Musical recordings have a relatively short history, and their evolving physical forms have shaped our interactions with them and our perceptions of their value. For example, the "album" originated with collections of 78 rpm discs that featured elaborate, bulky packaging. These discs were limited to three or four minutes per side, which shaped the contours of the modern pop song. The storage limitations of the 78 disc also explain why the solos of early jazz recordings were compressed, and why these recordings often ended abruptly with cymbal crashes. Each subsequent format has less physical presence while allowing for more storage and greater possibilities for user programming. The LP and cassette allowed for two contiguous halves of up to 24 and 45 minutes per side respectively, each largely self-contained, while CDs accommodate 78 minutes per disc arranged in a long ebb and flow, with a few scraps as bonuses at the end (Strauss 29). An iPod can store up to ten thousand songs in a gleaming white box smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
As recordings shed their mass and/or physicality, their visual and tactile aspects also are reduced. This reduction is particularly pronounced in the transition from LPs to CDs. Vinyl could be shaped, colored, or embedded with pictures; apart from "box sets," specialty packaging has largely been abandoned with CDs. Each format also has reduced the listener's physical interaction with music, which allows music to acquire an increasingly ambient status. A listener would have to rise from their chair to change an LP, turn over a cassette, or load a CD player, but an iPod can be programmed to play until its battery expires. While LPs and CDs allow the user to determine their flow, the work as a whole must initially be engaged on the creator's terms. With an iPod, flow is determined exclusively by the user. Some argue that through digital formats, music may return to an intangible essence altogether, in which it "would stop being something to collect and revert to its age-old transience: something that transforms a moment and then disappears like a troubadour leaving town" (Pareles 22).
CDs have a physical presence of plastic and metal, enhanced by packaging. They retain "aura," although this aura is diminished. Browsing a record collection is emotionally gratifying; it is visual and tactile at the same time. We pore over the jacket art and liner notes. We determine the value of the recording by gauging the wear on the jacket and disc. Browsing a CD collection, on the other hand, is less satisfying. The medium's size limits its visual appeal, and the plastic of the jewel box degrades the tactile sensation. Digital sound files lack potential emotive contexts altogether. They are just data, metadata, and a thumbnail, and therefore emotionally less valuable than a medium you can hold in your hands. Through their immateriality, digital files cannot contain their own history. Unless they are burned onto a CD, they have no physical manifestation. No history is encoded on their surfaces, since they have no surfaces. If a digital product is enshrined in a physical form, like an LP or CD, it is regarded as being valuable. When a product is delivered in a string of bits, rather than presenting itself in a physical form, it appears to have less value. The result is that the world of commodities and the world of things continues to separate and our notions of value become separated from the material purchased. Diminished or nonexistent physical property undermines the notion of intellectual property--hence the widespread illicit copying of software and public support of file sharing.
Paradoxically, the lack of materiality in digital files heightens our sense of "ownership," as well as our desire to sample, collect, and trade music in new ways. Possessing digital files is a more intense and intimate experience than owning physical recordings, based on three things:
* The desire for compacting. "Compacting," or compression, is integral to digital media. Codecs pare away a digital signal, in ways that allegedly are imperceptible to listeners or viewers, to facilitate their processing. Similarly, the appeal of digital collecting is predicated in part on the ability to contain huge amounts of data in a small area (witnessed by the popularity of iPods, which heighten the "geek" thrill of massive storage) despite the limited sound quality of MP3s and other file formats.
* The desire for immediacy, in which the ability to sort and regroup files effortlessly transforms the listening experience. A collection of digital files in a hard drive becomes what one writer termed "an ocean of possibility [in which] daily life gets a different kind of soundtrack, endlessly mutable and instantly reconfigurable" (Moon 36). Fluidity becomes more prized than history; speed itself becomes a fetish.
* The desire to customize, which is heightened by the malleability of digital media. Customization via digital software is expedient, efficient, and accomplished at physical remove (although software nomenclature implies otherwise; we "grab" cuts and personalize collections via "drag and drop" applications). Mix cassettes, on the other hand, are inefficient. They require the precision of starting and stopping, monitoring levels, erasing and re-cuing in real-time.
The popularity of MP3 files and related formats, as well as music in the form of telephone ring tones, indicates that access and convenience are increasingly more important than artifact and sound quality. Greater possibilities for user programming result in music increasingly approached in terms of utility, rather than aesthetics; it is "less about an artist's self-expression than a customer's desire for self-reflection" (Goldberg). Fluidity, rather than integrity, is the defining characteristic of digital technology. While mechanical technology enhances the possibilities for reproducing an original artifact, digital technology increases the possibilities for modifying an original (witness the popularity of "mashups" and other recombinant recordings). Digital content is not static or universally commodifiable; instead, we engage in "dialogues" with a work by altering the artifact itself or recontextualizing it through mix CDs or playlists. While most of us lack the talent and abilities required for mixing and matching vocals and instrumental tracks into mashups, playlists increasingly serve as a form of personal expression. In cyberspace, people collect lists rather than objects. These lists may be geared to a theme, an event, an experience, a relationship. They also serve as a sort of "branding" for the creator, akin to DJ practices.
As aesthetic imagined communities, or "taste tribes," become more formalized and concretized via online tools, playlists may serve the function that CDs serve now. For example, the Rhapsody online music service's playlist function allows users to readily e-mail playlists to other users. If the recipient is a Rhapsody subscriber, he or she can click on an attachment, which will download the playlist. Playlists also reflect a key aspect of the relations of production in cyberspace, which increasingly rely on voluntary and unwaged "free labor" through the creation of web sites and other forms of user-provided content, modifying software packages, and viral marketing (Terranova). Nevertheless, as the historical record reveals, no new technology entirely substitutes for an older technology. Format obsolescence has been crucial to record companies, as it allows them to recycle their catalogs (which is where the industry draws much of its profit). Each new format is marketed as value-added by the record companies: The latest example is the (so far unsuccessful) shift to SACD and DVD-Audio, which are touted as offering improved sound quality as well as visuals, data, and interactivity to create multi-media experiences. The shift to these new formats allows the Big Four record companies to maintain bundled "albums" as a higher price point in the hard goods market, and is intended to counter the evolution of unmoored digital files in peer-to-peer systems. However, these "hard-good" formats have had limited success with consumers to date. Digital files enable heightened utility, power, and control for their users. As one reporter noted, "My records dissolved into the liquid-crystal order of a database. Organizing them was suddenly more than easy. It was a game" (Dibbell).
