But hold on, say the music companies–what technology taketh, technology can restore. Their answer is CD Plus, sometimes also known as Enhanced CD. This is a hybrid audio disc and computer CD-ROM, a mix made possible because musical information commonly only occupies two thirds of the real estate on a disc. The extra third is thus available for several megabytes of information readable by CD-ROM drives. Since these drives are now standard equipment in nine out of 10 home computers, and college students use them as often as pencils, CD Plus is a market about to explode.
Last spring only about 20 titles were available, but by Christmas, there should he about 100. At about five bucks more than a music-only disc, the price is reasonable. Certainly CD Pluses are a better bargain than some earlier CD-ROMs associated with rock stars: they generally cost thirty or forty dollars and don’t allow you to listen to the tunes on your audio player. With CD Plus, music is the key component–augmented by all sorts of multimedia goodies.
From my sampling of some of these new discs-ranging from Alice in Chains to Mariah Carey– I’ve concluded that anyone who likes the artists well enough to buy the music will appreciate the extra content. Even those CD Pluses with a rather predictable mix of video clips, lyrics, biographical matter and interviews can offer something we never got with liner notes: insight in an artist’s own voice of how he or she went about producing the music. As with the album packages of old, the multimedia presentation of these new variations have a distinctive look and feel that seem to jibe with music itself. The Cranberries accompany you to their gritty Dublin haunts; Toad the Wet Spocket favors an artsy-fartsy, whimsical approach. Sometimes the extra material has terrific archival value. Bob Dylan’s offering contains a comprehensive listing of all the songs from his 40 albums– by clicking on any song title, you get a 15-second sampling. The high-tech can even mix with the political: Todd Rundgren’s new disc, “The Individualist,” in-eludes a Doom-like game where the listener does battle with creatures bearing the likenesses of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson.
On the other hand, the liner notes of old never warned you to “contact your computer operating system/CD-ROM vendor if you have problem mounting this disc.” Like everything else with computers, things aren’t as easy as promised. Does your machine have sufficient RAM, a proper sound card and the correct drivers? (At NEWSWEEK, we never did get some of our CD Pluses to run properly with Windows 95; the Macs did much better.) But the worst thing about CD Pluses is their inability to play the music concurrently as you explore the goodies on the CD-ROM part. What good are liner notes if you can’t read them as you listen to the record?
Obviously, this is a technology in transition, with bugs that can and will be obliterated. As these digital liner notes evolve, I suspect they will wind up merging with World Wide Web sites of the particular musical performers. These days, rock stars are just as likely to have home pages as groupies–they serve as combination newsletters, commercials and community hangouts for fans. Already several schemes are afoot to link up CD Pluses to those sites, either to speed up the discs, update the information or authenticate users to access special online entertainment. Eventually, we might do away with the concept of owning physical discs altogether-people will download their music from a single universal information umbilical that delivers everything else to the home, the office and, in this case, the headphones. Of course, that same fat roll of fiber will also connect us to all sorts of material that illuminates what we’re listening to. On our televisions, we’ll see videos and interviews; on our laptops we’ll read the prose and view the photos that were once the stuff of liner notes. Just like the old days, but much, much more so.
Or maybe not. My bet is that no matter how cool these new systems are, people who grew up reading the ’60s-style album art and liner notes will still weep and moan at their loss. While those were artifacts of a particular, and possibly inferior, technology, they carry powerful associations with the way that music was then- and, more important, the way that we were then. Experiencing any kind of technological displacement underlines the fact that you’re getting old. But we better get used to it. Rapid change is a given in the digital revolution, a lifestyle wave moving many times faster than the speed of life.
