"Music Science Report" entries

Download our new free report “Music Science: How Data and Digital Content are Changing Music,” by Alistair Croll, to learn more about music, data, and music science.

Today’s music industry is the product of three things: digital content, the Internet, and data science. This trifecta has altered how we find, consume, and share music. How we got here makes for an interesting history lesson, and a cautionary tale for incumbents that wait too long to embrace data.

When music labels first began releasing music on compact disc in the early 1980s, it was a windfall for them. Publishers raked in the money as music fans upgraded their entire collections to the new format. However, those companies failed to see the threat to which they were exposing themselves.

Until that point, piracy hadn’t been a concern because copies just weren’t as good as the originals. To make a mixtape using an audio cassette recorder, a fan had to hunch over the radio for hours, finger poised atop the record button — and then copy the tracks stolen from the airwaves onto a new cassette for that special someone. So, the labels didn’t think to build protection into the CD music format. Some companies, such as Sony, controlled both the devices and the music labels, giving them a false belief that they could limit the spread of content in that format.

One reason piracy seemed so far-fetched was that nobody thought of computers as music devices. Apple Computer even promised Apple Records that it would never enter the music industry — and when it finally did, it launched a protracted legal battle that even led coders in Cupertino to label one of the Mac sound effects “Sosumi” (pronounced “so sue me”) as a shot across Apple Records’ legal bow. Read more…