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Rare Finds? Selection and Uniqueness I. It would be folly to summarily treat online music vendors such as Apple’s iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/) as one would the online presence of an academic or archivally-minded music repository like e-Tree’s Live Music Archive (accessed through the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/). Marketing dollars, profit-motives, and philosophical differences aside, however, the case for distinction between the two when measuring quality of the “online deliverable” begins to break down, especially once we start speaking of standards such as selection of material and that material’s uniqueness. Can online music vendors and archives lay claim to uniqueness as traditional archives do, in their promise to provide access to unique materials? It would appear for purposes of discussing what are in effect online versions of listening copies that the answer is no, but the question merits further investigation, since uniqueness of holdings in traditional archives has implied some expertise on the part of archival staff in the content areas of those holdings. For archives, providing unique information to a greater or lesser extent could be a measure of its ability to ably access and/or represent cultural content, as the established “expert” regarding the material.8 If uniqueness does in fact imply this sort of expertise, then it could have an impact on assessing online music sources that cannot claim uniqueness. The traditional assumption regarding non-archival sources of cultural information (whether one considers these bookstores, record stores, print shops, galleries, or libraries) is that the materials they hold are not unique (i.e., copies are held elsewhere). Archives on the other hand have often been defined in terms of their uniqueness, their value to the community perceived as a function of preserving and providing access to rare or one-of-a-kind records, selected for their uniqueness, that can speak as surrogates for the people who created them.9 Uniqueness in an archives is a reassuring affirmation of its documents’ authority and, by association with those documents, the authority of the archive itself. But actually defining the qualities of unique documents was never easy, and according to some is getting harder to do every digital day.10 For instance, James O’Toole has identified four different meanings of uniqueness and in the process concluded uniqueness may be the straw man of archiving. There is, he says, a) Physical uniqueness, or the individuality
of the artifact containing the information. The trouble with the first two meanings of uniqueness is that identifying the unique object and the unique information in many cases can be quite difficult, and assigning value to them can be quite problematic. For example, in terms of photographic images, is the cultural object of importance the photographic negative or the print? Isn’t it the copy that carries the cultural message, rather than its source?12 Can something that is inherently not an original be as or more important than that unique object? Sound recordings carry similar issues with some important differences. Many modern recordings, especially after the development of tape and the ability to manipulate it, are often several steps removed from source material. With the exception of live performances recorded with no subsequent editing, modern recordings, often mixed down from multiple takes (not always performed with chronological linearity) and then glued together, cannot be considered mirrors of real events. “Such a recording may well represent a unique assemblage of scattered bits of aural information but…this kind of uniqueness is unconnected to any pre-existing reality. A new, artificial reality has been constructed instead.”13 The unique cultural object cannot be considered the multi-track tape, or its mixdown, or the master, or the CD copy sitting on the shelf in the record store. These may all have varying degrees of uniqueness, but none of them can claim to have captured an actual performance, and as far as conveying cultural material is concerned, it is the last link in the chain, the CD copy, that may be the most likely candidate for achieving that goal. The last two aspects of uniqueness are interesting, and may help our interpretation of the concept as applicable to online music providers, if only to an extent. Archives are interested not only in the uniqueness of objects and the information they contain, but how that information was generated, and in what kind of organization the information was then placed. From O’Toole’s perspective, both of these types of uniqueness are doomed because it would be difficult to locate a process or aggregation that did not admit of some unique quality. “In the end, everything differs from everything else, and the presence or absence of uniqueness thus permits us to draw no meaningful distinctions.”14 However, for this paper, O’Toole’s suggestion of unique aggregations of records, and the way in which they were created, is meaningful, with a slight adjustment of perspective. There are three major functions or actors that define an archive or repository: 1) document creators or authors; 2) document keepers or archivists; and 3) document audiences, or patrons. If in the realm of online music delivery and downloading we shift the boundaries and consider the provider the document creator, and the user the archive, then there are unique aspects about providers that users may well be interested in. The way in which the providers render their music files, organize them, present them, and restrict them could all be considered unique aspects of music providers and among criteria for their ability to deliver sound and music. As demonstrated, uniqueness in the context of online music archives