GrindEFX

First of all, I must apologize for my absence from the site in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been incredibly busy elsewhere and any time I got to put into the site was mostly taken up by “behind-the-scenes work”, hence the lack of activity on my part.

Back to business though and one story that’s been generating a frenzy this month is the new digital album format being developed by the major record labels and Apple (separately). Since rumours have been flying around for a few weeks now you’ve probably read or heard about it somewhere, I just wanted to play catch up though for those that haven’t heard and drop my 2 cents.

A brief overview; Apple announced they were working on a secret project which was given the name “Cocktail”. The idea behind Cocktail is a single file download that would include songs, videos, artwork, lyrics and liner notes for an album. This new format would presumably work very nicely alongside their iPod line and the new Tablet rumoured to be released later this year. Apple apparently reached out to the majors (Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI) for a partnership, however the majors decided instead to team up and develop their own competing format – CMX – which would, again presumably, require its own supporting player.

There are a number of reasons why this post got the Facepalm treatment, let me start by looking at my calendar; it says August 2009, though reading the above paragraph you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally stumbled into Stewie Griffin’s time-machine and travelled back to 2003. 6 years ago, this would have been a great idea and may have revolutionized the music business… but Apple did that already. Now with 200 million iPods, 20 million iPhones and 8 billion iTunes tracks sold, and over 3/4 of the mp3 player market behind them, the major labels want to wave their arms and say; “hey, we can do that too!”.

Consumers are going to take one look at CMX and do one of two things:

1. Buy the album elsewhere so they can actually listen to it on their iTunes and mp3 player.
2. Pirate the album.

So all they’ve done is further isolate music fans. Since when did people care about liner notes anyway (I’m talking about the mass market, not us music geeks)? And how big are these files going to be? HD images and videos? It’s likely each album will take up over 100mb. Aren’t we living in a world that wants everything faster and smaller?

To me this just sounds like another lame attempt by the major labels to limit access to music (I’m sure the files will be caked in DRM) and squeeze another few pennies out of a dying format (the album), because let’s face it, they don’t know how else to produce and market music. If they actually go through with it, CMX will be an epic fail and the majors will once again be the laughing stock of the music business.