![]() They're out there doing it just because they love it." "And that lends them a credibility edge, and a degree of pureness. "We feel podcasters and bloggers are the most passionate introducers of music," he claims. But one company can't call out everything in the pile, and Arnold expects that the duty will fall to outside tastemakers. IODA can promote the music through the usual tactics- placement on the front page of iTunes, mixing playlists that celebrate the World Cup, and so on. (Someday, music recommendation engines may also help us cross borders, leading us to music from different cultures by tracing its common rhythms and appeal- but nobody I spoke with thought it would happen soon.) And Japanese hip-hop and Finnish metal would never again get stuck in the "general world music" bin. Add that dimension, and a customer could search for jazz across borders or Brazilian music across genres. For example, while every song in an online store has tags for genre, Arnold points out there's no standard for tagging the country of origin- let alone the artist's hometown. Once it's online, you can use technology to sift through it. ![]() It's pretty exciting to think that in the next decade or so, a lot of these things will come to light." "But apparently a lot of this stuff was locked away.and is rumored to exist in the archives. The masters were supposed to have been destroyed," says Arnold. What kind of treasures? "There was a big underground jazz movement in the 1960s, during the Maoist Cultural Revolution, and this type of music was outlawed. So that's another whole level of excavation.We're still working on the top part, and then dig through the archives and find the real treasures." The scope goes from everything from several thousand CDs that are in print, to music on old masters that haven't been digitized yet. For one thing, it takes time to process all of the music: As Kevin Arnold, IODA's founder and CEO, says, "A catalog that big, that's going to take years to pour all the way through. IODA won't just dump the entire catalog on the market at once. The first step is to release it in chunks. What does the thin end of the Long Tail mean to us? Is IODA's Chinese acquisition the equivalent of getting a copy of the Beijing phone book- where you have the number to everybody in the city, but you don't know who to call? But making something available isn't the same thing as making it popular. And with the right strategy, a store can make as much money off the niches as the hits. Everyone in the digital music biz is well aware of the "Long Tail", Chris Anderson's definition of the marketing phenomenon where online stores with limitless shelves can sell millions and millions of products- everything from the standard bestsellers to the most obscure niches. Let's assume that somewhere in IODA's gigantic pile of Chinese music, there are albums that a few people would love a few that anybody would love and thousands that just plain stink. As a friend of mine put it, "world music" makes him think of "library music," i.e., the dusty records you pulled from your grade school library, because your teacher wanted you to write 500 words about throat singing.īut there are plenty of exceptions- if you can find them. ![]() Even if you forget what a bland and biased label that is, the idea of these distant, foreign recordings can make our eyelids droop. In fact, most Americans don't like world music per se. Saying that it would take 30,000 hours to listen to it all means nothing, because nobody wants to hear it all. So here's the question: What the hell can anyone do will all of that? Sixty thousand albums means at least 30,000 hours of music, or about three-and-a-half straight years. When IODA's done, services like iTunes will be able to sell you music from more than 60,000 albums that date back to the 1920s: folk music, kids' music, pop music, the Peking Operas, and who knows what else is buried in that pile. Last September, IODA- a digital music distributor in San Francisco- announced a gigantic deal: The China Record Corporation, the largest government-owned record label in the world's largest nation, would license its entire catalog to be digitized and distributed online. ![]()
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