From Waves to Bytes: How digital music reconfigured a medium and its industry

“Today, in the age of Facebook, GOOGLE, and Amazon, it’s hard to tell how a new and growing musical artist could make it in the way we did” states Neil Young, acclaimed singer-songwriter and longtime political and musical criticizer, in a letter decrying the digital music and industry (2018). In many ways, Young’s statement is accurate. No other media industry in modern times has experienced a shakeup on the same scale as music. The dawn of computer technologies promoted ubiquitous digital data, since the evolving technology relied on quantization of data, reading byte by byte of data from hard disk. Other media struggled with the shift as well (i.e. film piracy and debates between proponents of film and digital cameras) but there was an existing familiarity in the formatting. Films are viewed frame by frame, books are read letter by letter. Recorded music, a comparatively young format, however, lacked the distinct steps in presentation. With vibrations cut directly into wax or electrical signals put along magnetic tape, audio was distributed as analog, continuous data. However, with digital formats, the industry has encountered multiple paradigms. The following sections with the accompanying web project provide history and context to these transitions, including a devaluation in the worth of recording, a democratization of the composing process, and the arrival of new musical techniques, all pathways for artists to make a connection with their audience in a way never possible when Young started his career.

I often find myself thinking in music. Whether that be in the context of listening in the background of doing work, playing guitar, or just humming and creating melodies and lyrics to keep myself entertained, music stays a constant in my life that I never tire of. That perseverance, however, I mainly attribute to the ease of which I can consume it. Around the age where I really found myself devoting time to the media, it was reasonably difficult to get a hold of it. I found myself saving up for used CDs or using iTunes gift cards I got as birthday presents to download new songs. Quite curious about many different genres of music, I scoured the internet looking for ways to find music for free. Scared and paranoid of piracy, middle-schooler me did my best to find legal golden eggs, music I could hear for free, given to me by gracious artists and record labels. These early discoveries were my first exposure to a marketing strategy that now permeates through the music industry, economic devaluation of the recording to a tchotchke of a branding tool.

With no understanding of this context, these terrific discoveries often made my day, and my listening experience for the next few weeks. Not too long after, I began collecting vinyl records, enjoying the thrill of the hunt through dusty thrift store bins and the technically fickle execution of their high-fidelity playback. I soon augmented my record hunting with subscription to a streaming service, so I could listen to whatever music I wanted wherever and whenever I want. Since then, I have been listening non-stop, discovering while fascinated by the way I can consume this content in such distinctly different manners and enjoy both so much. This fascination provokes my ideas for this paper and project, where I want to tell the story of how the technical aspects of this dialogue between audience and recording has shaped how music is heard.

Papers and projects on similar subjects do exist, but this work has a unique enough perspective to stand on its own. A dominant narrative in the discussion of this topic refers to how piracy, "the biggest problem within music industry circles" as discussed in Patokos' New Era for the Music Industry, and digital technologies suffocate artists, labels, and record stores, and lead to complaining about how modern society does not value a song recording like they used to (2008). This project refocuses the discussion on how that devaluation may be an element tied into the nature of the data format, articulating that there is a paradigm in shifting continuous data to an interval-based format. What this project will build on, in terms of previous work however, is the data about how this shift has changed what the focus of the music industry, including the discussion of the shift of market share between the "three music industries" of record distribution, licensing, and live performance in Wikström's discussion on The Music Industry in an Age of Digital Distribution (2014).

The primary presentation of this project is through a website that functions like a museum exhibit for the shift of music from a primarily analog to primarily digital form of distribution. The website format allows for easy access from any internet connected device, especially with a fluidly responsive design. The first section of the website is an interactive timeline that contains 25 albums with information about why their musical content, release strategy, or format innovatively contributed to the changing face of the music industry. Providing the music to listen to while reading the narrative provides an important audible context. “Visitors” to this digital museum space can not only read about the subject at hand, but listen to the sonic textures that have developed. This is particularly important when facilitating discussions of digital sampling, bitrate, and compression, all of which are musical aspects that played an important role in the story of digital music, but are not the easiest ideas to communicate without listening to. The next section includes visual references that also help contextualize some these concepts, as well as interactive graphs of sales that show how music has been consumed over time, provided by the Recording Industry Association of America. This paper will also be provided on the site, in full, for ease of dissemination.

