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Too Many Performances are Locked up by Corporate Gatekeepers

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The digital ‘siloing’ of a piece of a recorded performance is a far cry from the days when even a local book, video or record store would carry thousands of physical copies to be purchased on the spot.

In addition to the release of his powerful recent film, Oppenheimer (2023), one useful public service director Christopher Nolan has provided is to make the case for preserving media products in physical copies that can be easily accessed. Having shot his movie on film, it’s clear Nolan likes the idea of physical media. His concern is a familiar one among seasoned Hollywood directors. Films are now held by companies and licensed to streaming services where—if a copy can be purchased at all—they remain offsite in a corporate computer farm.  A physical and usually analog form of a performance that has been duplicated has a much easier pathway to enthusiasts and collectors.

Soon it will be difficult to purchase a DVD of a film. And it is also getting more difficult for musicians to achieve a run of CDs, a digital form for sure, but easily accessible when it appears as a physical copy. The same accessibility quotient applies to digital books and streamed audio in all categories. In some cases we can own a download. But even those must be channeled through a corporate gatekeeper. That’s the price of losing the chance to be a collector who curates their own copies of books, films and music.

Film directors want their work to live in the world. Nolan is happy to share his films on a DVDs, though the format can’t do justice to the 70-millimeter Imax prints of Oppenheimer he made for some theaters. He knows that cinema is a more public thing when it exists in physical media outside of what is euphemistically called “the cloud.”

Alarmingly, as access to films and music moves to streaming and premium cable, it is clear that some license holders for individual titles are withholding products from audiences. For example, a person who would like to see Apple’s award-winning film, Coda (2021), can view it only on Apple TV+. If a person is not a subscriber, they are left to find used copies of the DVD, or perhaps a copy at a library (alas, not mine). Incredibly, this is the fate of a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2021.

This ‘siloing’ of a piece of art—a strategy that Apple has perfected—is a far cry from the days when a good local book, video or record store would carry thousands of physical copies to be purchased on the spot. The purchase was your copy for as long as you wish. By contrast, if you download songs or albums from Apple Music, you don’t own it. Instead, they grant you only a license to use it.

To be sure, no one would know what to do with the mammoth 600-pound reel of film that is the Imax form of Oppenheimer. But the DVD and its advanced cousins are compact and easily played on home players that are, incidentally, also on their way out. We could not have known it, but the late 1990s were a high point for easy access to performances that were available on physical media. The DVD was new, but picking up supporters, and CD sales were only starting their slow decline in the face of digital copying and streaming. In those few years just before the new century consumers and collectors could build and curate huge personal libraries. In addition, content providers and talent had the satisfaction of sometimes significant sales revenue, and the added advantage to know that a third party had not put their work out of reach. It has gotten so bad lately that studios like Warner Brothers and Netflix are even shelving some finished films with no intention to release them: the rough equivalent of completing a painting and then locking it in a closet. We should have pity for the talent whose work has been captured. Film especially is a collaborative enterprise; many professionals in various departments count on building their careers by having their work seen widely.

Media Extensions of Ourselves 

Finally, the denial of purchase and ownership of a performance affects what one media analyst has called the “association factor.” When we take ownership of a specific performance, in some small way we may well incorporate it into our identity. It can be an extension of our world in a more precise sense than if we are witnessing a streamed item controlled by another source. Our homes and children’s rooms are filled with performances of various types we are usually proud to have and display. The humble bookshelf was among the first ways to express media extensions of our sense of self.

Without question the internet, cable and streaming have greatly expanded our access to wonderful and sometimes obscure performances, many on YouTube. But the cost of turning over content control to a service looking for big audiences means that a great deal of Hollywood’s output has been sold to corporations with little interest in keeping it available to the public. For the moment set aside the butchered slice-and-dice display of films on “free tv.”  It is more worrisome when classic Hollywood movies, especially from the last century are not easily available from any traditional source. For example, if a person wants to see some of the classic films of the popular American playwright Neil Simon, they will probably have to pay to be an Amazon Prime member, in addition to paying an additional charge for a specific title. And by the time a person becomes a “member” of Prime, a film may have moved to a lock box at another pay-to-watch provider.  Making art is a precarious business: all the more so when we know that some media companies like MGM and Warner Brothers have not always been good stewards of the performances they once supported.

