Is anyone still listening to whole albums?

That all said I do agree with you about The Wall.

having said that i do like mixtapes which are effectively a preselected shuffle selection.

go figure.

i can't do the cumputer/ipod thing. i really just can't work in that world. exhausting and massively unsatisfying.

I acquire most of my music through trading CDRs (albums and mixes) with friends. So if you want to hear everything you can, you sadly have to listen to album tracks. Again, it's not that bad.

This morning I listened to albums by Ol' Dirty Bastard and Belle & Sebastian.

I love bleep.com for letting you preview each track on an album so you can, if you want to, weed out the ones you think you'll want and will listen to lots and not bother with the rest e.g. 'Fast Life' on the Jackson album is probably the only track on it i would actually not skip or get bored with. And the collab. with Kazu of Blonde Redhead is the only thing I really like from the last Prefuse 73 album, to give two examples. I want to buy everything this way, personally.

This strikes me as very bad - you're basically encouraged to make a bunch of snap A&R-man-style judgements and not allow the possibility that a song may grow on you after, say, five listens. Conversely, there's a good chance that your immediate favorite on any given album - the song that jumps out at you - will be the one you'll end up skipping for the rest of the year!

whatdo you suggest? buying albums because 'it might grow on me'?

I think what I was wondering was whether the technology drives our listening techniques. I'm sure it does mine. The more stuff I hear about (here or elsewhere) the more I want to hear and the less time I have to hear it all.
Maybe that's says more about me than the technology though? I also have about 25 books in by bedside cabinet, very few of them more than halfway read. As for films, well it depends if I'm in the cinema (where I have never ever walked out halfway through) or at home where I definitely skip sometimes, last time being through the sex scenes on 9 Songs. Obviously.

I was wondering if someone would make this analogy. OTM. heh.
Oh, our fast food culture.
Excluding my own mixes, I prefer the album. Subpar tracks and all, sometimes there is a sort of story underlying whole package. The general mood might be missed if I skip the less immediate tracks. Horses. Not prominent examples, but, Destroyer's Thief. The Elected's Me First.
Example from this year: S-K's The Woods. "Steep Air" is one of the lesser appealing tracks, to me, but I never skip it because it is a part of the whole vibe that I get from the record.
And then, if an artist seems to have integrity, I try to figure why the track that I don't like is important to them. If it was their choice, why would they put it on the album, in that order?
But...are also there are times when a track is just so apparently filler.

I can also assume, though, that programs like iTunes could challege artists to make better albums.

Record companies need to redesign their distribution/promotion models to make use of digital distribution and pay-per-download sites (iTunes/Bleep) and the grass-roots/word-of-mouth buzz (promotion) created by mp3 bloggers. If I were to predict the future, i'd say the industry will focus on small EP's, replicating the perfect pop package that is/was the 7", in a digital format. By promoting individual song releases by artists, the labels will be able to drip out the tunes 1 by 1 or 3 by 3 and spread out the hype. If all the record labels had their new releases immediately available for download, had the new updates sent directly to subscribers through RSS feeds with direct links to listen/download/buy, they'd sell tons of music. Imagine if you could have subscribed to 4AD or Factory in the 80's, automatically received an email when something new came out with links to preview/download straight from your email program. We want our media when we want it and in the format we prefer...and we want it cheaply. I don't advocate getting rid of hard copies, but a shift to digital downloads and download kiosks in record stores, would immediately increase label profits. No huge distribution costs, fewer copies physically printed and no middle-men to pay/work around. Perhaps artists would have the freedom to create their art without as much focus on the bottom line. Maybe since they print fewer copies, they can afford to spend more on the packaging to entice those who still prefer CD format. I don't know what will happen (i'm just a simple caveman), but I do know the recording industry needs to realign their thinking to remain relavent to those immersed in the digital lifestyle.

As to be expected though assuming a big part of it is down to being able to buy chart CDs for £6.99 online, or indeed download albums via iTunes or whatever.

OMG! Then surely the rest of the world will experience this exact same thing. I guess albums sales aren't dead!

Sociah T = OTM. Cheaper albums and downloads will increase sales. Shitty albums you have to wait to hear even though the files are leaked online months in advance are not helping album sales in my opinion.

How much of the market are album sales compared to singles in the UK vs. US?

If an album deserves to be listened in full, it should be. But most albums don't deserve it. Most albums aren't novels - they're anthologies of short stories, or books of poetry. And nowadays it's mostly bad writing with a few gems sprinkled about.

I'd say the rise of CDs did more to kill my enjoyment of the album format than iPod/WinAmp/p2p/whathaveyou - artists now feel the need to fill 60 to 70 minutes of play time. Unfortunately they don't have a whole hell of a lot to say. The bloat just kills the experience for me. When I put a new CD in the tray and the time is < 45 minutes I do a little jig.

One of the things I miss about the 80s music scene is the EP. Nobody puts out EPs anymore - but that doesn't stop me from making my own. You want to put 16 songs on your CD? Great, in my world you had 6 good ones. You have been EPified. One my favorite CDs of the 90s was Team Dresch's Personal Best. Total time: 24 minutes.

The most recent album I've found myself listening to end-to-end, over and over, is Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender. A great example of someone fashioning their own little world and populating it so fully you can get lost in it.

It must be stated again that anyone who implies that listening to certain songs instead of full albums is like reading only certain sentences out of books or watching certain scenes from movies is wrong. That's fucking idiotic beyond belief. Shut up.

Why am I even on this thread? I do some of both, which was also true before mp3s/downloading/etc.

This would probably change if I had a portable mp3 player though. i could see only having a few albums on there with a lot of loose tracks as a way to conserve space.

I’ve also not really followed the mp3 phenomenon much other than downloading some very hard to find things when Napster was at its zenith and some unsigned stuff off of the net. That has been a few years ago and I haven’t gone back for much, other than occasionally checking out some sound clips to see what something sounds like before purchasing.

i can create a great atmosphere when i put individual songs in a playlist then arrange the playlist like i want it, mixtape style. in fact, i have New Order/Underworld/Orbital playlists that far exceed any single album they've released. My New Order 80-82 mix is particlarly striking when placed against Movement, for example.

I recieved two EPs last week. There are quite a few still being made.

-spliced reply-

By promoting individual song releases by artists, the labels will be able to drip out the tunes 1 by 1 or 3 by 3 and spread out the hype.

Hype is already spread out plenty.

If all the record labels had their new releases immediately available for download, had the new updates sent directly to subscribers through RSS feeds with direct links to listen/download/buy, they'd sell tons of music.

More oceans of digital junk isn't a boon. Yes, let's do RSS feeds and ignore everyone who either doesn't care to listen to music on computer or ignores the ... hype about the alleged goodness of instant digital delivery. xhuxk to thread.

