So I was having a think about the notion of the music being secondary to the video- hence there not often being complete narratives, & then what features come into play when music is played on a pc or portable mp3 player. I came up with this:
When playing a song on one’s computer through iTunes, Media Player or one of the alternate popular mp3 player programs for the PC, there is a ‘virtual space’ that is present and not being used. By this I am referring to the possible mediums the song could be using to connect with us, but isn’t. So if one was sitting on their squashed-padded chair which they saved from an inorganic collection one year, and reading the latest Craccum while listening to the music from their PC, their screen would be wasted space (and energy too- unless it is switched off ). The music video makes the viewer become more engaged with the song (the product) right, so what would you say to the idea of music videos becoming the future of legal downloading? Hear me out…
If the shear size of the MV files were no longer a factor, and we did not have to worry about them chewing up bandwidth or our monthly download quotas, as well as them taking up too much space on our iPods, would we substitute them for the humble mp3? Well if we think about mp3 players 7 years ago, a simple 512mb mp3 player was considered extravagant, & now it is considered to be inadequate; current iPods are able to play movies & in fact the iPhone (which will be in NZ next year) is rumoured to have a 100 gig hard drives. So if the average size for an entire album of 12 songs, in mp3 format at a respectable encoded bit rate, was 160mb, one would be able to fit somewhere in the region of 7500 songs, or 625 albums. & one can download a high quality MV for, say 30mb. So one could fit roughly 3333 music videos on it, which equates to (presuming that a MV was made for every song) 278 albums! (Remember that video formats are constantly being improved, with picture quality becoming crisper, & file size decreasing in time). But when we are strutting around uni, we are not looking at our iPods most of the time, so one could argue that it would use up too much battery life - well not necessarily if one switches off the screen. Plus, batteries with longer lives are constantly being released. So therefore we would have a library of music videos at our disposal, right in our left pockets with no real loss- not too many off us own more than 264 entire albums. Record companies are never going to completely eradicate piracy, so why not make a buck out of it by promoting their music videos & receiving lost revenue through product placement?!? So perhaps if the music videos are provided on the discs when we buy, or in buying the disc we are granted permission to download the music videos, as opposed to merely having to settle with viewing them online. Could we then possibly expect to see the cost of CD’s reduced? Ha, if a utopian morality kicked in over night then perhaps. But a similar notion is quite common nowadays- when we buy the original disc, we are granted ‘access to VIP areas on their website’ when we put it in our PC’s. But this idea of ‘behind the scenes’ is a marketing ploy that has been around for the last decade or so. Anyone remember EnhancedCds? They were normal audio CDs that, when put in our PC had a whole bunch of media for fans on the disc (including the artist’s single music video), & did not simply provide a few desktop pictures & a link one could follow to get to the fan site with all the media like we get nowadays. These were most popular in the Backstreet Boys/young Britany Spears era- late 90’s, when the internet was taking off, but while it remained a novelty to most people….I know this because my sister had the disc, not me.
So to summarise all that: mp3’s do not make use of all the virtual space they have access to. Therefore in this society, that is constantly technologically bettering itself, could the humble MV be expected to evolve into a viable competitor against the single audio track, if the technological margins separating the 2 were lessened? If no, then what about in the next decade? Remember, the American engineer-turned-inventor Lee Deforest stated, in 1926, that he could not see television succeeding as a ‘commercial proposition’, and dismissed it as a ‘development’ which ‘America needed to waste little time dreaming about’.
Just a thought.
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