a 1982 technology programme

Games The website for BBC Four's Electric Dreams season has launched. My favourite video is this clip from a 1982 technology programme, incredible because there's isn't much the tank-topped presenter says which isn't still true (to some extent):

"There's no right, there's no wrong, there's only popular opinion." -- Jeffrey Goines

Film It's July 1997 and BBC Music Magazine's Barry Fox is investigated this new invention, DVD...



The first commercial dvd in Europe was Twelve Monkeys. Seems apt somehow. In yesterday's Guardian: Going the way of VHS: DVD industry braces itself for march of the download. That didn't take long did it?

Music Useful column from Charles Arthur describing how the internet blindsided record companies:

"As they explain, the average CD is 650 megabytes of high-quality sound. Every single second takes up 1.4 megabits of data. But everywhere you look, your potential consumers - home internet users, the same people who buy CDs now - are on dialup internet, chugging along at 36 kilobits per second. At that speed, it would take 45 hours to download a CD. In that time, you could walk to the nearest store and buy the record."

Except, as we know, someone was already thinking ahead.

Mystery Music March in April

The 'Internet'

In September 1995, BBC Music Magazine published this article which helpfully introduces the internet to a readership who may still be getting used to hearing their music on cd:

It’s the kind of writing which still needs to put the words like browser and phrases like World Wide Web into apostrophes and which spends a lot of time explaining what the Usenet is. This is pre-Google and the search engine of choice, Lycos didn’t even have its own domain name yet.

Over a decade later the various news groups are still there (rec.music.classical, rec.music.early, rec.music.makers.piano) and can be seen though Google Groups, but the WWW Vitual Library’s been lost and I’m pleased to see Lycos is still in the topic five web portals along with their doggy logo. Most impressively though, the Viola Jokes domain still works and takes you to a page which notes that the magazine made a typographical error in the URL before usefully pointing you in the right direction!

With the exception of this organ, I haven’t been in sight of a high street magazine about music in years. Most of anything I read about music is in the papers or online which probably explains why I still haven’t understood exactly how writing process works despite spending the best part of two months in the attempt. As a homage to John Warburton’s fantastic piece of journalism, here are the five music related ‘websites’ ‘online’ which I’m using right now. Don't expect any great revelations ...

No Rock And Roll Fun
I’m not subscribed to too many music-related gossip websites largely because Simon seems to read them all for me (and us). Covering everything from the business to what the tabloids are saying I might not always have a clue who he’s talking about but his posting rate is impressive and the writing between the links is often funny and acerbic.

Wired: Listening Post
As you’d expect this offers a slightly more corporate, technology orientated version of the above but with more a more proactive approach. More often than not, I’ll read a story here which isn’t picked up by the rest of the media until days later and with less detail.

Winamp
My music player of choice. Having tried iTunes and found it cloggy and slow on my dial-up connection, Winamp continues to be a lean, useful alternative. A recent overhaul added a little box which appears and tells you unobtrusively which track is just beginning, although I still can’t get the ID3 editor to work as well as before.

Soundamus
A tool which analyses your scrobbling habits through Last.fm and then sends news via an RSS feed of new releases by the artists whose music you’re listening too. It works too – Jewel’s new lillbitcountry album is released in June.

Wikipedia
Well, yes, clearly. Does anyone actually remember what the web was like before the Wikipedia came along and could tell you very quickly why Lou Reed recorded Metal Machine Music? Pointlessly criticised for the few minor errors which are corrected almost as quickly as they’re noticed it’s been the main source for many of these articles. If the coverage isn’t always as detailed as you like, at least you can go in yourself and make it as detailed as you like. Even if you’re wrong.

Music It's BBC Music Magazine's July 1995 issue, and Barry Fox takes time out from listening to the Stravinsky cover disc to predict portable digital audio players:



I think this is worth adding a new tag/label to the list.

Technology Another fantastic piece of futurology this time from BBC Music, June 1995:



I don't think there's much more to add, other than that I hardly every use rerecordable cds or dvds. What Barry calls WORMs are so cheap now, even when a recording cocks up it doesn't seem like too much of a loss. Of course if blanks were still £10 a time it would be another matter entirely.

Technology Before iTunes, iPods and mp3s, hell, even before the proper Napster ...



That's from From BBC Music Magazine in April 1995.

This reminds me of the fanciful drawings in Da Vinci's sketch book. Machines will fly -- we just don't have the materials yet. People will download music on mass and pay for it. It's just that it would take a couple of hours to download a whole album. That's not a workable business model. In my experience the majority of people with domestic access in those days (surely the main audience) were still on dial-up, and 32 Kbps at that.

A quick search finds this Herald Tribune piece from 1996: "Will Internet Replace Record Shops?" and even more impressively, from Multimedia Success Stories (?) Case Study Project: Cerberus Digital Juke Box were we see (amongst a range of amusing in hindsight details) that Cerberus were already concerned about piracy and had cooked up some DRM:

"Each track costs 60 pence and is digitally compressed. The Web page gives the duration of the track and its size in kbytes – a six-minute track takes around two minutes to download. To prevent piracy , each individual transaction is encoded uniquely, using a proprietary disposable key technology (DKT), so that any fraud is limited to a single transaction."

"The user then downloads the Cerberus Player (a piece of encrypted software containing the track) from the company's Web site to his hard disk. Finally he can play the track back as many times as he wants, using his PC's sound system."

Basically it's a very similar model to that developed by Apple for iTunes. About the only item missing is that they don't conceive of the music being played digitally on some kind of portable audio player. But the kicker for me is that the artists involved submit their work on cassette.

Cerberus's domain name is now a link farm. Clearly these visionaries deserve better.