FDIS 2000Steve Crandall AT&T Labs-Research An Adventure in Networked Music Is the world really...

FDIS 2000 Steve Crandall AT&T Labs-Research

An Adventure in Networked Music

Is the world really changing?


Why is there and interest in digital music at AT&T?AT&T has had an interest in music for eight decades

The passion of John Pierce and Max Mathewsdigitally sampled music in the 70s, compressed music followedserious progress was made on perceptual audio coding systems by the early 90s

A few researchers passionate about music recognized the emergence of high speed networks for consumers and the dramatic drop in storage costs as a catalyst. The demise of some genres and the Net as a savior was a motivating factor.

Several technologies were combined to form the basis of a digital music delivery systemreasonable compressioncryptographic containers and watermakinga flexible licensing mechanism

Nice application for broadband network


Compression TechnologyMPEG-1 layer III file extensions in Windows were labeled .mp3

MPEG-1 standardized in 1992 (ISO/IEC 11172-3)the encoder is not standardized, but conforming bitsteams and the parsing,decompression and re-synthesis by the decoder are …

MP3 uses a perceptual audio coder that relies on “audio-masking”threshold of masking is calculated for time blocks using a psychoacoutic modelthe encoder is complex, the decoder isn’t as no pyschoacoustic modeling occurs128kbits/s is a common stereo rate, many noticeable artifacts

Encoders and players are readily available and work well on Pentium 1 classmachines


Compression Technology (cont)MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC)

ISO-IEC 13818-7 1997

Better coding/higher quality reproduction at a given bitrate

several double blind tests with golden ears show aac > mp3nominally 192kbps MP3 ~ 128kbps AAC (this may not matter!)

very flexible in bitrates and sampling rates

FADS - we are joint developers - encoding and decoding work still progressing

multichannel (48) fits in with internal work on sound field reconstruction


The Intellectual Property Protection ProblemHow do you balance the rights of the owners of the music content with the social use

of music?

We had several technologies in-house and proceeded to build a “flexible” rights management system that would defeat casual pirates

Cryptographic containers - key management is a big issueother files can be bound to the music file

Policy Maker - flexible licensing mechanismnumber of copies, ~“copyleft”, time outs, …decentralized

Watermarkingcleartext, hidden, degenerative


Spinning a businessA2bmusic http://www.a2bmusic.com

Learn about consumer use of downloaded files

Potentially work with some of the big 5 (EMI, Time Warner, BMG, Polygram, Sony) -- $30B+ worldwide -- and smaller players

Digitalphono http://www.digitalphono.com

research project to work on interfaces, multicast, etc.

focused on smaller content owners for legal reasons (folk and classical)

work with Oberlin College and others (golden ears, musicians, consumers,good LAN)


Social issuesAny service must be very easy to use

interface

PCs are not the best music platformmanagement issues - plugins, players, windowsstereo replacement, portable, car

High bandwidth services a must streaming music vs bursting downloads

Perception of ownershipcopying

Perception of valuea large issue in Gen X and Y


The music business web

QuickTime™ and aGIF decompressor

are needed to see this picture.


Reluctance of big musicThe current scheme makes a lot of money

profit margins are large, production and distribution linkedfirst derivative effects are difficult to detect

copyright plays a central role protecting the business (not the musician)

distribution/promotion plays a central rolesee themselves as talent discoverersthreshold effect - large names “need” services of Big 5

High speed network links to the consumer are a recent developmentmass market focus, NIH, SDMI

“zillions” of cleartext masters are in circulation, not an issue until recentlyLegal protection from Congress is a historical assumption


What is copyright?Who has the right to copy? Copyright is the regulatory authority for the marketplace of

ideas

A brief history

Mary 1 created the Stationer’s Company in 1557guild members purchased rights from authors and had exclusive rightsforever. The Crown could censor

Statute of Anne (1710) was granted rights directly to authors for 14 yearsdecades of legal battles ensued

Authors and publishers have no absolute property rights, but enjoy rights for a limited time to spur creative work (1774)


What is copyright? (cont)US Copyright Act of 1790 was based on the Statute of Anne.

considerable debate - Jefferson believed in freedom of ideas, Madison and others believed in granting limited monopolies to encourage creative work

the views of Richard Stallman and John Perry Barlow are remarkably similar to those of many of the founding fathers.