Generally, it eventually occurs to consumers of music in 2005 and people working in the industry that quantity of digital goods doesn't equal quality. Unless they're really stupid. It does, however, mean that the signal to noise ratio has increased and continues to increase. Now, finding the signal, or the piece of gold or even just iron pyrite, in all the gravel eventually becomes aggravating no matter how much instantaneous delivery is added.

Imagine if you could have subscribed to 4AD or Factory in the 80's, automatically received an email when something new came out with links to preview/download straight from your email program.

Yes, but you didn't know you liked everything from 4AD or Factory until you let it sink in the old-fashioned way.

Anyway, yuk. I already delete 99 percent of my mail unopened.

We want our media when we want it and in the format we prefer...and we want it cheaply.

This is a really great cliche/meme that's been circulating for at least five years or more.

I do have a thing for shuffle/playlists though if I'm having people over, much easier than throughing 6 cd's in the cd changer or making mix cds.

that's why you preview before you buy. if Tim Finney or someone else syndicated their suggested releases and sent that to you every month, that wouldn't be overload.

re: quanity = quality...I didn't suggest it did.

I have a list of artists and lablels i follow so if new releases by those labels/artists got automatically sent to me, i'd check them out. i don't think anybody would just blindly subscribe to every release Juno carried.

We want our media when we want it and in the format we prefer...and we want it cheaply.

This is a really great cliche/meme that's been circulating for at least five years or more.

yeah, it's cliche, but there's truth in there too. just cuz you say it's a cliche, doesn't make the statement false or irrelevent.

then you need to learn how to organize/limit/filter your mail. this is not my problem.

if i can get an RSS feed sent to me, customized to my tastes, i'd be sure to open it. especially if it made tracking down music/news easier.

(not coincidentally, I think this contributes to the notion of albums being all over the place - artists responding to the demand for different perspectives, as meanwhile they, like everyone else, are full of information/perspectives)

you can always software to combine the tracks into one single file.

At home: Five full albums at a time (CD changer, random play)

In the car: A couple songs per CD at a time (as A.D.D./impatience/curiosity with other CDs I brought sets in), or the radio is on

On bar jukeboxes: One song at a time (well, five for $2 usually, from five different artists). Only morons play full albums on those.

(Sometimes any/all of the above albums might be EPs, though. And I guess sometimes they're singles, too, though not on the CD changer.)

Ridiculous. There are TONS of EPS put out now, way more than just a few years ago. Bands put out self-released EPs every fucking day. And indie labels and even majors seem to be using them as samplers more, for promising bands who don't yet have a full album in the can (think Bloc Party, Raveonettes, Black Keys, etc.)

I can't see how anyone who loves music enough to hang out on a board titled I Love Music, wouldn't want to take some time to put all their favorites in one location (hard drive) and find a tool to make listening to whatever/whenever as easy as possible. Remaking albums, like so many people here like to do, is so easy when the files are all on the computer. You can arrange the album, take out songs you don't like, replace versions with better takes and add B-sides that should have been included in the first place. I do this quite often to create a better listening experience than the originally released set of songs provides. I'm not saying my way is the right way, but it's a better way!

I discover way more songs that I enjoy by having them all on my computer. I love album art and still buy music all the time because of the packaging and because I prefer to have physical copies. Listening to and organizing that music is much easier digitally. I guarantee it takes me less time to find music i'm looking for than you. I guarantee if you had your entire collection digitized and properly tagged, you'd see my point. Unfortunately, the people who don't know what it's like to have a library of 20K at their fingertips ready to sort or listen randomly don't understand the value of such a system. I spent years doing it your way (standing in front of a huge rack or barely organized CD trying to figure out what I wanted to hear. It was frustrating and time consuming. Then i'd have to switch the disc after a few tracks because so few albums are good to listen to straight through.

Actually, don't change anything you do in your life. The way you do it now is the best way it can possibly be done. There is no room for improvement so please, as technology changes, refuse to adopt and change your usage of that technology. Your way is perfectly fine and nothing can possibly be better. I've tried both and have made an informed decision. No sense in you doing the same.

I'd like to hear an opinion from someone else who has their collection digitized and properly tagged. Do you find it more efficent in the digital format or do you prefer to pick out CD's even though everything is on the computer? Do you have a method of listening to that music through your stereo or is it confined to your computer speakers?

If you only know 1 side of the equation, how can you argue for one side over the other?

xpost: I know this isn't new and i know from your post that you're unlikely to convert to new technologies since your way is perfectly fine for your needs. That's great for you. I'm only expressing my pleasure with the method i've chosen and requesting you try it before you say it's shit. I love those old turntables where you stack 45s and let them play. I've got the digital equilivent to that right now! Search: New Order + 7" returns an exhaustive list of all New Order 7"s and b-sides that i can play all day long! That's just an example, not an exhaustive list of my music collection, btw.

>Imagine your 3000+ CD collection is in less than perfect alphabetical order <

Ha ha, never (though sometimes I forget where I filed *The King of Crunk Presents Lil Scrappy and Trillville,* I will admit that.)

>do you remember how time consuming making MixTapes was?

Anyway:

Damn skippy. That's PART of what made them fun. Listening to the songs in real time, changing your mind, getting new song-order ideas as you went, made for way more interesting tapes. "Faster" is not always "better," either. ESPECIALLY when listening to music. (It's better for activities that are a lot less fun, though, I suppose.)

Mixed Blessings: The Commercial Mix and the Future of Music Aggregation
Rob Drew. Popular Music and Society. Bowling Green: Oct 2005.Vol.28, Iss. 4;  pg. 533, 19 pgs

Copyright Routledge Oct 2005
[Headnote]
This paper explores the appropriation of the trope of the mix tapes by commercial interests within the music industry for the purpose of selling music. I trace the phenomenon back to the rise of home mixing in the subsequent disaggregation of the single-artist album as a result of digital distribution. I review several varieties of commercial mixes including personalized mixes, branded mixes, celebrity mixes, and user-contributed mixes. While some of these products have been creatively packaged and sold, they have the potential to commodify mixing practices that consumers have enjoyed on an informal basis for decades. In the process, they transform home mixers into laborers on behalf of music labels and retailers, and they confine mixing to limited musical repertoires within proprietary digital formats.

