Fortunes sink for LimeWire, Walkman

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#5)

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

Rest in peace, LimeWire and Walkman (Japan). Happy Birthday, iPod!

Yep, it’s been quite a week. A giant of file-sharing software bites the dust while an iconic music player of an earlier age limps toward its eventual demise. Meanwhile, the iconic music player of today celebrates its ninth birthday.

On Tuesday, LimeWire officially died. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood handed LimeWire’s parent, the Lime Group, a permanent injunction ordering the company to halt its distribution and support of its file-sharing unit. The company, embroiled in a copyright infringement lawsuit with the Recording Industry Association of America since 2006, complied with the judge’s order, ending an era which saw LimeWare at one time sharing space on nearly one out of every three iPods.

Read about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/technology/27limewire.html

Just two days earlier, on Sunday, Japanese electronics giant Sony confirmed it would stop producing its Walkman cassette players in Japan, due to declining demand, although it would continue to make the devices in China for the U.S. and European markets. 

You can read more about the Walkman's declining fortunes here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101025/tc_yblog_upshot/sony-walkman-rip

News of the end of the Japan-based Walkman came as Apple’s iPod marked its ninth birthday, following the trail the Walkman had blazed for it years earlier, by showing people that they could incorporate portable music into any lifestyle.

Details follow here: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/apple-ipod-is-9-years-old-50001302/

Like the Byrds sang, to everything there is a season ….

(Listen to the Byrds’s classic 1960s rendition of their hit, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with words adapted from the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes and music by Pete Seeger, here:)

Let’s start with LimeWire. The seeds of its destruction were sown four years ago when the privately owned company and its founder, Mark Gorton, clashed in court with the RIAA. In May, Lime Group was found liable of copyright infringement;

the injunction, issued by the U.S. District Court in New York, forces Lime Group to disable LimeWire's searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and distribution features, effective immediately. A hearing to determine damages is set for January.

Lime Group, however, is working on a new piece of software that the company promises will adhere to copyright laws, a move aimed at jumping on the burgeoning market for legal downloads and radio-style services. The new service will include a desktop media player, mobile apps and a catalog of music from which people can stream and download songs, the Associated Press reported.

What did a typical Walkman user look like, back in the day? In the '80s, my friend, June Wilson, a wonderful artist from Middletown, N.J., painted this portrait, called "Walkman," which should answer that question:

A TYPICAL WALKMAN USER, BACK IN THE DAY

Note the oblivious countenance, a forerunner to the iPod user of today. No wonder the Walkman, which emerged in 1979, sparked a genuine revolution. "It started to push this idea of mobility," said Nick Bilton, a New York Times technology reporter. "You couldn't really walk around or sit on a subway with a record player and listen to music. You could with a Walkman."

Before the Walkman, "the music industry was essentially an industry being listened to at home," said Bilton. But once the Walkman was introduced, cassette sales "just skyrocketed during that time. It was a huge thing for the industry," Bilton said. Sony has sold more than 200 million Walkmans since the device first went on sale.

Considered by some to be the most significant music invention of the past 50 years, the Walkman was the brainchild of Nobutoshi Kihara, an engineer in the audio division at Sony. Kihara was asked by his chairman, Akio Morita, to design a device that would allow Morita to pass the time on business trips by listening to his favourite operas.

(Speaking of opera, here is a clip of The Three Tenors - the Spanish singers Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and the Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti - performing "La donna è mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto, in 1994:)

As the Walkman shuffles off into gadget history, let's pay tribute to it in pictures:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5733286/Sony-Walkman-in-pictures.html

Now let's talk about the iPod’s birthday.

Like the Walkman two decades earlier, the iPod revolutionized music, helping to bring the idea of digital technology - and the Internet - into the mainstream. It wasn't the first MP3 player, but the iPod and its iTunes website made collecting and listening to digital music easy. The success of the iPod also made a star of Apple chief Steve Jobs, and made Apple a corporate juggernaut.

Watch Jobs' mesmerizing introduction of the iPod in 2001, here:

This is a good point to introduce this week’s Open Mike interview: Kevin Brennan, of Bradley Beach, N.J., is a music fan and musician whose personal digital-music collection contains about 130,000 tracks. He has been through vinyl, cassette, Walkmans, minidiscs, iPods, streaming, the whole ball of wax.

“I’ve been building that collection for over 10 years,” Kevin told me. How much time does he spend on his collection? “Usually it goes in spurts,” he said. The library covers "a very wide range" of music, "anything from Amadeus (Mozart) to ZZ Top."

(Go here to watch an abbreviated but stirring performance of  the first movement of Amadeus Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony by the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra:)

(To view a clip of ZZ Top performing "Sharp Dressed Man" in concert, check this out:)

Kevin started out owning vinyl records. "And as soon as CDs came in vogue in the mid-'80s, it didn't make any sense to store your music on such a big, bulky medium, and the CDs were very convenient," he said. "But now with the advent of music being digitized, what once took an entire wall of CD cases jewel boxes now can be contained in one hard drive that you can contain in the palm of your hand.”

He stores the music in "several external hard drives," backing up everything to one hard drive. The backup drive is "left dormant in case I have hardware failure," he said, adding that he has "about another 180 gigabytes of free space, so it’s almost time to buy another drive."

Along the way, there have been mishaps, he said. "One time," he recalled, "I lost an entire drive of video that I had brought over from my TiVo; they were all live concerts that had been broadcast on television and I lost probably 300 hours of really good stuff."

Kevin listens to his tracks using various media. He spends long hours in his day job, driving a truck For the truck, he has "a stereo that my iPod is interfaced to." In addition to the iPod there’s "a USB input so I can just listen to music just on a flash key. At home or in my office on the computer I try to use Lennox (MP3 player) ... usually the player that came with the operating system. On Windows I use Winamp and on the Mac I use iTunes."

I asked Kevin if he thinks that flattening sales of digital music downloads in the past few years signal that people are tiring of music downloads. His reply: "I don’t think they’re tired of downloading music, I think they’re tired of downloading music and having to pay for it." With free music available through illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, "people are sharing the files," he said. "One person buys the files; they rip it and it gets shared amongst thousands."

The increasing availability of legal, radio-type subscription services could be contributing to the sliding sales, he said. "I myself subscribe to Rhapsody. And for $10 a month, you can listen to unlimited tracks in their library, and they have 7 million tracks. So there’s really no reason to buy the music if you are connected to the Net. On demand you can listen to whatever you want. Why store it yourself when it’s available there for you to listen to?"

In the months and years to come, reducing storage will be the big issue, Kevin said.

"There will come less and less of a need for people to amass and store the files themselves .... There’s no necessity for having all the storage and maintaining all the infrastructure and the computing power to have everybody duplicate what’s out there in one source. ...There’s no need for you to keep it yourself."

To hear the complete interview, go here: http://www.box.net/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_516848666#/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_529638477

Since Kevin mentioned country music and we haven't yet featured that genre in this blog, let's close out with a couple of fine renditions of "Miles and Miles of Texas" and "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" by the venerable Western swing band, Asleep at the Wheel. For this music, we can thank an amateur video photographer who caught the band in action when it played a record store in Austin, Texas.