Bounce to App
This past Saturday I had the pleasure of participating in Michael Hlatky’s Bounce to App panel at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference 130 in London. I was on stage together with Michael Macmillan, CEO of Bounce Mobile, the creators of the FirePlayer, a mobile remixing app, and Jörn Loviscach, professor of mathematics and computer engineering at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld. Also involved in organising was Sebastian Heise of Accessive Tools, developers of the SoundTorch (more on that another time).
The hour-long panel was very enjoyable and focused on the idea that the future of music consumption is destined to take place primarily on mobile platforms. This will change the workflow with which music is created and the expectations around the musical experience. Old paradigms will fade and new opportunities will take their place.
And so what? AES features a lot of high-end audio hardware, tools, and algorithms. This is the result of impressive work across a number of disciplines. But let’s remember that at the end of the day most of the music produced using these techniques are “enjoyed” using low-quality earbuds in the middle of a noisy train while on the go. There aren’t many of us left that actively listen to music, perhaps just staring contemplatively at a white wall. The days of high-end audio production for the mass market are already behind us; impeccable mixes are ultimately compressed down to a 128Kbps mp3 and shoved onto an iPod with 10,000 other songs.
So what’s next? Consumers have come to expect significant levels of interactivity when doing anything on their mobile device. This includes games (obviously), but every other kind of application as well, such as news, sports, or even picture taking. This expectation is slowly also extending to music. The modern smartphone is a big ball of sensors attached to the internet, complete with relatively strong computing capabilities. It is the walkman of the 21st century. Why should we continue to experience music as a static recording, always the same, never changing? Why do we continue to passively consume music as a single set of sounds, frozen in time? It is like the days of pictures before video. Or video before video games! Both RjDj and Bounce (among many others) offer ways out of morass with new ways of experiencing music never before possible. Whether it looks like a remixing app in which loops can be mixed and matched to create personalised revisions of popular songs, or a deeply personalised experience in which the music is generated in real time according to your environment, whether it is a lean-forward or a lean-back experience (whereas listening to music is currently only a lean-back experience), consumers are undoubtedly understanding, accepting (,and demanding!) some measure of interactivity with their music.
And what does it all mean? If there is truly a demand for these kinds of experiences, there must be new ways to create content (music won’t be distributed as data anymore, rather as programs!), musicians who understand the technology and the creative opportunities (e.g, when was the last time that you could unlock new content in your song, discover hidden content, or maybe even have a bug in it?), and of course new distribution channels must be created in order to deliver and consume this new kind of musical experience.
And what now? No one has really figured out the magic formula (if one exists) to make this all work out. In truth, most people are still happy listening to their pop music one mp3 at a time. But the future is coming, and musicians, producers, engineers, and the rest of the music value chain must take notice or risk being out-innovated (again).
