Commercializing Music Technology in a Connected World

When Bob Kohn — former vice chairman of the board of Borland Software Corporation and now Chairman and CEO of RoyaltyShare Inc., a royalty accounting service — first started in the music industry, it took 15 minutes to download a song to a computer. That is, if it wasn’t coming through a dial-up Internet service that tended to boot off users mid-track.

That comment garnered a chuckle from fellow speakers on the panel “Commercializing Music Technology in a Connected World,” presented during the University of Miami Global Business Forum Jan. 15 – 16, 2009. It also served as a reminder of how far the industry has come.

The explosion of music technology over the past decade has dramatically changed the production and distribution of music, allowing connected Americans to carry their music collections in their pockets and producers to market works globally.

The advent of the MP3 audio format has sped up that process and given producers global reach, said Schuyler Quackenbush, president of Audio Research Labs and a digital audio expert who chairs the Moving Picture Experts Group’s (MPEG) audio subgroup which standardized the MP3 format.

“I produce in New York. Can I sell in California? Can I sell in Brazil? MP3’s success gave consumers portability and interoperability,” Quackenbush said. “As a producer, why wouldn’t I want to sell in every market in the world? We’ve heard about how, in a few years, China, Brazil and India are where the action is going to be in terms of consumer growth. Interoperability helps us be there.”

Though technological interoperability enables a global market, Quackenbush and Kohn agreed that technology alone is not necessarily the next challenge for online music. To expand the market, innovators need to work on making the technology more consumer-friendly and easier to integrate into daily life.

Apple’s iTunes has made it vastly easier for consumers to download and store music digitally, Kohn said. But, he argued, the future of digital music will “really take off” when portable devices are truly operable across the variety audio formats, other than MP3, which have also become popular in recent years.

Also, he said, portable devices should be able to recognize music and download it instantly. Kohn explained that, like many consumers, he doesn’t listen to music on the radio. “But I go into Abercrombie & Fitch to buy something for my son and I hear something I like,” he said. “I wonder, What is that? How do I get it?” In his estimation, a portable device should not only be able to recognize music and download it, but also suggest similar songs and artists.

While some companies have worked with adding metadata to tracks, or embedding unique fingerprints or “watermarks” directly into audio that devices can recognize, these practices aren’t standard.

“We’re not there yet,” Kohn said. The technology is there, and we’re getting close.”

To make things easier for music consumers, Quackenbush would also like to see a service offering a digital music bank account – what he called a “virtual iPod” – that would keep and catalogue music. That way, a consumer wouldn’t have to pay for a song each time it was downloaded to a new device, and the digital collection would be safeguarded in case an MP3 player is lost or ruined, or the user buys a new hard drive or computer.

“I want to be protected,” Quackenbush said. “I want to own my music, and I want to enjoy it.”

The third panelist, Robert Fuhlbrugge, who works in the wireless microphone industry as a senior director at ShureInc., also talked about the “ease of use” problem in his industry.

Fuhlbrugge said he’s tired of seeing audio and visual techs setting up for performances and running into difficulties getting disparate systems to function together.

“To be able to get all the individual manufacturers together and get some good standards that aren’t 50 or 80 years old, but more in today’s technology,” Fuhlbrugge said, “would be a huge benefit.”

By Marika Lynch