably find a way to delete it.  It would probably annoy me.

Seeing this article about how this whole move prompted a huge sales bump in U2's back catalog, though, it got me thinking about my whole music consumption and purchasing experience these days. As where I just used to just walk into a store and pick something that seemed to be marketed to me and would take a chance, these days I typically listen to something on either Spotify or Google Play, and if something grabs me I'll usually still buy it, and in many cases I will buy a bit of the back catalog.  Sometimes in one sitting, sometimes bit by bit over time.

Putting these two things together, Songs of Innocence is just and ad for the rest of U2's back catalog, and for those that like U2, it seems to have worked. The problem was that the ad was totally untargeted, and users generally don't like ads that aren't targeted to their interests, or their purchase intent.

The thing is, Apple also has this thing called iTunes match, where I can upload my entire library to iCloud.  This allows them to pitch me music I might like.   For bands that are similar to what's in my music library, why not allow me to opt-in to having Apple sell my music library as targeting to bands whose albums I don't own, and putting in albums from those bands that might make me buy the back catalog?

So the money would flow like this:   the music label would pay Apple to target me and put their album in my collection for a month, and if I download it I get to keep it.  Hopefully, I would buy more of that band's back catalog and then the band would make up the cost of the placement and more.  Hopefully they bought a fan.

I don't know all the numbers to actually work out if this would be a viable money maker for any of the parties involved, but it feels like there would be something there if done right.

How does the MP3 album cost more than the CD?

Really, how does this even happen?  It seems nuts in this day and age that any MP3 album would cost $17.98 anyway, even if it is a double album.   But for the CD to be less is even more ridiculous!

The Loudness War and Remasters (Rush - Moving Pictures)

Recently I've become fascinated by reading about the alleged "Loudness War" going on in the music industry, whereby every time a label issues a "remaster" they are essentially just making the recording louder and more compressed in addition to supposedly making it sound better.

In addition, I presume, to get suckers like me to buy my favorite albums again and again - the reasons listed for doing so is to actually get the songs to be mixed for the iPod  - as loud as every new recording released today and downloaded from the iTunes Store so you don't have to mess with the volume switch and be audible outdoors with background noise mixed with the Apple ear buds.

I always assumed these remasters were for audiophiles, but apparently that isn't always the case.

One of the remasters I bought recently was Moving Pictures - Deluxe Edition [CD + Blu-ray], which also comes with a 96kHz/24-bit DVD or Blu-ray (two separate versions) so I thought I'd take a look for myself if this was the case.

I took the remastered version of Red Barchetta and compared it to an older version released on the Chronicles and lo and behold, it's louder!

Throwing both versions into Garage Band, it's pretty easy to compare both MP3s side by side as they both play.

Just looking at the volume meters, you can immediately see the difference.   Now if you were born anywhere between 1965 and 1970, you probably spent a good bit of time recording LPs to cassettes, and in doing so, you would have had to fool with the levels so that those meters just barely ever went "into the red", otherwise you would end up with one distorted cassette tape.  Basically you were doing the same thing as any sound engineer: make it as loud as possible without distorting it.

Original on top, remaster on bottom

Well, it turns out digital recordings on CDs and MP3s don't distort at the same frequencies as cassettes so you can indeed make them a little louder, but if you make them too loud, you have to start compressing, which is essentially throwing out the outliers on the highs and the lows.

Original

Remaster

These two clips are from the same part of the song (where Geddy Lee sings "Wind in my hair shifting and drifting...") and you can see how the signal is made as loud as possible going to the limits of the digital playback range in the remaster, and it gets nowhere close in the original version that was just dumped to CD way back when.

Here are some close ups from a few beats later.

Original

Remaster

So while I think this remaster sounds pretty darn good, especially the 24 bit versions, it certainly is louder.  The drums do indeed sound a little "punchier" in the original master but with a good pair of headphones I'm not really hearing distortion.

I can't wait to look at a few more of these to see what the differences are.

i'll take "phrases i couldn't have said 10 years ago" alex

Does anyone think the new Def Leppard sounds like Linkin Park?

At least the first song?

After that it degrades quickly with songs like "Only the good die young" - the title alone should make you cringe.  And no, it's not a Billy Joel cover.  It's an original.

SDRE playing "In Circles"

Ran across this today - I forgot how good this song is...



SDRE is one of those groups I wish I had a time machine for.