Given the endless reminders that we live in a digital age, the old analog mix tape is getting a lot of attention these days. Recent paeans to the joys of mix taping have appeared in Salon.com, the Washington Post, the Utne Reader, and the Guardian among other publications (Michel; Stuever; Paul; Keller). On the web, sites such as Art of the Mix (where users list and comment on one another's favorite mixes), Tiny Mix Tapes (with an "automatic mix tape generator" to match any word, phrase, style, or emotion one submits), and Mixtaper.com (with hundreds of mixes linked to free and legal mp3s) all reveal an enduring devotion to the plastic cassettes gathering dust in many a closet.
Stranger still is the way commercial interests have picked up on the mix tape theme. Only a couple of decades back the music industry loudly proclaimed that home taping was killing music (Heylin); now, to cite one example, Starbucks and its Hear Music subsidiary sell music compilations at their coffeehouses and on the Internet, advertised with the tag line, "Think of them as mixed tapes from a friend." In a Denver Post interview, Starbucks VP Don MacKinnon claims that the chain aspires to be like "that friend in college down the hall who played great music and made great mixes, and turned you on to something. A lot of us feel we don't have that friend anymore" (Booth). It may seem a little creepy that the world's largest purveyor of overpriced cappuccinos and none-too-tall lattes aspires to fill the shoes of your college mix-taping buddy. But Starbucks is just one of many businesses reviving the theme of mix taping for marketing purposes.
Such flattery seems a bit lavish for a moldy medium that trod the line of legality, but in many ways it makes sense. The revival of the mix-tape trope comes at a time when the desires that the mix tape first hatched are springing forth to transform the business and consumption of music fundamentally. The diffusion of digital music formats is allowing for the dematerialization and disaggregation of music distribution (Jones; Sterne, "The MP3"), while more affordable equipment for music production and reception is creating opportunities for new players in the music industry and challenging the dominance of old players (Bemis). As a result of these developments, the "mix" or "playlist"-that eclectic, quirky collection of personal favorite songsis threatening to challenge the single-artist album's dominance as a format of music reception. At the same time, and in an ironic twist, old and new music industry players are exploiting the mix-tape trope in order to position themselves and reassert their dominance in this chaotic commercial environment. Such businesses are capitalizing on mix-tape nostalgia by offering an expanded range of music compilations, which often are implicitly or explicitly marketed as alternatives comparable to homemade mixes. In reality, though, these commercial mixes fail to match not only the musical diversity but also the interpersonal meaningfulness of authentic, homemade mixes; worse yet, they have the potential to commodity music mixing further and to provide an excuse for further suppression of any mixing that is not commercially sanctioned.
This paper explores these developments as part of a larger project on the everyday creation and exchange, the digital transformations, the legal restrictions, and commercial exploitation of homemade music compilations. My motives for this project are partly scholarly. While much attention has been devoted to file sharing, less has been dedicated to the more central effects of digital technologies on music, which are the dematerialization of music and disaggregation of the album format. These new developments make home mixing ripe for both ethnography and critical analysis. But I also have a more practical agenda. Since the birth of the cassette tape people have enjoyed the capacity to mix music relatively freely, and, while digital technology has in some ways extended this privilege, it is not a privilege that ever can be taken for granted. In what follows I shall catalog the many varieties of commercial mixes and consider why the commercialization of music mixing may not be such a blessing after all. First, though, I shall offer a bit of necessary history to contextualize the rise of both the mix tape and the commercial mix within larger trends in music aggregation.
Background
After several decades' reliance on the 78-rpm single as their standard format, music companies introduced the 33-rpm long-playing album in the late 1940s. The LP's immediate advantage was that it spared listeners the effort of changing records every few minutes, yet by the 1960s it had become integral to the industry's marketing practices. Starting with classic albums by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and given ideological support by FM radio and the rock press, musicians and fans came to think of LPs as coherent artistic works. At some level, technical necessity was the mother of the "concept album." "There was something about the technology that inevitably and crucially imparted the delicacy and slowness the music called for-the whole give-yourself-over-to-it aspect that is at the heart of sensitive listening.... Moving the tone arm around from one song to another was just too much work. You flopped across the bed and took it in" (Marzorati 38). Yet this romantic ideology was convenient from a business standpoint as well, as music companies were able to bundle songs in album format and charge accordingly, and the industry managed to extend this "rockist" marketing model to practically every genre of popular music (Stratton; Christgau).
From the 1970s on, singles remained important as promotional vehicles, yet they declined in commercial importance outside niche markets such as dance music, becoming increasingly marginal to the business of single-artist albums. Alongside albums, though, another listening format/practice developed among consumers: the homemade compilation tape. Starting in the late 1960s, mix tapers used the new technology of cassettes to put a dent in the armor of the single-artist album. Rather than conforming to artistic intention and industry practice, mixers treated the album as an open work and took the selection and ordering of songs into their own hands, "enabl[ing] people to make their own personal soundtracks and compilations" (Willis 63). Mix tapers often thrived on haphazard and wide-ranging musical connections that transcended the genres and marketing niches of the recording industry and its artists. Like digital sampling, the charms of mix taping stemmed from its potential to utilize "any sound you can imagine" (a phrase from a 1970s synthesizer ad that provided the title for Paul Theberge's study of digital technology's influence on pop music). This is an essential condition of home mixes, that their potential source material spans as wide a range as recordable sound.
The rise of mix taping exposed a lingering discontentment with the inflexibility of music buying and listening options at the height of the single-artist album. Despite the music industry's venom toward it, however, mix taping was too isolated and sporadic to pose a real challenge to the album as a unit for packaging music. Ironically, the format that likely hastened the decline of the album more than cassettes was the very format the industry adopted to save itself from taping: compact discs. Along with its accompanying remote controls, multi-disc players, and programming and randomization functions, the CD first made it possible for mainstream listeners easily to rearrange the tracks of their albums. A year before Napster made its first appearance, Gerald Marzorati could write in the New York Times about "How the Album Got Played Out": "A Big Album cannot slowly unfold and cohere on digitally formatted compact disks that can be scanned or reprogrammed at the impatient push of a remote's button" (Marzorati 38).
What finally unmoored songs from the album format and threw open the floodgates of dematerialized music was digital distribution and the Internet. The bulk of discussion around digital music has centered on MP3 file sharing. Yet the file-sharing debate has become a bit of a red herring, as it has become clear that digitization's challenge to the music business runs much deeper than file sharing. As a result of digital distribution along with inexpensive recording technology, there is more music available from more sources now than ever. In 2002, at the height of file sharing, over 33,000 new albums were released by major and independent labels according to Soundscan, a 5.4% increase over 2001, and this almost certainly fails to include thousands of independent records not registered by Soundscan (Christman; Nelson, "Counting"). Digitization has not killed music as the majors warned, but on the contrary created a glut of it (and a proper accounting of this glut would have to include not only digital distribution and cheap home studios but the prolongation of "youth" among the educated middle class, the migration to "cool cities" that serve as musical seedbeds, and the coming of age of a baby boomer-reared generation whose highest values lie in self-expression).
