Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Introduction to the Project

This semester I will be working on a project to determine the size of the hole in our online collection of digitized music from throughout the 20th century. As the digital revolution is a relevantly recent phenomenon, it is understandable that much of the music of the time period in question did not necessarily make the transition to our modern music collection. There is potential for inclusion, and expansion of the current repertoire via the digitization of the personal music collections of our parents and grandparents.

My first task will be to inventory the collection of music that currently does exist, using the Smithsonian Folkways database as my starting point. I will then look into whether there is any kind of internet information site (such as a Wikipedia page) for each artist on Folkways. Then, I will see if the artist's music (and how much of it) is available on popular music stores and streaming sites such as iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Rdio, and 8tracks. Because this would be quite impossible to make any significant progress if I was trying to cover all genres, I plan to spend most of my time looking into the trajectory of the collection of Folk music recordings over the years. Hopefully as I compile more and more information, patterns will develop as to how much of the music has been preserved, and how much of it we are missing. Depending on the size of the hole, I may attempt to come up with a valuation and potential market for this lost era of music.

Some key ideas and takeaways to be had from this project will be the effectiveness of conversion when changing mediums in media, the cost and benefits of current copyright law, and application of research on the Folk music genre to other genres of music (classical, rock, jazz, etc.), and other industries such as print and artwork. With the available storage space on the internet being almost, if not completely infinite, we definitely have the space to hold and keep track of as many different digitized items as we want. The question is, however, do the benefits of attempting to complete these collections warrant the cost of time and effort it would take to accomplish this?

An example of the period and genre of music that I will be doing research on will be similar to that of the recently deceased, American icon, Pete Seeger. I'll attach the New York Times article published following his death because it is both interesting to read of his path through American history and his role in the Folk movement: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/arts/music/pete-seeger-songwriter-and-champion-of-folk-music-dies-at-94.html?hp&_r=0.


4 comments:

  1. Olivia - One meta lesson I hope that you get out of this project is that the questions matter as much or more than the answers. My comments below are intended to get at some of the questions. They are all a reaction to the characterization of the project - getting at the size of the hole.

    I think it helpful to first construct a straw man, one which is based on a total belief in markets. In this world, older music is digitized if and only if the expected future profit from sale of the digital music exceeds the cost of the digitization effort and the storage and management costs of the content thereafter. You can make that more complex by asking whether the risks of such an effort can be diversified or not and whether the future is discounted appropriately. In our class we discussed that sometime corporations are too myopic and don't make investments that will pay off long term as a consequence. Those nuances are there if we need them. For now let's ignore them because they make things more complicated. The upshot of this market sort of argument is that very popular artists, such as Pete Seeger, will have their recordings digitized. Less popular recording artists will not. A believer in the market will say, that's efficient. Why should we worry about the less popular music?

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  2. A second sort of question deals with your sampling method versus the volume of potential music to look at. You are doing, more or less, a manual search. You are not building webots to troll the Internet, which would do a much more exhaustive search. The issue then is, using the metaphor of blind people touching an elephant to get an impression of the whole, will you be able to tell if you are sampling only the tail and never the trunk? If not, does your sampling nonetheless have merit? If so, why?

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  3. I think the answer to your first question can begin to be answered in my post next week of why Moses Asch ran Folkways the way he did. To answer your second question, I believe my sampling method does have merit. I'm looking to get a snapshot of the music availability in one genre, develop an idea of the holes that exist in the collection if there are any. It similar to a scientific experiment in that case, I'm setting out to refute the null hypothesis. That's something that as an amateur researcher, I believe I can do. If my data does end up refuting the null hypothesis, that is a point where someone with access to webots and experience writing code and conducting official research can step in and collect some concrete data and continue the work I started, in a more official capacity.

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  4. Let me make some follow up questions on both points. One is whether folk music is special, as it tends to be about grievance and protest. (Some of it is love ballads, which obviously don't fit this characterization.) So might the music be promoted where other music that is pure entertainment is not? I believe I've mentioned Joe Glazer previously and the albums songs of Joe Hill. The labor unions had strong reason to see that music promoted and widely heard. This gives a different mechanism for why the music is available.

    I also encourage you to remain skeptical about your tentative conclusions. Also, you may see the key questions as morphing as you get further into it. The issue of holes may matter less than whether it is "safe" for a citizen who has an album in vinyl to digitize it and post online. Then there may also be the flip issues - is there some music that has been digitized but is nonetheless not available through normal distribution channels?

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