and commercial sites doesn’t work as a measurement of quality, since there are few, if any, sites providing sound files not derived from source tapes or otherwise copied.15 If uniqueness plays a role at all, it is in the way providers bring records together and organize them, which, if we shift perspectives and make the user the archive, might be described as uniqueness of aggregation. Related to this is the principle of selection, a critical aspect of archival quality that speaks to the same kind of expertise implied by a collection’s uniqueness. II. At Southwest Missouri State University, the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection (http://www.smsu.edu/folksong/maxhunter/) archives traditional folk ballads in compressed RealAudio (a proprietary format) and CD-quality AIFF format (the format played by commercial CD players). Selection of songs is not an ongoing process – Max Hunter, a salesman with a tape recorder, collected the songs from 1956 to 1976 as he traveled through the Ozark Mountains, so the collection is discrete and will not continue to grow. Hunter’s decision on what to record became the default selection, and because he recorded traditional songs, many of which are variations on the same tune sung by different singers, the collection conveniently serves scholars studying the development of folk song and the malleability of the form. Its rarity as a web resource has less to do with the uniqueness of its songs than its mere presence online – there simply are not many, if any, comparable web collections that also offer cross-referencing to other collections or folk song transcriptions (such as the Child Ballads). With some songs represented as many as eight times (“Barbara Allen”), the mission of the archive appears implicit in its selection. In this model, the authors, archive, and users are separate, but the specialized nature of the selection of the collection’s songs shows that it is closely aligned with specific needs of folksong scholars. At the other end of the choice spectrum, offering greater choice but thinner collateral, or context, for those resources, is Apple’s iTunes. Currently the champion of online music vendors (10 million downloads in its first four months alone, before it released its interface for PC 16), iTunes’ selection policy appears motivated by the pop culture that supports it and its ability to talk artists and record companies into allowing songs to be placed online in their proprietary twist on the .mp3 format. Like a traditional record store chain, iTunes sees its strength in allowing users to select from the broadest possible collection they can put together. In this case, the authors, archive, and users are separate entities, and selection of culturally relevant material is controlled partly by the archive, and partly by the authors or rights holders. Customers do influence selection insofar as they (theoretically) decide what to buy, and therefore influence what is selected and sold, but it could also be argued that as the content manager iTunes ultimately controls user choice. At the same end of the spectrum with iTunes, although a little more towards the middle, is eMusic, which uses VBR, or variable bit rate .mp3 technology, to provide music to customers. Unlike iTunes, eMusic actually has a stated selection policy (of sorts), which is decidedly mass market but focused on a specific audience: eMusic is the digital music service for discerning music fans, having paved the way for groundbreaking independent artists and labels to digitally distribute and market their music online. Boasting more than 275,000 songs in every genre from 900 of the world's best independent music labels, eMusic is the premier subscription service for independent music.17 A selection policy aimed to draw listeners of independent music (i.e., music independent of big record labels) distinguishes eMusic from many other online commercial services and in an archival sense adds value to its collection, as eTree does, by letting users know the nature of its collection. Selection can be revealing in estimating the ability of online music providers to effectively deliver cultural material to audiences. Ideally, selection should function as it does at the Max Hunter Collection, where the mission of the archive is implied in the content it accessions. This is not to say that the other archives mentioned do not achieve their goal, but only at the Max Hunter Collection is the actual cultural content the star of the show, and the focus of the archive’s expertise. At eTree, while the jam band genre naturally fills its vaults, given its community’s tape trading ethic, the story told is less about that genre than it is about the importance of a lossless compression scheme – beyond that requirement, there are no restrictions (outside of copyright) limiting selection for the archives. Many may count this as a strength, but it is possible to read into it a certain lack of control over the direction of the collection. iTunes and eMusic may achieve commercial success, much as a discount department store might, on the strength of policies lacking clear selection standards. Their success as repositories of commercial music may, ironically, depend on an actual disregard for the cultural content of the material they vend. Uniqueness and selection is a first step in
considering the archival qualities of online music providers, and as we
have seen, uniqueness is difficult to realize, particularly in digital
environments (and may not even be possible, or desirable), while selection
can be effectively wielded or ignored to differing effect. The next step,
consistently ensuring the authenticity of the material presented, that
the sound files users access represent the real deal of (pop) cultural
heritage, is a challenge that archives must meet if their reputation is
to remain intact. NOTES |