More to the point, digital distribution has formalized what the mix tape initiated and the CD accelerated, which is the disaggregation of the album. Over the past several years, music fans have had inexpensive or free music coming at them from all directions and practically none of it takes the form of single-artist albums. Internet radio stations, along with websites like Yahoo Launch and Live365, offer advertisersupported, streaming music. Free and legal music downloads can be accessed at hundreds of band sites and MP3 weblogs. Hundreds of thousands of songs are available at a dollar apiece at music downloading services. Such services have sought out consumers by stocking music download cards right alongside phone calling cards at stores like Target and Rite Aid, and offering free downloads with Big Macs, Whoppers, Pepsis, Heinekens, and Slurpee cups. And if none of these options will do, you can still get CDs cheap at your local Sam Goody closeout sale.
In this environment, the challenge to music industry players is twofold. First, with so much music available, the greatest threat to big record companies is not that listeners will consume their music illegally but that they will consume, whether legally or illegally, someone else's music entirely. The "cultural mobility" of popular music that Marcus Breen observed back in 1995, its convergence with other forms of entertainment and its movement to the center of the corporate economy, has become not only more feasible but absolutely imperative from the major labels' perspective. These companies are frantically cutting deals to best exploit the dematerialized economy of digital music. Thus one challenge for record labels in this heady environment has been to get their music out in as many ways as possible to ensure that people not only keep paying but keep listening.
The other challenge for major labels, as well as for the growing legions of music retailers, is to come up with ways of reaggregating music that will regularize sales and lend them some competitive edge in the crowded music marketplace. A little noted milestone of music marketing in early 2004 was that major labels started releasing singles online concurrently with their radio release and well in advance of album releases (Nelson, "Some Hit Singles"). It was an admission of sorts, of the album's crisis and of the labels' determination to beat file sharing by any means necessary. But it also may be a devil's deal: artists and label executives remain apprehensive that these early single releases will cannibalize album sales, and they know that they cannot live at the standards they have grown accustomed to on sales of singles.
Some artists have defied the trend by restricting the availability of their music at downloading services to "album only" format (Pareles, "What Albums"), but they may be fighting a losing battle. More than half of the songs downloaded from these services are purchased separately from the albums from which they originate. The labels must find new ways of packaging music that will generate revenue streams at greater than 99 cents a pop while also accommodating the wide-ranging tastes and shortening attention spans of consumers. Music retailers both online and offline see opportunities in reaggregating music as well. For retailers, reaggregration represents an important battleground not only in their competition for the growing online market, but in their ongoing struggle with music labels over development, design, and marketing of products as well as pricing and licensing fees (du Gay and Negus; Jones).
It is here that we come back to compilations, and to the humble mix tape.
The Commercial Mix
There have been multi-artist compilation albums as long as there have been albums, and a history remains to be written on this particular corner of the record business. Highlights of this history would include those scattered collections, particularly anthologies of reissued recordings aimed at audiophile markets, which have aspired to historic import and even auteurist status, such as Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and Lenny Kaye's Nuggets collection. More recently, companies like Rhino and Fat Possum have made a mission of unearthing long-forgotten artists and genres from the treasure trove of pop history. Yet for the most part, through the era of the single-artist album, compilations were rather cheesy affairs in the K-Tel mold, collections of current hits and oldies relegated to the last few record store bins and the inventory of mysterious late-night TV advertisers.
The hit compilation endures in the wildly popular Now That's What I Call Music series, which collects pop and R&B hits for the Top 40 radio-obsessed on a semi-annual basis. Yet the threats of file sharing and increased competition are pushing music labels to strike new licensing arrangements, thus expanding the possibilities for compilations and allowing a range of new parties to get into the business of aggregating music. These new vendors include music downloading sites, retail stores, satellite radio companies, magazine publishers, and many other parties. What all have in common is that they implicitly or explicitly capitalize on the trope of the mix tape. Their compilations often celebrate lesser-known gems over smash hits and there is an attention to flow and coherence in their selections and segues. With varying degrees of success, they aspire to the mix tape's quirkiness and edginess, its sense of character and taste, its temporal and relational meaningfulness. Although the specific models for compiling and marketing music vary in ways that make them difficult to categorize, a tentative taxonomy of the new commercial mixes follows.
The Personalized Mix
The most popular variety of commercial mix is the personalized mix. Like home mixers but with a commercial intermediary, consumers choose from a large number of songs to create customized compilations. The idea of personalized, commercial music compilations dates back to the pre-digital world of cassettes when, at the height of the mix tape's popularity in the late 1980s, the Personics company installed kiosks in big-city record chain stores which allowed buyers to make customized tapes from a 3500 song catalog (Pareles, "Homemade"). But the catalog was too small, the arrangements for licensing music too unwieldy, and the tapes themselves too expensive to garner much interest, and the company quietly folded within a few years. With the growth of the Internet, personalized mixing was initially revived by a stable of small dot-corns such as Musicmaker, Supersonic Boom, and CDuctive. Again, though, these firms were ahead of the curve, as major labels' reluctance to participate made catalogs spotty. It was not until 2003 that, buoyed by the diffusion of fast CD burners and Internet connections and the relentless pressure of file sharing, Apple was able to get all major labels and a host of indies to sign on for its iTunes service and create a profitable model for downloadable music. Since then a host of other players including Real Networks, Napster, Sony, Musicmatch, WalMart, and Microsoft have entered the fray, all with catalogs that number in the hundreds of thousands. At the same time, digital music players such as the iPod have made personal mixing more mobile and fluid, allowing users to store thousands of songs and remix these songs into an infinite number of playlists.
Personalized mixing is the linchpin of the digital music business. The new online services go a long way (though, as we shall see, not all the way) toward giving music fans the ability to buy the songs they want at a reasonable price and do with them what they will. But from a business perspective this is also the limitation of personalized mixing, since music businesses want some hand in determining not only what music people listen to but how they listen to it. Many such businesses aspire to a role in the digital music economy that goes well beyond just making music available. They recognize that, with the expanding range and flexibility of music choices, the role of marketing has the potential to increase rather than diminishing, because when it comes to music people often don't know exactly what they want. Thus in the more ambitious versions of the commercial mix, vendors act not just as neutral purveyors of songs but as active compilers and gatekeepers of music.
The Branded Mix
