Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

We Are Drawn to Technology
In 1985, my dad purchased his first CD player.  It marked the next generation of audiophilia for those who had purchased Original Master Recordings and half-speed mastered vinyl.  With the CD's sampling rate of 44kHz - that is, 44,000 times per second - Dad, in his own mind, was getting closer to the artists he loved.  It was as if Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis and the Rolling Stones were crooning or clanging in his ears.  

Piped through a quadraphonic stereo into Bose 901 speakers - before the brand became well known - the music sounded incredible, as if we were there at the recording.  No hiss or "wow" and "flutter" of cassette.  Now, there was sheer silence between songs.  What's more, the CD was much more convenient than older formats.  It was smaller and more portable than an LP; you could effortlessly skip tracks; and the sound was free pops and crackles.  The sound of CDs made me a lifelong Sinatra fan when I listened to his first album with Antonio Carlos Jobim.

At the time, it would have seemed that hi-fi had reached its pinnacle, even though purist audiophiles and musicians like Neil Young claimed that the human ear was able to hear a far higher resolution.  Luckily, CD mastering improved over the next 15 years, and new formats (Super Audio, DVD Audio, etc.) were introduced though not widely adopted by consumers.  Over the next 10 years, Dad replaced most of his record collection with CDs: the Sinatra Capitol Years 16 CD box set Concepts, Hot Rocks and Sammy Davis, Jr.: That's All, along with hundreds of others.

Give Us a Taste and We Crave More
But in 2000, seventeen plus years after the CD's introduction, digital technology and consumer behavior began to re-jigger, focusing on price, volume (meaning 'amount of content') and convenience; soon, music collections swelled and could be taken anywhere.  Even before the original Napster's launch, compressed formats like MP3, WMA and AAC had already been essential to efficiently fitting music on hard drives and portable audio devices.  When Napster became popular, these formats' small size enabled mass file collection, trading, sharing...and piracy via the Internet.  Included in the files were the metadata that allowed the music to be easily filed, sorted and played on demand.  "Songs" had become lower quality "files", which interestingly didn't influence the vernacular.

As the iPod became popular and its capacity doubled twice yearly, ultimately to 120 GB, consumers could eventually fit between 5-10,000 songs (1,000 albums!) onto their devices, sorted by artist, album, song and genre.  Many of these files were either 128kbs MP3 or AAC files, and the sound wasn't pretty good through the iPod earbuds.

When the iPod's capacity reached the point of diminishing returns (how many people have, or have interest in, 10,000 songs?), there ensued a minor revolt amongst moderate audiophiles to improve the sound quality.  What sounded fine through earbuds sounded downright muffled and tinny through higher quality headphones and decent quality stereos.  Apple responded by offering iTunes Plus, which offered certain tracks and albums at a much improved 256kbs and without copy protection, but still below the richness of CD quality sound.

What's my point?

Let Us Experience It How It Was Intended
I am nostalgic for the quality that we've lost in artistic verisimilitude and for what it represents.  I have the same craving and desire for quality in image.  I miss the feeling of feeling closer to the artist's creation by finding that perfect medium or representation that captured his or her art.  Of hearing the studio's atmosphere on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.  Of the synthesized heavy, airy bass drum on Prince's "Kiss".  Of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman's warmth, breath and spit on their all too short Impulse album.  Of the richness of Radiohead's Kid A and the reverberated mud of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?  Of seeing Vertigo for the first time, in re-release, on the big screen in faux VistaVision.  Of facing William Claxton, Horst, Irving Penn or Francis Wolff's photography on a wall in full sized prints.

I don't always want a Rock Band-style interaction and participation.  Some of the time, I want to merely appreciate, passively.  I at least want the option.  To have a front row seat without having to play or interact.   To appreciate someone's talent or art without having to approximate it.  To be in awe.  To be close to the creation without having to create.

This desire for "closeness" might represent nostalgia, perhaps even for exclusivity, as much as a penchant for quality, but it represents a type of communion between the beholder and the artist's art.  It gives me the feeling of being close to 'there' that moment of artistic creation, of bearing witness, which I intellectually know is impossible.  In the modern era of auto-tune and compressed audio, of jpegs and MPEG, and importantly interactivity, I feel we've lost some of that proximity to artistic creation and replaced it with other things that are important to commerce and connection, but are potentially deleterious to beauty and quality.

Technologist though I am, I'd love to see us strike more of a balance in the future.  

Nevertheless, I'm happily going to plug my laptop into my $35 JBL computer speakers and listen to Jamie Foxx and T-Pain's unlikely monster hit "Blame It" via my Rhapsody subscription.  Old habits can be sublimated...even amongst audiophiles.

Jonathan Cohen