the Incredible Shrinking Format
Recently my wife purchased a Nano IPod; while I must admit to being impressed with the spectacularly small size of the item I found that it raised some questions with me about the value of convenience and the role that music plays in the modern-day US.
For years, the preferred commercial method of listening to music involved the 12" longplaying vinyl record. I grew up during the heyday of the LP, and I was devoted to the format. The size of the LP was part of the fascination for me--it allowed for complex artwork and also gave more than enough space for recording credits and lyrics. The package could enhance the enjoyment of the sounds contained within and it also had the effect of presenting a unified piece of artwork that gave more significance to the individual piece of art itself rather than drawing unwarranted attention to the label or distribution network. Its size was undeniable; large collections, stored in milk cartons, had the heft of bricks and took up lots of space. Though incredibly popular in terms of mass consumption, the LP did not lend itself to portability, and individual records were something that required care and precise handling to maintain their optimal playing condition. The lack of portability became the first true sign of trouble for the format, and as car stereos began to multiply the LP began to lose some of its desirability in the eyes of the average music consumer.
With the car stereo, a new format was clearly necessary. The stability required to properly play LP records simply did not exist in the car, and the sheer size of LP's and their turntables also precluded their use in a moving vehicle. The first two attempts to make inroads into the market met with differing levels of success. The cassette tape simplified the bulky and semi-complicated reel-to-reel tape recorder greatly, and its size was infinitely more preferable to road warriors. That some fidelity was lost was not such a great concern--after all, who can hear every note in a complex piece of music while travelling 70 MPH with the windows down? Along with the cassette tape, a less successful invention came along to make driving and listening an easier task. The 8-track tape--clumsily split into four "programs" rather than 2 sides--had the disadvantage of disrupting the intended continuity of the album, while reducing the artwork to a cookie-cutter form that paid as much attention to the label that produced it as the artists who were responsible for creating the product in the first place. They were briefly popular during the 1970's in the US, and then they mercifully faded from the scene amid the scorn normally reserved for failed and dated technology. The cassette briefly triumphed as the top alternative to vinyl, and with the introduction of the walkman in 1980 or so it began to take a larger and larger share of the music market. Its tiny size made it the ultimate in portability; but along with its size came some sacrifices in terms of packaging, lyric sheets, and artwork. All were reduced by necessity, and as they began to pile up on the shelves of record stores everywhere their homogeneity began to feel claustrophobic to me. An aspect of an art form that was vibrant, challenging, expansive, and sometimes threatening was slowly being smothered by the uniformity of mass production.
From this point things began to get bad for our 12” LP format. Massive corporations that were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in profits began to complain that they weren’t making enough money from their various outlays of cash and perks. Relying upon the fans of the pop music market to determine who was really worthy of attention was a risky prospect; it meant that all of their product necessarily could not be counted on to be wildly successful. In fact, their narrowing of media outlets for music made once bankable acts into risky investments. The industry used the development of digital sound to solve its problems and strong-armed retailers into converting over to their format of choice. The industry could eliminate weighty, unwieldy, expensive, and easily damaged shipments to retailers with the new lightweight and smaller product; overall production was cheap relative to the cost of producing vinyl; and best of all, the new technology afforded media corporations the chance to increase the unit price of their product by roughly 55%. If listeners had to sacrifice the warmth of analog sound for the cold clarity of digital, then so be it. The same went for album graphics—smaller size meant less money spent in production.
After the digital overthrow, the next big step was the IPod. No graphics, not even full albums—people collected single songs again if they wanted. The biggest advantage to them of course was their small size and massive memory. But even this invention has recently been tinkered with twice (in the form of the Nano and the Shuffle) to make it ever more infinitesimal, ever more insignificant. It is symbolic of a reduction in the overall importance of music; while I am not equating modes of delivery with the actual experience of listening to music, the Nano’s miniscule size simply makes me uncomfortable. The LP record to me represented the majestic potential of music, whether the artwork was enigmatic and mysterious or direct and wordy. The IPod’s faceless reductionism (while somewhat egalitarian in its anonymity) oversimplifies the act of listening for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I always liked the ritual of playing albums or disc. Taking care of the LPs and discs was a method of tribute, a sign of respect. What the IPod is doing to other formats of music is something that will eventually occur with books and newspapers, as art and all other forms of media become the property of cyberspace. It does make me somewhat nostalgic, though…but all in all, I can’t wait for my wife to get the car adaptor for the Nano so I don’t have to bring so many CDs in the car next time. I guess I’m just a hypocrite at heart.