Though the music industry is normally identified with a stable network of producers, distributors, and retailers, one increasingly finds music and in particular mixes produced and sold by companies that are not primarily in the business of music. Such mixes are often sold cheaply or given away as promotional vehicles for the companies' main lines of products. The history of such branded mixes can be traced back to that of programmed music, which began with Muzak's notoriously bland, symphonic arrangements of popular tunes. Originating in a post-war, behaviorist milieu, Muzak's mission was to produce unobtrusive music that quietly encouraged listeners to shop or work. Over the past two decades, though, programmed music has moved from "background music" to "foreground music" (Sterne, "Sounds Like"). It is the original pop recordings we hear in the chain store or restaurant, and, rather than just providing a generic soundtrack for buying, these musical streams are intended to evoke specific associations that appeal to the markets such businesses hope to attract.
In his 1997 overview, Sterne noted how one store, Victoria's secret, packaged and sold tapes of the store's musical programs (in this case, light classical arrangements presumably in the public domain). With more vigorous music licensing by record companies, this kind of packaging and commodification of branded mixes has boomed over the past decade. The market leader is Rock River Communications, which packages mix CDs for a long list of merchandisers including Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma, and Volkswagen. Such mixes aim to tap into and complement the "lifestyle" defined by the companies' products. Volkswagen's Street Music goes for an eclectic, modern vibe, with bands like Hooverphonic and Spiritualized; Restoration Hardware's Rum Punch veers more toward classy, jazzy fare by the likes of Perry Como, Tito Puente, and Harry Belafonte (Flaherty). Yet branded mixes can also hail new markets: Jiffy Lube installed listening kiosks in some of its service centers with branded CDs like Romantic Moments in order to make the franchise more appealing to women (Kaufman). Often, also, these branded mixes are synergized with the companies' larger marketing campaigns: Trio's "Da Da Da" and Nick Drake's "Pink Moon," both on Volkswagen's Street Mix, have also both appeared in Volkswagen TV commercials (the latter song, ironically, is heard by many critics as a portent of the singer's suicide).
The branded mix was conceived with multiple purposes in mind, serving as a promotional vehicle for retailers and artists as well as a potential money-maker. But as legal and illegal channels for obtaining music multiply, companies seem to be moving more toward the promotional model. Proctor & Gamble's Cover Girl brand recently teamed with Atlantic Records to form its own music label, stocking chains like Sam Goody and Media Play with its Hear the Love CD. The compilation targets Cover Girl's young, female customers with artists such as the Corrs, the Donnas, Brandy, and Queen Latifah (herself a "Cover Girl model"). The CD is priced at only $3.99 for nine songs and the proceeds go to charity, but its larger purpose is to strengthen the Cover Girl brand and its association with charitable causes (Deutsch).
A purer illustration of branded mixes as promotional tools is the rising number of CDs packaged with magazines. Again, there is history here: one can trace the practice back to the paper-thin, perforated flexi-discs included with magazines in the 1960s70s. Recently, though, a wide range of music and non-music publications have turned to CD samplers as vehicles for defining themselves and their audiences (Granatstein). Blender and Spin offer occasional samplers of indie bands, and even Rolling Stone recently included a CD for the first time to promote its "Top 500 Albums" issue. But more niche-oriented, "alternative" magazines now offer promo mixes as well. For instance, the Southern culture magazine Oxford American and Brooklyn's The Believer have accompanied their music issues with complementary samplers. The indie music magazine Paste includes a mix with each monthly issue, which the magazine's website describes as "an invitation-only CD we treat as a glorified office mix-tape." In such cases, the purpose is not just to complement the magazines' music journalism, but to define an ideal reader and an audible equivalent to the magazine's lifestyle niche.
These promo mixes substantiate the claims of some observers that popular music is likely to move more and more toward a sponsorship model of support. As music critic Ann Powers notes, "There's a kind of theory floating around that one day music will not even be sold. What will be sold will be burgers, backpacks...stores will just sell stuff, and the music will be given away for free" ("Pop for Sale"). Yet this sponsorship model is likely to court controversy: in the UK, where packaging CDs with magazines and newspapers is a longstanding practice (they are known as "covermounts"), opposition to the practice has grown among retailers and artists' agents. "The message you get from a newspaper is music is free. It devalues all of our artists' catalogs," says John Glover of the Music Managers Forum ("Newspaper CD Giveaways"). Some record companies have stopped licensing music for such use; others continue, noting that music is being freely traded as it is, and at least the legal samplers yield licensing fees; and some artists, eager for exposure in a crowded music market, are only too happy to appear on such collections.
The Celebrity Mix
Whereas the branded mix attempts to define the retailer's customer base and associated "lifestyle," another class of commercial mixes is pitched more on the basis of the personal appeal of its celebrity sources. In 2002, Starbucks and Hear Music launched their "Artist's Choice" CD series with the tag line, "It's like a mixed tape from your favorite artist." The series contained tunes hand picked by musicians as well as extensive annotations based on interviews with the musicians, including artists such as the Rolling Stones, Sheryl Crow, Lucinda Williams, Tony Bennett, and Yo-Yo Ma. Some of these disks have sold in the tens of thousands (Walker). But, while Starbucks proved the idea's viability, Apple's iTunes has brought it much further with their more flexible online distribution. iTunes added its "celebrity playlist" function in October of 2003 and, as of early 2005, over 150 celebrities had contributed playlists (each of which can be purchased with one click). It is becoming practically essential for up-and-coming musicians and bands to post their mixes on iTunes, though more established musicians as well as other celebrities put in appearances.
The song choices on these celebrity playlists are entertaining, but far more entertaining are the notes that accompany them. The paroxysms that some contributors go through to wrap their song choices with the appropriate rhetoric could provide fodder for a dissertation. Some musicians adopt a rock-critic style of discourse: for instance, Nick Hexum of the band 311 describes Wilco's "Jesus, Etc." as an "artsy lo-fi innovative production that has enough hooks to keep it interesting" (it seems to be obligatory for popular indie bands to include some songs by less popular indie bands in order to shore up their own street cred). Others try to put up a front consistent with their public images: in the playlist by grunge-metal super group Velvet Revolver, guitarist Slash opines of the Rolling Stones' "Tumblin' Dice," "It's such a f**kin cool song." The most interesting contributions, though, are by the many celebrities who accompany their mixes with intimate, personal testimonies. Folk-rocker John Mayer tells us of Dido's "White Flag": "The lyrics in this song are amazing. They help me understand how a woman thinks and feels better than anything I've heard in years. That kind of 'wounded but still standing there' thing. It kills me." And Sheryl Crow effuses about Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight": "No matter how old I get, that song still astounds me. That song, for me, just spoke volumes about thinking about life, about vulnerability."
There is nothing unusual about celebrities discussing their private lives in public forums (Dyer; Gamson), nor is there anything new about celebrity endorsements. What seems novel here is the notion of celebrities expressing an emotional, almost visceral attachment to commodities in order to sell those commodities. There is no more personal or emotional medium than music, and mix tapes and CDs in particular have always constituted a highly intimate form of communication. These celebrities (along with iTunes) are capitalizing on this intimacy of mixes; their comments on the music concern not just their private lives or consumption patterns but their deeper feelings and life histories. The therapeutic discourse in these testimonies aims to invest the music with an authenticity that gets beyond advertising patter, but it can't undo the music's commodity status, and it risks leaving the troubling sense of yet another ratcheting up of the commodification of feeling.
The User-Contributed Mix
