p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- It makes me weep to think of the library of Alexandria — all the knowledge of the ancient world lost forever at a stroke (or possibly four strokes, according to Wikipedia). There is something very appealing about collecting everything together — as well as the sheer trainspotterish satisfaction of being able to point to it and say: we humans did all this, it is actually useful and increases the breadth of access for the folk who may use it. Which is presumably why (it is alleged) Egyptian kings habitually took scrolls from any place they conquered to boost the resources of their own scholars as well as their bragging rights. Unfortunately, of course, it also made these texts more vulnerable to sudden annihilation.

The closest modern equivalents are national reference libraries such as the British Library or the US Library of Congress, and being made of easily destroyed physical matter they are still as vulnerable as the original Alexandrian library must have been to fire or vandalism.

Fortunately, it’s unlikely that written culture could be even partially destroyed in a single event today. The arrival of the printing press massively increased the likelihood that texts would survive library fires, because copies of those texts are dispersed throughout the bookshelves of ordinary readers far and wide though of course reconstructing the convenience of the library itself would still require a huge effort.

Since the invention of sound recording, the same has been true of music, which could formerly be captured only imperfectly in music notation. It is hard for me to properly express my gratitude for  living in an age where I can be moved by music made by artists I have never had a chance to see perform, and who in some cases died before I was even born.

Although sound archives have existed ever since, and proliferate today, often in the same locations where other cultural artefacts are collected, the internet has created a state of affairs where – instead of requiring a visit, to enjoy the collection’s wonders for a while, then go home — the library can now come to the people, in an always-on accessible form.

There have of course been several commercial attempts to bring such a library into effect. The first one I used was built into MusicMatch Jukebox, a now defunct media player, whose library was later absorbed by Yahoo before suffering the Alexandria treatment earlier this year.

Since then there’s been Pandora, last.fm, and a bunch of others, all of which present their musical riches as ‘radio stations’, randomly selected tunes from their partial collections, based on some taste matching method or other. (In fact there were even such recommendation engines before delivering music over the net was a realistic proposition. Anyone remember Dragonfly?)

Newcomer Spotify has abandoned some of the central tenets of streaming music services: instead of radio stations with taste assessment and recommendation, Spotify presents as a media player pre-stocked with a catalogue from which the user can make free selections, build and share playlists.

Unsurprisingly, this has proved very popular with users in the countries where it is available (mostly in Europe, and pointedly not the US where the licensing regime has made profitability impossible for streaming services). Who knew that people like to choose for themselves the music they want to listen to? They are apparently even prepared to put up with radio style advertising to get it, which is how Spotify intends to support itself in lieu of securing an adequate number of subscribers to its premium version.

But, like its predecessors, Spotify suffers from a crippled catalogue. One hardly needs to imagine the licensing shenanigans going on behind the scenes here. Artists’ work has been disappearing, and availability of some music depends on the licensing regime in which you happen to live.

There is something sickening about these negotiations. This is not how the internet is meant to work (although it feels horribly familiar, particularly after the regional restrictions recently introduced by last.fm, in which the more consumerist countries got to keep their free radio, while those with less disposable income had to fork out for it).

Culture, like investment, is too important to leave in the hands of big business.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be.

All the tools are there to emancipate streaming from the bean-counters, and perhaps ironically the blueprint has been laid by the very same company whose CEO pronounced last week that Spotify would kill file sharing. There is already a library which encompasses pretty much all recorded works, in many versions and variations. As with the written word’s distributed protection against cultural destruction, it lies in the hands of you and I the ordinary music lover. It’s on hard drives, memory sticks and iPods. But unlike the world’s bookshelves, these mini libraries are connected.

Traditional P2P networks, with their searchable databases of individuals’ shared folders, may have fallen into disfavour lately as zip files of specific albums and artist discographies have swarmed across the net. But the myriad folders of songs, whether hastily ripped at random or lovingly tended and cared for, are still there, in more copious quantities then ever, and can be connected up as a single large network in a trice if the need and the technology arises.

A core piece of Spotify’s strategy is to store the music on the user’s computer in an arcane series of folders (you can find them in \Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage under Windows Vista/7, but it won’t do you much good – the files are sneakily mangled) and stream it to other users to reduce strain their own servers.

I thought this was just nonsense, but according to one of the developers it actually works and has a significant impact on network costs. If it seems impolite of Spotify to store hundreds of megabytes of music on your computer, and serve up bits of it over your connection, without loudly announcing what it’s going to do, and a further insult that you can’t even access this yourself, this kind of behaviour has become par for the course with the latest generation of streaming apps. Yes, Spotify, as well as most streaming TV services like iPlayer, is a peer-to-peer application.

Streaming is a very nice way to have instant access to a lot of music that may not be available locally on your computer, phone, etc but none of the current offerings come close to what could be achieved. What if, instead of the limited catalogue it can squeeze out of yesteryear’s cultural gatekeepers, and limited to whatever countries look like good marketing suckers, a Spotify-like application could draw instead on the normal, unobfuscated library of every user worldwide?

Put a nice user interface on top of an existing p2p network like Gnutella, download file parts from all and sundry just in time for the complete song to be streamed to the listener, and there’s your international, ad-free, maximal-library version of Spotify right there. Someone is probably already working on this right now.

What a crazy world it is: the very mechanisms which are supposed to protect artists from exploitation are actually hindering their music from being heard, while, due to label accounting trickery, it is uncertain whether they will receive any income at all from the services that do play it.  It is hard to know which would be worse for artists: the success of an efficient but essentially unmonetizable underground solution, or the current situation where their works are used as pawns in a mad licensing dance from which it is unlikely anyone will gain but the labels and their lawyers.

Chris Ovenden The Peer
[Ovenden is a self-confessed technology freak who says he always ends up writing about culture, or who is perhaps a culture nut continually drawn towards the hi-tech, he plays guitar, makes websites and teaches. Editorships of various on- and offline publications lurk in his past, "and possibly his future".]

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September, 2009

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Music, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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