For years, the preferred commercial method of listening to music involved the 12" longplaying vinyl record. I grew up during the heyday of the LP, and I was devoted to the format. The size of the LP was part of the fascination for me--it allowed for complex artwork and also gave more than enough space for recording credits and lyrics. The package could enhance the enjoyment of the sounds contained within and it also had the effect of presenting a unified piece of artwork that gave more significance to the individual piece of art itself rather than drawing unwarranted attention to the label or distribution network. Its size was undeniable; large collections, stored in milk cartons, had the heft of bricks and took up lots of space. Though incredibly popular in terms of mass consumption, the LP did not lend itself to portability, and individual records were something that required care and precise handling to maintain their optimal playing condition. The lack of portability became the first true sign of trouble for the format, and as car stereos began to multiply the LP began to lose some of its desirability in the eyes of the average music consumer.
With the car stereo, a new format was clearly necessary. The stability required to properly play LP records simply did not exist in the car, and the sheer size of LP's and their turntables also precluded their use in a moving vehicle. The first two attempts to make inroads into the market met with differing levels of success. The cassette tape simplified the bulky and semi-complicated reel-to-reel tape recorder greatly, and its size was infinitely more preferable to road warriors. That some fidelity was lost was not such a great concern--after all, who can hear every note in a complex piece of music while travelling 70 MPH with the windows down? Along with the cassette tape, a less successful invention came along to make driving and listening an easier task. The 8-track tape--clumsily split into four "programs" rather than 2 sides--had the disadvantage of disrupting the intended continuity of the album, while reducing the artwork to a cookie-cutter form that paid as much attention to the label that produced it as the artists who were responsible for creating the product in the first place. They were briefly popular during the 1970's in the US, and then they mercifully faded from the scene amid the scorn normally reserved for failed and dated technology. The cassette briefly triumphed as the top alternative to vinyl, and with the introduction of the walkman in 1980 or so it began to take a larger and larger share of the music market. Its tiny size made it the ultimate in portability; but along with its size came some sacrifices in terms of packaging, lyric sheets, and artwork. All were reduced by necessity, and as they began to pile up on the shelves of record stores everywhere their homogeneity began to feel claustrophobic to me. An aspect of an art form that was vibrant, challenging, expansive, and sometimes threatening was slowly being smothered by the uniformity of mass production.
From this point things began to get bad for our 12” LP format. Massive corporations that were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in profits began to complain that they weren’t making enough money from their various outlays of cash and perks. Relying upon the fans of the pop music market to determine who was really worthy of attention was a risky prospect; it meant that all of their product necessarily could not be counted on to be wildly successful. In fact, their narrowing of media outlets for music made once bankable acts into risky investments. The industry used the development of digital sound to solve its problems and strong-armed retailers into converting over to their format of choice. The industry could eliminate weighty, unwieldy, expensive, and easily damaged shipments to retailers with the new lightweight and smaller product; overall production was cheap relative to the cost of producing vinyl; and best of all, the new technology afforded media corporations the chance to increase the unit price of their product by roughly 55%. If listeners had to sacrifice the warmth of analog sound for the cold clarity of digital, then so be it. The same went for album graphics—smaller size meant less money spent in production.
After the digital overthrow, the next big step was the IPod. No graphics, not even full albums—people collected single songs again if they wanted. The biggest advantage to them of course was their small size and massive memory. But even this invention has recently been tinkered with twice (in the form of the Nano and the Shuffle) to make it ever more infinitesimal, ever more insignificant. It is symbolic of a reduction in the overall importance of music; while I am not equating modes of delivery with the actual experience of listening to music, the Nano’s miniscule size simply makes me uncomfortable. The LP record to me represented the majestic potential of music, whether the artwork was enigmatic and mysterious or direct and wordy. The IPod’s faceless reductionism (while somewhat egalitarian in its anonymity) oversimplifies the act of listening for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I always liked the ritual of playing albums or disc. Taking care of the LPs and discs was a method of tribute, a sign of respect. What the IPod is doing to other formats of music is something that will eventually occur with books and newspapers, as art and all other forms of media become the property of cyberspace. It does make me somewhat nostalgic, though…but all in all, I can’t wait for my wife to get the car adaptor for the Nano so I don’t have to bring so many CDs in the car next time. I guess I’m just a hypocrite at heart.
posted by alyosha mcbain at 10:23 AM
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