The compact disc (CD) is on its way out. In a few years time it’ll be nothing more than an outdated piece of plastic, a throwback from the 1980s, a relic like the LP vinyl. In its place will come digital, the new cool.
Spurred on by the sale of Apple’s iPods, the growth of paid-for download music sites and the demand for cellphone ringtones, digital sales are growing. In the past year, digital sales have trebled, according to the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers.
It’s all on the back of the new digi-tal revolution, which began with artists bypassing power-hungry music industry suits by loading tracks on to the Internet for fans to download for free. And now the revo-lution has reached the shores of South Africa, with the country’s first digital album being released on Friday June 9.
Electronic musician Paul Ressel, also known as Humanizer — the producer of Cape Town electronic act Lark — and designer Charles Lee-Thorpe are together releasing Beautifully Empty, Humanizer’s debut offering and the first of four albums to be released by him this year.
But, unlike other albums, these will not be pressed to CD, nor will they be available from music retailers. Instead, those who bring their flash drives or iPods to the launch parties will be able to upload the albums themselves. Thereafter, they’ll be available from Apple’s iTunes and other music download websites. Fans will also be able to purchase a mini-disc containing MP3s of each track.
“The whole idea is that, at the end of the day, the album exists in the digital realm,” says Ressel. “Even with those little [mini] CDs, people will take them and copy the tracks on to their computers.” He says a digital album is more affordable to release than a CD. “The thing about releasing work this way is that you can do it till the end of time, because of the low cost.”
“For most people in our scene, CDs are like souvenirs of your favourite band, but you never actually listen to them anyway,” says Lee-Thorpe. “So we’re saying you don’t have to pay R120 for a CD because we know you just want to rip and listen to MP3s anyway. You can pay R20 and support the artist — and you’ll still have the music.”
Lee-Thorpe, or Simstim as he’s better known when doing live visual performances, is putting together the animations to go with each album. He has undertaken the four-part album release as part of his fourth-year design project at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
The idea, he says, is to move away from the “canned experience” of a CD album and towards a multimedia experience, complete with interviews, music videos shot on digital film, bonus tracks, wallpaper and animations. The intention is that the album is an added extra to the party and per-formance, which will see Lee-Thorpe and Ressel interacting to create live electronic visuals and music.
Yet, despite all the excitement around digital, there is a downside. Making music available as MP3s on the Internet or straight to fans increases artists’ exposure to piracy. Ressel accepts this as one of the risks associated with a digital release. His justification is that it offers an alternative to releasing a CD through a record label, where artists end up taking home next to nothing from sales.
“If 1 000 people pirate my music and two buy it, it’s still 1 000 people listening to my music — and at the end of the day, that’s what matters to me.”
Beautifully Empty will be launched at The Independent Armchair Theatre, Lower Main Road, Observatory, Cape Town, on Friday June 9. R30 gets you in, R40 gets you an album download, R50 gets you a mini-CD album.
The next Humanizer album will be released on August 25 this year
Downloading: The new radio?
Major record companies spend billions trying to get their artists’ songs playlisted on radio. Broadcast, it is believed, means album sales and fame — even though the high-quality FM signal can easily be recorded and reproduced.
The Internet, on the other hand, is viewed as some kind of apocalyptic network of thievery. Record companies, we are led to believe, see it as a place where intellectual property is stolen and distributed.
This is not unfounded. A week before American rock outfit Red Hot Chili Peppers’s long-awaited new album was released, Web savvy fans all over the world had already heard it illegally. Band members’ pleas to fans not to copy leaked files only spread the word that the album was available online, triggering further theft.
Nasty surprises like this have led in the past to sometimes truly bizarre attempts to stem the flow of music on the untrustworthy Web. First came Sony’s disastrous copy protection schemes. Copying albums physically damaged computers. Another resulted in ongoing and expensive privacy lawsuits (a third, the joke goes, is currently in production).
EMI has completely banned downloads of its music, though the legal issues around who owns what are complicated. Afrikaans artist Steve Hofmeyr gives away MP3s on MWeb even though he is signed to EMI. As one of the country’s biggest-selling artists, he appears to feel it does his CD sales no harm.
Not all record companies see the availability of music online as a danger to CD sales. Local independent labels Bowline and Rhythm Records believe that the ease with which files are shared online means cost-effective publicity for new bands. Anton Marshall of indie “countrybilly” Three Bored White Guys points out that, given the low wholesale costs, “it may actually be cheaper to give a song away than to try to sell it”.
As an act of compromise, SonyBMG has released the occasional freebie via MWeb, and allows downloads of live performances in the United Kingdom. Local producer and distributor Sheer Music is looking at ways to watermark downloads with “buy the album” adverts cut into the end of free MP3s.
In online marketing, complex issues must be managed carefully. Universal Music Publishing MD John Fisher says that by releasing a free download, “you can basically expect never to see any money from the song’s sales ever again. But, if it results in a new artist being broken into the market place and selling a million albums worldwide, then it is a good, calculated business decision.” Generally, Fisher advocates a pragmatic attitude to piracy: control it, and work to convert illegal systems into legal systems such as Napster. — Jean Barker