The shift to a digital data format was a more dramatic and important one than many in the music industry initially thought. Also, not the most welcome change to occur in media distribution, detractors argued against the aesthetics, quality, and economics since digital music's inception. And like detractors quickly point out, the shift unquestionably led to the devaluation of any given recording. Digital data, however, is inherently less than analog data. Analog presentation refers to a continuous signal, like the way audio is heard in constant vibrations. Initial forms of distribution in the commercial recorded music industry were all analog, including continuous grooves in records and electrical signals magnetized into tape. The dominant emerging technology of the latter 20th century, computers, however, are intrinsically based in digital data. Digital information systems are interval based, and in terms of computers those intervals can only be binary. The translation of audio to this system means replacing the vibrations with approximations of the location of the wave, which could then be sent as electrical signals to a standard analog speaker.

While playback of digital audio is designed to emulate analog, the ramifications of how it can be stored and communicated is what transformed the industry. Essentially, when audio is stored as a “map” with no physical weight, it is very easy to manipulate and share that map. In 2004, Mitchell, Peterson, and Kaya, medical researchers, took the steps to switch their cassette-based recording process for field studies to digital collection of .mp3 files, documented in their essay Making the Switch to Digital Audio . While not about music, this case study provides an excellent analogy to the digitizing of music. These researchers realized that for less money, they could store more data, easily organize and edit the data as needed, and share and communicate about it. Economically, their systems and recording were worth less, but the team extracted much more value.

A concurrent shift occurred in the release and promotion strategy of music. As Patrik Wikström discusses, the music industry makes money in three arenas: record sales, licensing, and live performance. For years, record sales held the dominant slice of that pie, and band tours could be held at a loss to promote more sales. Now however, with the shift towards streaming as the dominant distribution platform, primarily fueled by the fact consumers refused to pay for easily copy-able and small digital data files, licensing for that streaming is the primary recording income source. Since that is a comparatively small chunk of money, artists and labels have geared digital music as a near-free commodity that promotes engagement with their brand, moving the actual sales to concert tickets and merchandise (which can be reflected in the recent upticks in festival attendance and minor resurgence of physically larger formats, like vinyl and cassette) (2014). For more documentation on this shift, please reference the album gallery and visualizations in the web portion of this project.

The shift to digital production in music has also dramatically shifted the culture of music-makers. Prior to digital technologies, the record production process generally involved renting time in a studio, cultural hubs for artistic transaction loaded with extremely expensive, analog equipment. But, like the example documented in Dave Grohl’s 2013 documentary Sound City, many of these studios waned in the 1990s due to expensive upkeep required to make a not-particularly-expensive commodity. Smaller, cheaper digital studios took over at that time, often with the analog recording console replaced with a high-end computer. Now, in the 2010s, many artists create radio-ready songs on personal laptops. Digital Audio Workstation software (DAWs) makes the music production process simple and portable. Modern songs are often created telematically, with project files emailed back and forth. Sampling other songs became an important part of and/or birthed many music genres as well, as artists have found ways to interpolate and build on classic recordings in new aesthetic contexts. For more documentation on this development, please reference the album gallery in the web portion of this project.

I believe this project creates a valuable document of the history of the music industry’s transition to digital. By discussing the nature of the data format and providing audible context through the album gallery, the site helps preserve the significance of innovative sounds and releases made possible through digital data. To critique it however, I realize some of the information may be better presented in an actual physical space or a long-form documentary film. Also, it is near impossible to be comprehensive in acknowledging so many artist’s musical contributions; the list I have accrued barely scratches the surface.

While Neil Young critiques the corporate infrastructure around digital music, he is plenty aware of its potential and power. In fact, he has made multiple investment forays in to field, maybe most noticeably with the Pono, a digital music player designed for non-compressed, high-bitrate-and-resolution audio files. The product was exorbitantly priced and buying music files to play on it was no different; an exploitative business model similar to the corporate structure Young critiques that quickly lead to the venture’s failure. More recently, however, Young has started an internet archive of his work, making high resolution files of his output free to stream, much like many innovative young artists have done in recent years in terms of self-promotion and branding. The music industry’s ability to make wealthy, culturally respected artists like Neil Young may be fading, but many members of the industry, young and old are coming to recognize the full potential of digital data, including how it is made and distributed. Surely digital music will continue to grow and shift in the coming years, just as surely as analog music will never fully die, and the artistic potential of the format’s ability to connect with and inspire its audience has never been higher.