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Save Those Compact Discs!

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-Add in the degraded audio quality of most streaming, MP3 compression, or home-based Bluetooth equipment, and you are suddenly in the cheap seats behind the restrooms–some distance away from what can be heard from a studio master released as a CD

A few years back I wrote a piece about whether we were done collecting books and music.  Many people are, but it can be a mistake to abandon those once-loved CDs. What is interesting now is how streaming has come to dominate the music industry. Streaming means you pay a fee to access a vast library service with the music you want to hear.  In most cases its incredibly small royalties are a thumb in the eye to musicians, but it is ever so convenient for people who want wall to wall music without having to lift a finger. No collecting required. In 2019 Spotify had become the dominant form of music delivery, with other services like Pandora, radio and YouTube not far behind.

What a different world the music industry was in 1999, when 900 million compact discs were sold.  But in the years that followed, the CD lost favor and went into a near total collapse of sales.  Suddenly perfect digital copies could be made without additional purchases. By 2007, most of the huge brick and mortar stores like Tower Records and HMV were shuttered, and favorite form of retail therapy died with them. CDs now sell at the modest rate of 31 million copies a year, with Japan the only remaining major consumer. In fact some who study music industry trends in the United States barely notice this superior older format.

As for streaming, what benefits consumers is often a nightmare for performers. Fee-based streaming services put performers at the end of a meager financial food chain that was mostly tapped-out before they were paid. In 2019 the Canadian cellist Zoe Keating reported that her royalty for each stream of her music played by Spotify was $0.0054.

This short essay came to mind after reading a recent article from the Guardian’s Matt Charlton, who wondered if there was any point in holding on to the silver discs that solved many of the problems inherent in vinyl records. Some audiophiles will disagree, but modern CDs can offer stunning sound.  They also eliminated the problems created by physically trying to race a stylus through a narrow trough of vinyl. Clicks, pops, inner groove distortion, warping, and washed-out sound from worn down grooves are problems listeners no longer have to contend with. But as Charlton still sees it, CDs “are inherently unlovable, with none of the richness or tactile nature of vinyl, or the kooky, Urban Outfitters irony of tapes.”

His reasons don’t add up to much of an argument. Is he serious about the sonically handicapped cassette tapes that were originally designed for dictation? And what about “tactile vinyl” with grooves everywhere that you are not supposed to touch?  I also must have missed the concerts at Urban Outfitters.  Overall, I’m not feeling the vibe.

 

A CD has the capacity for sound accuracy higher than what Apple, Amazon and other music services are routinely streaming.

In fact, CDs are amazing as carriers of music and its supporting images and texts. The standard sampling rate of 44,000 Hz a second is a phenomenal rate for accurately rendering what microphones have heard (assuming your playback device has a decent digital-to-analogue converter.)  This is the big remaining asset of the CD; it has emerged as an easy way to hold on to what avid music listeners call “lossless” sound. That is, a CD has the capacity for sound accuracy far above what Apple, Amazon and other music services are routinely streaming. Add in more degrading streamed audio files like MP3 compression or Bluetooth equipment, and you suddenly only qualify for the cheap seats near the restrooms.

Of course there are some caveats. Many listeners seem to have trained their ears to not care about less-than-optimal sound.  And even a well-made CD won’t help what started out as a bad recording. In addition, if smaller cards and memory chips can now hold the same accurate audio content, the CD remains the most accessible medium we have for holding the complete package of music, notes and images that a carefully thought-out album represents. For me, new music starts from a physical CD, a personal “master,” before it is stored somewhere else as a high-quality audio file. What’s not to love about these small silver marvels?