David Weinberger, one of my favorite webloggers, has a new book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Like another weblogger I read avidly, Nicholas Carr, I’ve been looking forward to reading it. But Carr took exception to an early example in the book:
For decades we’ve been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs because there were fewer records to make, ship, shelve, categorize, alphabetize, and inventory. As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track. Thus was iTunes born, a miscellaneous pile of 3.5 million songs from a thousand record labels. Anyone can offer music there without first having to get the permission of a record executive.
When I say Carr raised an exception to this, I don’t mean he issued a warning and continued. We’re talking Fatal error: Failed read, terminating program!
Why did this paragraph and its surroundings rub him the wrong way? First, it’s in a chapter titled “The New Order of Order”. Second, it’s physically located on page number nine. Third, and most importantly, Carr believes it gets a bit of musical history wrong (and thus I suspect Weinberger’s unintentional New Order and Beatles references might’ve been what amplified Carr’s annoyance into a tizzy):
After a few failed attempts to produce a long-player in the early thirties, the modern LP was introduced in 1948 by a record executive named Edward Wallerstein, then the president of Columbia Records, a division of William Paley’s giant Columbia Broadcasting System. At the time, the dominant phonograph record had for about a half century been the 78 - a fragile, ten-inch shellac disk that spun at seventy-eight rpm and could hold only about three or four minutes of music on a side.
Wallerstein, being a record executive, invented the long-player as a way to “bundle” a lot of tracks onto a single disk in order to enhance the economics of the business and force customers to buy a bunch of songs that they didn’t want in order to get a track or two that they did want. Right? Wrong. Wallerstein in fact invented the long-player because he wanted a format that would do justice to performances of classical works, which, needless to say, didn’t lend themselves all that well to three-minute snippets…
The long-player was not, in other words, a commercial contrivance aimed at bundling together popular songs to the advantage of record companies and the disadvantage of consumers; it was a format specifically designed to provide people with a much better way to listen to recordings of classical works. In fact, in focusing on perfecting a medium for classical performances, Columbia actually sacrificed much of the pop market to its rival RCA, which at the time was developing a competing record format: the seven-inch, forty-five-revolutions-per-minute single.
For his part, Weinberger understandably bristles at Carr throwing down the book at such an early stage: Nick Carr thinks it’s wrong, at least up to page 9
So, who’s right?
Carr doesn’t, as Weinberger says, derive a “characterization of the argument of the book…from this one phrase”. Carr just “didn’t get very far in the book”. That doesn’t mean the whole book is a flawed argument. It doesn’t even mean he won’t pick it up again. It just means that he put the book down. I’ve had similar experiences when an early or prominent passage in a book contradicted something I knew well (examples will be posted upon request. One guilty party has already reviewed the book). From the musical examples Carr gives, I’m pretty sure he’s knowledgeable about music in much the way I am, a devoted amateur who cares deeply about popular music as art.
I believe Weinberger when he says, “The book overall is an argument against there being a natural units and a natural organization of them. I meant the ‘natural’ to be lightly ironic in this case.” Carr missed (as I believe I would have missed) the irony, just as Weinberger missed that Carr was arguing narrowly against the implied claim that unbundling tracks from albums was an advance.
Here we get to the heart of the matter: Is unbundling tracks from albums an advance? Well, an advance for who?
For some listeners, it’s at least a short-term gain. The move from LP to CD has, in my judgement, resulted in a bit more filler, so, for the casual listener, being able to go straight to the good stuff may be a blessing. (I doubt I’ll ever need more than one Monster Magnet song myself.) But Carr’s analysis of side three of Exile on Main Street makes a strong case for joys that will be harder for those same listeners to find in an unbundled world (though I’m not sure his accompanying psychohistory of Mick Jagger is entirely on the mark). A similar trade-off can be seen for artists.
For the music business, however, unbundling is clearly a boon, or at least an accounting convenience. Weinberger is correct to say there is no natural unit of music, but would be dead wrong to say (as I believe he might) there is no natural unit of music marketing. The natural unit of music marketing is the unit, as in, “How many units of Frampton Falls Asleep did we move?” While Weinberger would claim (rightly, I think) there’s no single natural classification for his book, his publisher’s promotional page for the book (and presumably their promotional efforts and spending) classify it as a business book. If Weinberger is correct that “By making music miscellaneous, Apple has captured more than 70 percent of the market”, then calling miscellaneous tracks the natural unit of music is the best business definition–maybe the only one that matters.
Same as it ever was.
(P.S. Carr’s lifted final sentence is just great–a perfect comment on so many levels.)
