And remember: The secret to survivin’ is knowin what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

How does it sound? “The machine is not adding its own color. It’s not adding anything of its own nature,” says the device’s developer. The samples on the NPR site are low-res internet audio, but the comparisons to the original are impressive, despite a persistent background hiss.

The technology could eventually become available to general consumers, meaning that the daunting task of MP3-encoding piles of vinyl would become way less daunting. It’s a strange and beautiful world.

Thanks Jeb

Sales of digital music through stores like iTunes are up (though slowing) – but not nearly as much as sales of CDs are down. Anyone who has thumbed through bins at their local LP/CD outlet recently has probably noticed the “no elbows required” phenomenon — there’s so little competition with other shoppers that you never have to share elbow space with GRateful Dead shoppers while plumbing the shelves for GRuppo Sportivo re-releases. I recently felt like I had the local Rasputin’s all to myself, which was a bittersweet sensation (sweet because I had a musical playground all to myself, bitter because of the writing on the wall — in-store music shopping has basically become passe). New York Times:

… very few albums have gained traction. And that is compounded by the industry’s core structural problem: Its main product is widely available free. More than half of all music acquired by fans last year came from unpaid sources including Internet file sharing and CD burning, according to the market research company NPD Group. The “social” ripping and burning of CDs among friends — which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing efforts — accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing, NPD said.

By some estimations, this Christmas could be the last hurrah for CD sales, “and then everything goes kaput.” I, for one, fear the reaper. And the reaper is us. But what exactly is it that we’re supposed to fear? Nostalgiac sadness at the death of a shopping and browsing experience with 100 years of tradition behind it? The trend toward owning singles rather than full albums? The death of cover art and liner notes? Lack of involvement in the album as a larger art form when we’re all stuck on perpetual random play? The role of the record store as an editorial conduit designed to tell us which music matters? Plummeting fidelity? All of the above?

Not all of these fears seem well-founded. Cover art has made a big comeback in digital music collections, and ID3v2 lets us store lyrics and liner notes inside our files. Meanwhile, the serendipity of the browsing experience hasn’t died — it just smells funny. Discovering rare finds by browsing has merely changed form — we now have discovery tools like Pandora and last.fm and eMusic at our disposal – arguably more effective and “intelligent” than the random “dusty bin surfing” record store experience.

If record stores do indeed go belly up in a few years’ time, loss of audio fidelity is probably the largest threat faced by music lovers. Online music stores typically sell tunes at well below CD quality — and few users notice or complain. Music swapping sites, where it’s often possible to find 192kbps or better versions of what you’re looking for, fare a little better, but it’s a crapshoot. If the only copy of that rare Japanese pressing of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Live in Butan* is available at 128kbps and you’re desperate, you’re going to grab it. But 128k just doesn’t deliver the punch necessary to draw out the full resonant potential of all that cowbell (YouTube’s insanely aggressive video compression doesn’t do much for it either).

There is a glimmer of hope for the children: EMI has agreed to release its tracks on iTunes both free of strangulating DRM technology and at 256kbps – double the fidelity of other iTunes music and free of copy restrictions. If there is justice in the universe, other labels and online music vendors will soon follow suit.** Though I personally can barely tell the difference between 256kbps AAC and uncompressed PCM audio, there are golden-eared folks who can — such as my friend’s nine-month-old son.

As for the role of labels and the distribution chain as editorial pre-filters, wading through the crap so we don’t have to, I call “bull.” In fact, the reverse is true – too much crap is a big part of the reason for the demise of the record store. Online music networks bring organic, Darwinian principles to the filtering process — a sort of trickle-up phenomenon (or “treacle-up,” if you prefer). By monitoring attention streams and counting downloads, music sites can let the wisdom of crowds do the pre-filtering for us. In theory, the good stuff will rise to the top like thick cream, without any help from studio execs in comfy chairs. In theory, anyway. Whether you trust collective “wisdom” is another matter. If the “wisdom of crowds” turns out to look more like the idiocy of crowds, we’re no better off than where we started.

But the greatest threat posed by the rise of bits over atoms may not be technological or aesthetic at all. If the end truly is nigh, we should fear for our children’s backs. After all, if they’re never required to cart heavy record crates from apartment to apartment on their journey through college, they could grow up with weak spines, unprepared to ward off the next wave of corporate spoon-feeding.