The above options rely on some sort of gatekeepers-retailers, publishers, or celebrities-to compose mixes for customers. Yet another option is for customers to share mixes among themselves. The idea of user-contributed, commercial mixes goes back to the dime-a-dozen, Internet start-up story of a website called Uplister. Uplister started in the late 1990s as a free site that allowed users to post music playlists and built a broad following among indie music fans. These were simply lists of songs with no links to content, but users took to the idea of posting lists and commenting on one another's lists, and at the time most users could download whatever they wanted via Napster anyway. (Uplister also first popularized the idea of the celebrity mix, with playlists posted by the likes of Thurston Moore, Joey Ramone, and Alice Cooper.) In mid-2001, after signing up a number of independent labels to license their catalogs, Uplister shifted to a subscription model. For $10 a month users could now download the songs on one another's playlists, or at least those songs that the company was licensed to offer ("Uplister, Inc."). Yet the general softness of the Internet economy and the slow rise of competitors with larger catalogs worked against Uplister, and the service shut down within just a few months.
Over the past year, though, the concept of user-posted playlists has been revived by much bigger fish. With the success of iTunes and the appearance of a host of competing downloading services, such sites have sought to add "sticky" content that will keep users coming back. Among the most popular such features are those that purport to create a "community" among users (Flynn; Tedeschi). This has coincided with the rising popularity of social networking sites like Friendster and the appearance of a seemingly endless parade of manifestos touting the virtues of "network science" in business and marketing (Gladwell "The Tipping Point"; Keller and Berry). In April of 2004, with the release of iTunes 4.5, Apple unveiled its own user-contributed mix function, called iMix. Apple's website describes the feature: "Did they like the mix at your last party? Let your friends find the tracks on the iTunes music store easily. Publish your playlist as an iMix on the music store.... If you've got a motivational playlist that stops you from procrastinating, a list that keeps you moving during a workout or tunes to listen to while cleaning, spread the word." I quote this description at length to emphasize how this feature is framed as an online analog and extension of the homemade mix. Yet, whereas homemade mixes have traditionally been exchanged interpersonally or at most among small groups, iTunes promises the "instant fame" that comes with "shar[ing] your good taste with the rest of the world." Users can also rate each other's mixes on a 1-5-star scale, and top-rated mixes are highlighted on the iMix main page and on artists' pages. And, of course, you can purchase songs from any mix or purchase the entire mix with one click.
As of February 2005, with iMix up and running for almost a year, its register shows about 230,000 total mixes and 850,000 total votes. One need only scan a few of these mixes to see that they are often interesting, creative, and varied in their meanings. A quick once-over of the listings for top-rated mixes reveals a Hindi mix, a Hawaiian mix, a Christian mix, a big hair mix, a shoegazer mix, a mix of gay bands from the 1980s, a mix to celebrate a class reunion, a mix to commemorate a radio station that no longer exists, and a couple of mixes of music from movies that never had official soundtracks. The range of themes and content can seem to approach those of homemade mixes. There are limits, though, which I shall come back to shortly.
When you submit an iMix at iTunes, a button appears that says "Tell a friend." You can then type in one or more email addresses of friends whom you would like to notify with an announcement of your new iMix. If your friends have the iTunes software they can, as always, buy your iMix with one click. iMix is thus retro-fitted with the one-to-one intimacy of a homemade mix, with the small difference that when you give your friends a homemade mix you don't usually ask them to pay for it. The legal version of Napster, which combines subscription streaming and pay-persong downloading, highlights "community" features even more than iTunes, attempting to reproduce the original Napster's peer-to-peer connectivity in a forprofit environment. As with the old Napster's "hot list" function, you can browse other subscribers' collections and see what they are listening to. And you can easily send playlists to other users and stream or purchase the lists they send you; a Napster subscription comes with an inbox for receiving and storing music from other users.
What's Not to Like?
"I love iTunes.... It's so exciting to experience a positive move in the record industry," Sheryl Crow gushes in the notes to her iTunes celebrity mix. Internet guru Steven Johnson is equally enthusiastic about iTunes' celebrity and user-contributed mixing features: "What's potentially revolutionary here is the ability to buy a compilation of music handpicked by another individual, as opposed to the official compilations released by record labels" (quoted in Eakin and Lee). Services like iTunes make hundreds of thousands of tunes available for cheap and easy downloading, and their mixing features offer legal, for-profit options for compiling and exchanging music. Commercial mixers, not just the downloading services but all the new music purveyors cataloged above, offer a wide range of slickly packaged compilations with detailed, informative liner notes. To complain about commercial mixes will no doubt come off as typical academic bellyaching, the sort of attitude that can take a perfectly good advance in consumer capitalism and undermine it. Nevertheless, I will argue that this trend in music distribution has several troubling implications. Specifically, commercial mixes attempt to commodify and functionally displace a previously non-commercial cultural practice, they transform everyday cultural activity into labor on behalf of music businesses, and they have the potential to restrict the range of musical choices available for mixing.
Commercial Mixes and Commodification
Most obviously, commercial mixers deploy the rhetoric of mix taping in order to commodify a culture practice that people have engaged in freely and noncommercially for decades. If, as some cultural anthropologists have argued (Miller; Kopytoff), the exchange and gifting of consumer goods effectively decommodifies them by appropriating them within relationships, we might view the commercial mix as a kind of re-commodification of the gift economy of home mixing. In a paper on the music industry's responses to file sharing, Gil Rodman notes the industry's intolerance for any use of music outside individual consumption. In particular, Rodman considers how iTunes' "favorite song" ad campaign frames affective relations around music purely as a private consumer transaction. In the same vein, as commercial mixers implicitly or explicitly beckon us to think of them as our mix taping friends, we can sense them reaching further into our private social relations around music to re-commodify them.
One motive for commercial interests' appropriation of the mix-tape model is the free-for-all of file sharing; another motive concerns music producers' and distributors' desire to foster a relationship of trust with consumers. Sam Binkley considers how, starting in the 1960s, many consumers developed distrust toward the distant, manipulative discourse of mass marketers. Marketers responded to this erosion of trust by adopting a lifestyle-oriented rhetoric that assumed the tone of a confidant. In this spirit, the new commercial mixers take pains to distance themselves from the musical mainstream and promise to put consumers in touch with the music that suits their lifestyle. For instance, a Starbucks executive declares that the company's Hear Music brand is "trying to give great music back to the people after decades of music industry consolidation and standardization." The marketing patter for commercial mixes is full of such pronouncements; its purpose is precisely to convince us that they are not marketing at all, just recommending great music as any trusted friend would.
It is worth asking whether, by modeling themselves on homemade mix tapes, commercial mixes have the potential functionally to displace home mixes. The original appeal of home mixes depended in part on a scarce economy of musical connoisseurship. In the old days the mechanisms of musical taste were tucked away in the backs of obscure magazines and the basement bins of independent record stores, and an authority accrued to those who displayed the right tastes. Part of the point of making and gifting a great mix tape was to show others how cool you were, yet nowadays the culture industries themselves (in particular a certain breed of small urban marketers and publishers) have made a science of "coolhunting" (Gladwell "The Coolhunt"), and some of the firms that put together commercial mixes have people in their employ who likely know as much or more about music as even the sawiest consumers. If I can go to Walmart.com and get a "chill-out mix" with Morcheeba, Bebel Gilberto, and Groove Armada; if I can tune in an audio program on a Northwest Airlines flight that includes Iggy Pop, Jonathan Richman, Television, Gang of Four, Nirvana, and other punk-era mainstays-then what do I need with my friends' mixes? Just as suburban malls offer us a simulation of urban life that results in a diminution of the city itself, the commodification of the home mix by retailers could potentially steal some of the thunder of home mixing.
