The Chimeric Future of Music

The music industry is in dire straights. After years of idiotic customer extortion by the RIAA’s lawyer farm, there simply isn’t much market left to exploit. CD sales continue to plummet. Radio stations are almost completely devoid of artistic content, not to mention the complete absence of passionate and knowledgeable DJ’s. Despite the RIAA’s best efforts, file sharing continues to grow and currently accounts for the majority of Internet traffic. What could possibly happen next? Are we looking at the end of music as we know it? Not if Harmonix has anything to say about it.

A few weeks ago, Electric and Musical Industries Ltd (EMI) officially announced that its entire library of digital music would be made available on Apple Itunes without the encumbrance of Digital Rights Management restrictions. In other words, purchasing an EMI track online is now a lot like buying it on CD. We are again free to make backup copies. EMI’s customers can also burn playlists to writable CDs in any order they want and as many times as they want. They can copy their files to any brand of MP3 player instead of being restricted to one. The more ungrateful types could even turn around and publish EMI’s tracks on a file sharing network without any hacking required. The only catch is that unencumbered tracks cost 40 cents more than the DRM ones; however, it cannot be overstated how important this move is to music.

EMI is not some mom and pop establishment. It is one of the big four music providers of the world along with Sony, BMG, Universal, and Warner. The removal of their DRM is more than just a shrewd business move; it is the first step in the death of encrypted content. Computer nerds everywhere have been laughing up their sleeves at the idea that media could be encrypted for a decade or more. Finally, after millions of dollars have been wasted, the truth comes out. If you can play it, you can copy it. This particular realization should have been a no-brainer even for record executives. The only way to keep music safe from piracy is to not sell it at all.

Unfortunately, the music industry does have one last hope to survive, and they need to take a close look at the gaming and software industry to figure it out. The only future left for a middleman company in the digital world is as a niche service provider. For example, take the recent move by Adobe to begin charging a yearly fee for their Photoshop software instead of a buy-the-shiny-upgrade approach. See Xbox live or Steam for similar examples. But how can music possibly be a service you ask? The answer can be found at the intersection of Harmonix and MTV.

When Harmonix was purchased by MTV, I was the first to break down and weep. Harmonix’s Guitar Hero 1 and 2 for Sony’s Playstation are plainly two of the best games ever to be crafted on this planet. In Guitar Hero, you don’t listen to music, but pretend to play it yourself. The simple patterns of approaching notes and flimsy plastic guitar seem innocuous at first; however, I challenge anyone to play Guitar Hero and come away unchanged. All intentional cheesiness aside, Harmonix’s way of bringing the experience of being a musician to the masses is truly profound. Then, enter MTV, sure they didn’t single handedly obliterate music as we know it; they were merely the finishing blow. MTV essentially took the formidable passion of rock music and wrung it into an experience more akin to standing in line at McDonalds. What worse fate could have befallen my beloved Harmonix?

In a recent announcement, Harmonix fleshed out the details of the project they’re now working on under MTV. It’s probably the single most important announcement for music since the invention of recorded media. Harmonix’s new game, Rock Band, will be coming out for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. It will feature three peripheral attachments to Guitar Hero’s one: a microphone, a drum machine, and the now legendary plastic guitar. The ambitious project will allow for the formation of virtual “bands” online, playing with each other in real time over vast gulfs of meatspace. The implications are mind boggling.

It has become obvious that you can’t sell music anymore. The record industry came into being when both recording and distribution were fabulously expensive. Both costs have since fallen to practically zero. On the other hand, imagine Rock Band as a service you subscribe to as eagerly as cable TV or your cell phone. Somebody has to own and operate the servers that allow for all this online play, and more importantly, someone has to provide the Rock Band compatible tracks for the millions of subscribers to pretend to play. Unfortunately, it looks like that somebody will be MTV. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry; however, one thing is certain. The music industry is about to become a chimera, with the body of MTV and the snarling ferocious head of Harmonix.