The Supreme Court generally reaffirms primacy of the public over copyright holders

Congress generally increases the rights of copyright holders.considerable action in the past decade - much of it confusing

“Only one thing is impossible to God -- to find any sense in any copyright law on this planet “ Mark Twain


The campus explosionFuel consisted of :

“good enough” mp3 encoders and decoders free of licensing issues

fast LANs in the dorms, cheap ethernet on PCs

inexpensive multi-gigabyte hard disks

cheap soundcards/speakers

a sense that CDs are a poor value ($17 for one or two good tracks)

a view of music licensing that is divergent from current law

poor availability of college oriented genres


The campus explosion (cont)Spring 1998 measurements at two unspecified college LANs

9/63 users online during a 24 hour period had byte traffic that camefrom known mp3 servers

20.2 MB for non-music users, 169.0MB for music users (60 MB/hr music)

Spring 1999 showed greater penetration/similar usage … 1.9 hrs music/day

file sharing/intranet access … one small campus had over 30,000 tracks distributed on 44 “servers”.

nominal use was to download a week’s worth of music and create playlists

CD-Rs are important for mp3 file archiving as well a portable use


The campus explosion (cont)Musical tastes seem to be broadening on campus (anecdotal)

New music, particularly from Europe, propogates quickly

Less-heard music may be stimulated

Playlists are propagating via email - a new form of DJ seems to be emerging (FJ?)

Overall CD sales are marginally up, but locally down on campuses - sales of non-POP music is up (80/20 rule closer to 60/40 at UMich, Oberlin)

Dorms are more popular than during the pre-Net music days. Off-campus DSL and cable modem sales to college age renters is anecdotally high.

Is this a “killer app” for “high bandwidth”?


The campus explosion (cont)Campuses themselves are being careful

fear of RIAA and others

cost of network expansion

Institutional music libraries

a few amazing resources exist, but very few colleges are making them available to campus intranets and other institutions.

everyone seems to be waiting for legal precedent. no one wants to visit a courtroom


Device explosion on the horizonSolid state memory MP3 players not widely adopted (yet)

expensive memory

cumbersome - linkage to PC often opaque and slow

limited market

CD-R based players are interesting

CD-R writers are a necessary these days

price of discs < $1

mobility

fast rippers, ripper scripts

emergence of CD players that play MP3 files (automotive market first)

Fast Net to larger markets will impact hardware development

unlike the dorm, the PC is not seen as a stereo in the home

dedicated devices, STBs, wireless … G3+ phones/devices


Napster - the Net as the archiveFirst heavy usage seen in the Fall of 1999 on campuses

Central server with file listings of users.

Thousands of simultaneous users and hundreds of thounds of files are common

Easy to use, fast - the PC is now the stereo in the dormatory

Used with social services like chat, IM, etc …

(Nick Drake Pink Moon)

Epiphany for many users. The Net is the library. Local archives are less important.

Traffic not well measured, but huge

Legal (RIAA, Metallica, ...), UI, business, and net (LAN loads) issues abound!


The present and near futureGnutella is mime independent file sharing without a centralized server

server + mini search engine - efficiency is a question (it attempts to get around this by network segmentation), but it is difficult to trace

spread to video is taking place on campus now … schemes are in an early engineering phase

what if this gets used for other things? eBay without eBay??

Notice that SDMI is very quiet these days

Real Networks and Microsoft are very active in the backgroundconventional schemes, mp3 may not be the codec of choice


And what of the music business ...There is too much friction and too little value in the current music distribution

system to ensure its survival.

The public has a different view of copyright than music companies

Smaller players can enter, BUT they need to find an audienceyou win by being loud and/or having a sufficiently enthusiastic user base.

Live performances may become important - multicastbonding for some genres (classical, jazz, folk, …)

Social issues need to be understood - no one understands how/why people listen to music (PPV/L probably loses, subscriptions may win, channels, mobility, …)

Innovation is necessary - new players don’t understand business .. a feature?


ChallengesHow do you build distributed databases with millions of pieces of music

(or multimedia)?

How do you multicast efficiently? QoS?

How do mobile users access the storehouse?edge, G3, G4 …local storage - 1TB just under 2 years of compressed stereo

How do people search the archives? Interface ...

Should the quality of the sound improve? Should the quality of the experience improve?

Understand how/why people listen to music?

FDIS 2000Steve Crandall AT&T Labs-Research An Adventure in Networked Music Is the world really...

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