Yet commercial interests will have their work cut out for them if they hope to approximate the role of home mixes in people's lives. What most commercial mixes cannot approach is the relational embeddedness of home mixes and their delicate sensitivity to time and place. There's a reason home mixes exchanged between friends don't come with the overblown notes that line commercial mixes: they don't have to. In Edward Hall's old terms, commercial mixes are "low context" while the dyadic communiqués of home mixing are "high context"; they reflect and sustain a sense of relational synchrony that is often radically out of tune with commercial imperatives. The mix tape, writes Luc Sante, "is almost always fleeting-often more so than the songs it comprises-and endures best as a time capsule of a vibe gone by" (Sante 22). Whereas bartered home mixes are like moments in a long relational conversation, commercial mixes can never fully escape their promotional purpose or overcome their distance from consumers.
These shortcomings are especially evident with the celebrity mixes, as illustrated to humorous effect in Dan Kois' Slate.com column on iTunes' celebrity mixes entitled "Beyoncé, Your Mix Tape Sucks." Kois hones in on the generic feeling of many celebrity mixes: "Many of the artists involved play it snoozingly safe. For instance: there's an obscure little ditty out there called 'Hey Ya!' Avril Lavigne and the Flaming Lips and Alice Cooper and Mischa Barton, star of The O. C., think you ought to give it a listen" (emphasis in original). Outkast's "Hey Ya" was surely the most exciting and galvanizing hit of 2003, and, when the celebrities mentioned by Kois originally posted their iTunes mixes (roughly, late 2003-early 2004), it still might have had some currency. But by the time Kois posted his piece, the song was played out, and served only as a reminder of how dull and dividing everything else on the radio was. Thus, once mixes are abstracted from their interpersonal context and reified within a commercial context, they lose much of their meaning: "You know what other music celebrities love? U2. Dylan. Clapton. Nirvana. Hendrix. It turns out musicians pretty much like the same music as everyone else" (Kois).
Kois also critiques iTunes' celebrity mixes for their self-promotional proclivities: "The worst of the bunch are those celebrity playlists padded with the celebrity's own songs, epitomized by the queen of the craven playlist, Beyoncé Knowles. Eight of the 14 songs on Beyoncé's playlist are performed by her thin-voiced sister, Solange, by her former bandmates in Destiny's Child, or by Beyoncé herself (emphasis in original). Kois faults Beyoncé for including her own songs in her iTunes mix, but her real crime is, as Goffman says, to "make the situation" (Goffman 52). The reason Beyoncé's mix "sucks" is that, rather than maintaining the pretension of authentic expression between celebrity and fans, she baldly admits to what we all already know: that iTunes and its celebrity mixes exist to sell music. Yet in the process she risks undermining the sense of trust that commercial mixes strive to foster.
But what of the user-contributed mixes that appear in the iMix section of iTunes? Though not as susceptible to the egoistic impulses of celebrities, these too may run into problems of trust, particularly in light of the ongoing furor over stealth marketing, that shady set of practices in which marketers pose as ordinary consumers of products. We hear of record company employees going into chat rooms to talk up new bands, of movie studios hiring web designers to generate fauxfan sites to promote new releases (Calvo). The user-contributed mixes on iTunes include no names, email addresses, or other identifying information; why should anyone believe that the "users" who contribute them are anything but music industry shills?
Despite such potential suspicions, most of the mixes contributed to iTunes at least appear to be the work of unpaid and unaffiliated users. And there is also the "tell a friend" option which allows customers to share mixes interpersonally through the iTunes software. With this option, services like iTunes and Napster achieve something more like a one-to-one model of mix exchange, thus rendering questions of trust moot. Some might argue that such one-to-one commercial mixes finally obviate any further need for non-commercial, homemade mixes. Like the other varieties of commercial mix, the "tell a friend" variety commodities mixing by bringing it within the fold of music industry profits (and the industry would argue this is just as it should be), but what is commodified here is on the face of it precisely what people have been doing among themselves all along. User-contributed mixes thus call for a separate critique based on issues of labor and choice.
User-Contributed Mixes as "Free Labor"
The notion of media behavior as labor goes back to the seminal work of political economists who argue that watching advertisements amounts to unpaid labor by audiences on behalf of television programmers (Smythe; Jhally and Livant). Yet this notion takes on added relevance at a time when new business models are blurring the lines of media production and consumption-models such as reality television and branded entertainment (Andrejevic), and, even more so, the peer-to-peer models of the Internet and digital economy. Tiziana Terranova views the commercial Internet's peer-to-peer activity as "free labor": "Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs" (Terranova 33). Terranova draws on the Italian Autonomist theorists' idea of the "social factory," whereby "work processes have shifted from the factory to society" (Negri, quoted in Terranova 33). Just as chatters and bloggers can be seen as performing the labor that sustains the profits of sites like AOL and Blogspot, the users who contribute mixes to iTunes and Napster can be viewed as laborers on these sites' behalf.
These labor activities might be viewed in Marxist fashion as straightforward instances of incorporation and exploitation, particularly since many such activities have "gift economy" precedents: the non-profit chat of the early Internet and the exchange of homemade mix tapes. Yet this view is complicated by the fact that such free labor is so often voluntarily offered: "the fruit of collective cultural labor has been not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled...within capitalist business practices" (Terranova 39, emphasis in original). Such a perspective sheds a different light on the stealth marketing phenomenon, which now appears as something of a red herring. In a 60 Minutes story on stealth marketing we see a teenager hired by a marketing firm to hype his favorite film (the anime classic Cowboy Bebop) online in exchange for t-shirts and posters. "I don't consider this person a marketer," an executive from the marketing firm comments, "I consider him a fan of a product he's interested in...these people are passionate and excited about telling people about the movie." If from a stealth marketer's perspective, the shills he hires are nothing more than passionate fans, from a critical theorist's perspective one might argue that the fans who hype music through iMix are shills whether they know it or not; or, to paraphrase Baudrillard's famous take on Disneyland, we can say that "stealth marketing" exists to convince the rest of us that we're not stealth marketers.
Like the Marxist Autonomism from which it derives, Terranova's netizen-aslaborer perspective is somewhat totalizing, yet it leads in interesting directions. We might follow its lead by asking what the users of services like iMix expect in return for their "labor." One factor that likely motivates users to post to iMix is the promise of a public voice. Internet forums like iMix magically resolve those myriad critiques of public life in modernity such as Putnam's well-known lament for the decline of traditional civic groups and Oldenburg's ventilation about the disappearance of "third places" for socializing outside home and work. The Internet boosterism of new economy gurus is replete with this sort of language, all centering on the catch-all phrase "a sense of community." At the same time, the promise of community through Internet forums often conveniently dovetails with the less savory lust for celebrity. Indeed, public speech in the United States today seems to be discussed and understood more and more within the limited and apolitical terms of stardom. "Why waste your mix on one friend," iMix seems to beckon, "when you can post it to the world?"
