Neil Young and the Triumph of Technology Over Audience

There was big news last week in the technology and music spaces when Neil Young announced, at the opening of the JavaOne Conference, that he would finally be releasing the masterwork he has been threatening for more than twenty years only on the Blu-Ray platform, which runs on Java.

The masterwork is a five-volume series of boxed sets with interactive, multi-media elements that will include music, letters, personal archives, memorabilia, photos, video and manuscripts, plus the quality sound of the Blu-Ray format. The first one, a 10-disc set, covers the years 1963-1972, the period when Young emerged from obscurity to join the Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and begin to blossom as a solo artist.

"Previously, there was no way to browse archival material on a disc and listen to a song in high resolution at the same time," said Young on Tuesday. "It is important for me that the user experience the high-resolution music along with the archival visual material. Previous technology required unacceptable quality compromises. I am glad we waited and got it right."

I consider myself a Neil Young fan. I have many of his albums and have seen him numerous times in concert (most recently the Denver date of the current tour.)

But I don’t have a Blu-Ray player. Less than 10 million people do. As a format, Blu-Ray recently won out over HD as the next-generation video format. A quick check on c/net shopper lists player prices still mostly in the high hundreds range, not exactly something I’d buy so I could listen to Neil Young, no matter how many unreleased photos, manuscripts and songs are included.

Besides choosing the most expensive format for his archives, Young has also recently disparaged the mp3, that pesky little audio format that sacrifices quality of sound for ease of accessibility and has brought the music industry to its knees, for its inability to give a listener the experience Young intends. "Putting on a headphone and listening to an MP3 is like hell," he said. His aim is to give the audience "quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as much as you want, we just don't want our name on it".

Apparently, I’m not the only one who wonders why Young has apparently chosen product placement over serving his constituency. Paul Cashmere, who knows more about Blu-Ray than I do, asks a bunch of questions about Young’s decision, ultimately asking if he will be alienating rather than inspiring his fan base.

I think it’s wonderful that Young wants to present his material in the best possible technology available. But if his followers aren’t Blu-Ray users – and I suspect I’m not an unusual case – and the music won’t be available on CD, they’re left to wait for the P2P networks to extract the music and make it available for free – on mp3. Talk about defeating your purpose. Unless Young offers the music in CD and downloadable forms – and this could be a later part of the marketing plan -- he may find few buyers for one of the most sought-after major-artist collections ever made.

Another technology news story this weekend made me think again about Young’s decision to go with the highest tech available.

It’s an Associated Press story that details how an engineer has recovered data from a disk drive that plunged to earth in the fiery demise of the Columbia Space Shuttle in 2003. The drive, part of an experiment studying the properties of liquid xenon, was found six months after the disaster in Texas, and engineer Jon Edwards was able to extract data even though the disc was scorched and the seal that keeps out dirt and dust had melted. (There's a photo of it at the top of this post.)

Though other disc drives were recovered from Columbia, the reason only this one was salvagable is that the computer was running DOS, one of the early operating systems with which any PC user from the 1980s through the 1990s is probably familiar. Edwards said that the main reasons he was able to extract the data is that the tape continued to hold an eclectic charge and that DOS does not scatter data all over drives as most later systems do.

No one is asking for a return to DOS as a result of the findings. But it does beg the question of whether new technologies are always the better ones.