* Stuck Between Stations makes no claim that such a recording actually exists.

** Update: Apple began selling DRM-free tracks in iTunes on May 30, 2007.

Apparently Collier got a little build help from Pete Hartley, who also designed the drum kit Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen used after losing his arm. All part of the “fundamental strangeness of Sheffield.”

What really sets Collier’s synth apart is its use of a ribbon controller in place of a keyboard, putting its sonic output somewhere between that of a theremin and Rolf Harris’ Stylophone. Except that Collier’s strap-on has been known to blow amps in a few seconds or less.

Icing on the sawtooth: You can tweak Nick’s knobs yourself, if you’re so inclined.

More:

• Pink grease roller disco
• Terrifying wiring shot
• More of Collier’s synth creations

Photo courtesy Dan Sumption, via Dan Shot Me (Gallery: Pink Grease roller disco)

The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

savenetradio.org has been created to raise awareness and reverse the tide, before this vital medium is smothered in its crib. Please consider sending email to your congress-critter / reps, encouraging them to stop the madness.

We all know that the theory was that digital downloads would let people only purchase the songs they liked, rather than the entire album, but I had no idea the tide had shifted this far already. Me, I’ve bought exactly one single from iTMS in the past few years – a track from Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, which I needed for a performance piece we were prepping for a friend’s wedding.

That wee melanoma aside, I still think almost entirely in terms of albums. Doesn’t mean I think the album is sacrosanct – I do delete duds from the collection without regret when they don’t warrant a place in the stash. But at eMusic, iTunes, and name-that-download-site, I smoke only full albums (though I don’t inhale). It’s not some kind of pride thing, and it may in fact indicate a form of stupidity, but it’s just the way I am. Perhaps a sign of age.

Two factors at work here: 1) The gestalt of the album is dead (or at least it smells funny) – people not raised on vinyl don’t have that flip-it-over, we’re-not-done-yet thing in their blood, and 2) Artists and labels are being punished for a decade of dross. When the ratio of keeper tracks to flotsam gets low enough, no consumer in their right minds is going to pay for 90% fillah.

Most importantly, I think the atomic nature of data structures on the internet are having an effect on our brains. We don’t read entire web pages, let alone books. We Google for the keyword, then Cmd-F to find the answer on the page. We don’t channel surf to discover, we BitTorrent the stuff we already know we like. We don’t buy an album per week and digest it two dozen times from the comfort of a beanbag chair, we download a track from MySpace and listen to it twice in the background. Jeff Kempler of EMI nails it:

Perpetuating a business model that fixates on a particular packaged product configuration is inimical to what the Internet enables, and it’s inimical to what many consumers have clearly voted for.

Trying not to sound maudlin or sentimental, but dammit, we’re going to lose something important here. AOR is not a bad word, and Out of the Blue is not just some brachiating XML tree waiting to be parsed.

Bits are winning. I miss atoms.

Short Attention Span System takes the playlist and musically condenses songs to their essence. Through time compression, you get the memorable heart of each song, with an average length of aproximately two minutes with NO self indulgent guitar solos, NO long intros, NO repetition of choruses again and again. Radio returns to the snappy song length of the 1960s.

In other words, everything long is bad. Because time is an inconvenience, and self-absorbed artists with no respect for your fast-paced lifestyle are wasting it. Ummm… ewwww? So what happens to Hot Rats? Cosmic Charlie? Fool in the Rain? Mothership Connection? Born Under Punches?

But look on the bright side — nobody cares!

Radio SASS starts out with the memorable beginning, followed by the best verses, best chorus and then wraps it up just as you remember … Will listeners object? The answer is no. Several focus groups conducted by Harker Research show that most people don’t even notice.

Also interesting here is the name of the service: “Short Attention Span System.” Since saying that someone has a short attention span is generally considered a bit derogatory, this represents a sea change. SASS must think that people are not only aware of the fact that they have short attention spans, but also don’t think of that as a bad thing. The marketing here is aimed at the heart of what has traditionally been considered a human weakness, or a negative aspect of media snack culture. Kind of like selling potato chips under the name “Obesity Chips.”

And, oh yeah – the new protocol is patented. You can patent butchery?