The benefits of iMix's "tell a friend" feature are more straightforward, if also more dubious. First, it is easier than conventional mixing: rather than taking the time to make a tape or burn and package a CD, the user can send his friends a list of titles and artists accompanied by a heartfelt message and a convenient, one-click purchasing option and let the friends do the paying and the burning. second, its legality is beyond question: users can finally assuage themselves of whatever tinge of guilt has accompanied their mixing ever since the music industry's "home taping is theft" campaign three decades ago. If users do turn to services like iMix as surrogates for homemade mix exchange, though, they should be mindful of the differences, and these have to do less with labor than with the limits on musical choice.
Commercial Mixes and Musical Selection
When mixes are made and exchanged within the environment of a particular online retailer, it is intended to give the sense of something comparable in scope to a homemade mix. Yet no online retailer's repertoire can include the unlimited resources that homemade mixes can draw upon. iTunes offers music from a wide range of major and independent labels, but its policy of inclusion is by "invitation only" ("CD Baby"), and many artists and labels are not invited to the party. Recent, unsuccessful iTunes searches I have conducted include Michigan folk-rocker Sufjan Stevens, California singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, and transatlantic neo-garagers The Kills. More prominent artists such as Metallica, Garth Brooks, and Radiohead also remain absent from iTunes due to contractual disputes. There is also the small matter of the Beatles, who have thus far refused to license their music to iTunes, in part because of their old dispute regarding the Apple trademark. And, of course, any music that is out of print, self-released, or not-officially released is unavailable.
It might seem petty to fault a service of iTunes' range and diversity for what is not available; its website brags that it includes over a million songs. But its promotion of a feature like iMix, which so clearly models itself on home mixing, is precisely what begs this sort of critique. When burning CDs or downloading songs onto an iPod, it is possible to import non-iTunes sound files (such as MP3s) into the iTunes environment (the iPod could not have succeeded commercially without this capability). What one cannot do, however, is include non-iTunes songs in an iMix. iMix contributors are often pointedly aware of this. One user who posts a soundtrack of songs from the movie Garden State comments, "This iMix is missing Colin Hay's ? Just Don't Think I'll Get Over You' and Bonnie Somerville's 'Winding Road' because iTunes does not have it." Another user who contributes songs from the film Dannie Darko concludes by offering fellow users advice on filling it in with outside sources: "Some great songs are missing from this list, unfortunately, including a phenomenal cover of 'Mad World' by Gary Jules, the version of 'Ave Maria' used in the film, and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' by Steve Baker and Carmen Daye. I used this playlist as a starting point and built the rest of the soundtrack from there, downloading missing songs from movie fan sites."
Thus, whereas the trope of the mix is intended to give the sense that users of downloading services such as iTunes draw on unlimited sonic resources comparable to home mixes, in reality these services are restricted environments comparable to Internet portals like AOL (or, as these portals are sometimes ominously called, "walled gardens"). And, although it is possible for users of these downloading services to draw on outside resources such as MP3s (just as it is possible for AOL users to exit AOL to the web), it is in the interest of such services to discourage users from doing so. Apple, for instance, would like to ensure that iTunes is the exclusive source of music downloaded to its customers' iPod players, as demonstrated by the recent flap when RealNetworks released software that allows its customers to download songs from its music store to iPods. Nor should iTunes be singled out here: the digital music business has become a maze of competing formats, with iTunes, Real, Napster, Microsoft, Walmart, and others competing for loyal (not to say captive) users of both their downloading services and their portable music players.
Finally, there is the elephant in the room, one that motivates the online retailers' format wars as well as the music labels' ongoing dance with retailers: copyright. The major online retailers' formats all incorporate some variety of digital rights management that restricts the copying and transfer of music; none of them traffics in the more open format of MP3s. Such restrictions assuage the music labels' fears of furthering the file-sharing free-for-all, but they also raise the labels' hopes of quashing the MP3 format. MP3s have, of course, been a thorn in the music industry's side for the past half-decade, and attempts to counter their distribution have included everything from copy protecting CDs to suing file sharers. And, while the anti-piracy efforts of music industry lobbyists center on MP3 file sharing over the Internet, they are no fans of the more small-scale, informal sharing of MP3s represented by home mixing: "It would be naive of us to say that we should allow that type of activity," says Frank Creighton of the Recording Industry Association of America when asked about home mixing and CD burning (Gallagher). The main appeal of a downloading service like iTunes from an industry standpoint is, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs says, that it "competes with piracy" (Brandie and Legrand 1); yet, if enough people can be drawn to such services, they have the larger potential to usher in a "pay-per" economy of music. If a critical mass of music consumers can be established for commercialized, rights-managed services like iTunes-and, in particular, for commercialized, rights-managed peer-to-peer features like iMix-it could provide the rationale for more strenuous legal and technical measures against the exchange of MP3s than ever.
Conclusion
While the digital distribution of music is most often discussed in terms of piracy, it has also had a less often-noted effect: the dematerialization and disaggregation of the album format. This has opened up new and sometimes exciting possibilities for packaging and selling music, yet music retailers' deployment of the trope of the mix has also had more troubling implications. It commodifies a practice that music fans have enjoyed on an informal, one-to-one basis for three decades; it puts a price tag on the mix, and turns mixers into laborers on behalf of music retailers and record labels; and it corrals the practice of mixing within proprietary digital formats and confines it to the limited repertoires of particular music retailers. These retailers' adoption of the discourse of mix taping is intended to lend them an aura of the musical margin, when in fact they are firmly entrenched within the corporate music mainstream. Even in the digital world, no single purveyor of music offers everything, and so it is important to maintain diverse ownership, open formats, and flexible terms of use for online music. But the new online retailers, based as they are on a model of vertical integration and one-stop shopping, have the potential to severely cramp and weakly displace the open-source world of home mixing that they work so hard to simulate.
For a while around mid-2004, iTunes customers who clicked on the iMix link would have encountered a top-rated mix called "iTunes Needs More Indies." Contributed by a British user, it was intended to protest the fact that iTunes opened its European music store in June with only a few dozen independent labels. Negotiations between Apple and the majority of European indies broke down a week prior to the service's launch when Apple issued contracts to the indies that would have held them to three-year, fixed-income deals with licensing fees lower than those negotiated with the majors (Andrews). The British iMix-er complained of the service's dearth of indies: "Most of the music I want isn't on iTMS! [iTunes Music Store].... Come on Apple, get it sorted out or people like me are going to stop coming back." The mix itself consisted of only one song: Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing." This "mix" received over a thousand votes from sympathetic fellow users, who gave it an average of five stars and elevated it to the top of the iMix ratings. When I last checked the iMix standings, however, the British protester's mix had disappeared. The top rated mix was "Best of John Mayer Live," with four and a half stars and 209 votes.