By Mike Collett-White
The 58-year-old producer, former Genesis frontman, world
music champion and digital technology pioneer is involved in
two new ventures he hopes will address his concerns.
The first is The Filter (www.thefilter), which aims to
produce a blueprint of an individual's taste in music, movies,
news and views by analyzing what the person buys online.
Users can recommend songs and films to each other, and,
further down the line, may be able to customize their profiles
by selecting particular directors, artists and critics.
The second is a venture with speaker makers Bowers &
Wilkins that offers an exclusive album each month recorded at
his Real World Studios and available online as an uncompressed
file, which should ensure CD-standard quality.
Gabriel, who helps organize the WOMAD world music festival
in Britain, this year from July 25 to 27, spoke to Reuters
about his new projects.
Q: What is the main idea behind The Filter?
We're trying to integrate their parameters, if you like,
with 'you bought this therefore you might like this'. That is
part of the mixer idea and it's only in its first stage of
implementation. Those people whose taste is available through
The Filter, you can then allocate them to the mixer. That would
be the aim ideally.
Q: Has the Internet been as much of a force for good in the
music industry as you had hoped?
A: I think everyone thought that it was going to
democratize the music business, but it's done less of that than
we would have hoped. I think if you have good filtering then
that is a tool to really level the playing field. If people are
starting to really like what you do, and that enthusiasm and
that sort of rating is getting in there, then that will make
you more visible and accessible so it would then be based on
passion and enthusiasm rather than just on dollars of
merchandising and advertising.
Q: Are the kind of musicians you typically support, most of
whom are not household names, benefiting from the digital
revolution in music?
A: Not as much as I would like yet, and as a lot of the
artists are losing one of the central sources of their income,
i.e. record sales, they need to become smarter in building
their own database as a means of accessing their own fans and
learning and getting the feedback from their fans.
That's a channel through which they can sell other stuff.
We do need to democratize the process of discovery.
Q: Another negative aspect of the Internet you identified
is the poor quality of downloaded music many people listen to?
A: The iPod, for example, does have the capacity to hold
... what they call 'Apple Lossless' files, so it's built in and
available, but very few people use it and an MP3 has become the
sort of new standard and it's a giant step backwards. Whereas
in television now most of us are getting used to wide screen or
high definition, and that's gone forwards in terms of quality,
music has certainly gone back.
To get as small a number of digits taken up as possible
something has to be sacrificed and it's unfortunately the
music.
Reuters/Nielsen
0 comments:
Post a Comment