Some General Commentary and Provoking Thoughts on MP3s

"It doesn't make sense to buy CD's (read: accumulate possessions) when you can keep music on hard drive, and delete them when you're finished with them (however long that may take)."

"I have downloaded entire CD's worth of stuff (Kazaa works well in conjunction with allmusic.com); onto CDRW; listened to it twice and recorded over it."
- Fatsauce Plumpie

This article is a based on experiences as a musician and music collector, and includes my reactions to various MP3-related stories and discussions that have taken place at conferences and in magazines. While compiling these observations, I've had to revisit my thinking on the subject repeatedly. There are so many sides to the issue. Those of us with multiple perspectives have a duty to communicate with one another about the nature of these developments. Otherwise, big business and an ignorant majority may end up making all of the decisions about things they know little about.

Until researching this material, I rarely made time or had an interest in searching the Internet for MP3s. I'm more inspired by physical CDs, usually from really cool music stores where I can often find some very good stuff. And I'm interested in CDs for artwork, lyrics and production information.

To become more familiar with the culture of MP3 collecting, I decided to search for a specific song from a well-known artist, just to see if I could find it and how long it would take. For this experiment, I purposely avoided Kazaa and other similar P2P interfaces. I just wanted to see if I could find the song online via a search engine, ready to download, without any additional software or sign-up requirements.

I was somewhat surprised at how long it took. It took me 6-12 hours (spread over a week, and while multi-tasking with other things) to locate the desired song. Here are my observations:

• Using the Advanced search tools of search engines like Google and Hotbot will get you closer to a result. Hotbot is nice because it allows you to indicate you only want results with MP3 files.
• By using "name of song.mp3" as an "exact phrase", and using the artist name as an additional filter, you are more likely to find better results.
• Many files I located were partial clips (30-60 seconds), and the quality varied.
• Beware crappy live renditions and poor cover versions
• Look out for cool live renditions and impressive cover versions by other artists
• Over half of the sites that claimed to have the desired MP3 contained broken links, or bad connections to the server where the file was located.
• MIDI files are fairly common, and could be a workaround for musicians hoping to use the song for educational purposes.

Could this process have been less time consuming if I used Kazaa? Probably. However, I have some reservations about installing any additional software, especially if it could potentially harbor malicious code.

Recent advances in fiber-optic technology will eventually bring lightning fast downloads of many media types, not just MP3. In fact, we may see people trading WAV files instead. Still, MP3s seem to be the most portable solution.

Should ISPs be able to track or prohibit what users download? Aside from basic usage statistics (MB used, logon times, etc) No. Otherwise, it is none of their business what a person downloads. Does your state have a right to track/prohibit where you go on state roads? Aside from basic statistics like number of vehicles, no. An ISP is an on-ramp to the Internet, but they shouldn't be given additional rights to filter or track content.

Why MP3s are good: :-)

• Allows you to sample an artist's catalog with little investment of time/money
• Provides access to forms of music you may not find at your local record store
• Conserves space, great for travel, demos, etc.

Why MP3s are bad: :-(

• The MP3 discussion itself has wasted so much bandwidth and resources that could have been put into creating music. Artists are getting distracted. Very distracted. Listener focus has turned from enjoying music to managing files, backups and keeping current with all new equipment CD/MP3 vs iPod DVD, etc. Do we want a world where you HAVE to own a laptop to enjoy recorded music?
• Makes music less tangible than it already is.

One of my biggest arguments against MP3 technology used to be that it dumbs down the technical quality of the product. Various MP3s that I reviewed in the past were just not as good as a CD. Until recently I could not see the point of downloading so much sub-standard music. Then I got cable.

The files that I got from a subscription service were from 128 to just over 400 Kbps. It was nearly impossible to distinguish them from CD tracks. Preliminary A/B tests with CDs verses MP3 downloads of the same albums did not (so far) net any major sonic differences on my equipment. More time is needed to listen carefully.

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