Free Music

I elbowed in between elder bloggers Tim O'Reilly and Dan Farber in the interview to ask what Young thought of Trent Reznor's giving away free music and RadioHead's saying they aren't going to do so anymore. At first I thought he wasn't going to give me anything good, saying: "The recording business is going somewhere but I don't care about that, I try to remove myself from the business part. The artistic part of me tries to. The world will work it out."

He went on though to point out that his project Living With War always was and still is fully listenable for free on his website. It delivered a message he wanted to get out, he said. His thoughts about the content included in his giant life collection? Blu-ray may be riddled with DRM but Young doesn't think that will be an issue.

"Ten Blu-ray disks doesn't lend itself to P2P," he pointed out. "They [the fans] are going to do that anyway - people are going to copy all this music. We don't have to deal with that. All we're doing is supplying the mother-lode, trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as far as you want, we just don't want our name on it."

More than just indifference, Young was downright enthusiastic. "It's up to the masses to distribute it however they want," he said. "The laws don't matter at that point. People sharing music in their bedrooms is the new radio." Go Neil!

MP3s Sound Like Shit

Wonder how Young feels about the ongoing debate over the impact of the MP3 format on sound quality? He's pretty clear on it.

[When it first came out] "digital music sounded like shit," he said in the interview. "It was no fun to listen to turned up. Instead of water poured on you it was like being attacked with ice picks. [His recordings on Blu-ray] are like snowflakes."

"I don't listen to music, it's in my head. Putting on headphones is like hell for me. I can hear an mp3 from a half mile away because the air has a chance to make it sound natural."

Young said that MP3 was convenient - but that it's like a vision of paradise that's only inches deep and slams you in the face when you try to walk into it. "I'm a music guy, a sound guy - I went through hell in the 80's," he said. "Now we're coming close, climbing up the quality wall. I make all my music analog, when a new format comes along I will dump all my music to it." Would he advise other musicians to do the same? He said that wasn't realistic. "I'm too rich and elitist, most people can't afford the machines [for analog recording] and the people to take care of them." Young says he's been hoarding tape for a long time, sometimes recording over content that didn't work out.

Finding Freaky Scientists on the Internet

Young spent much of the interview talking about his work building an electric car that users don't have to plug-in to a wall. The end of roadside refueling is his ultimate goal. He and Tim O'Reilly discussed the plans in some length and it was fun to listen to. Nothing else Young talked about is nearly as important. It's also not very relevant to RWW, except for his thoughts on how the web has assisted his work on the car.

"The internet is a fantastic place to find science experiments," he said. "That's my favorite thing about the internet. People who are kooks in their garages - the tools are here for us to look to the edge of the scientific world. You can seek them out and tell them if you think their ideas will work. You can tell them you'd like to connect them with other scientists in other parts of the world and if the work succeeds or fails you'll put them in a movie about the project."

That's not a perspective I've heard about the web before, and I like it.

Neil Young was a personable, intelligent and well spoken interview subject. I'll remember getting the chance to interview him fondly for the rest of my life.

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Disclosure: Sun is a client of my personal consultancy and paid my travel expenses to JavaOne.

Young's collected works after more than 40 years of making music and film would be a massive enough project - but the most interesting part of the announcement is that the media will be delivered on Blu-ray Disks that will check for updates when new content is available and download it to your local device.

See also our interview with Neil Young, done after his keynote presentation.

Young said on stage today that the sound quality in available technologies has never been good enough to publish his collected works. That's changed with Blu-ray, he says. He's also excited about the way Java allows for sophisticated navigation through a large collection of content. The content is navigated through a filing cabinet GUI containing photos, vidoes and music. When music is played the screen displays a vinyl record being played. More recent content plays on top of more contemporary delivery technology, like CDs. There's notes about songs and albums throughout the collection. It's a strikingly classy interface.

Neil Young famously sung that he'd never do product endorsements and some press asked if today would be the day he sold out. Arguably, that's not the case - launching a new collection of his own legacy of work can hardly be equated with singing for a Pepsi commercial. Young said in a later interview that he's been talking for 15 years about doing a project just like this.

Continued below

Blu-ray

At the JavaOne conference three years ago it was announced that the Java software environment would be included in all Blu-ray Disc players as a mandatory part of the Blu-ray standard. Java powers the interactive menus on Blu-ray disks.

While there's been a morning full of stunning Java demos and it's been presumed that Blu-ray has won the disk war against DVD - news from offsite is less cheery. Ars Technica is reporting that Blu-ray player sales dropped a whopping 40% between January and February. The format also carries some seriously annoying DRM with it.

Will the collected works of Neil Young, with live updates, push some Blu-ray sales? It might.

The Conference

The JavaOne conference is being broadcast live via startup UStream on this page.

One of the highlights of the conference so far is the announcement that Java will now provide content owners and publishers free access to extensive user data in anonymous aggregate. The company is moving towards enabling data mining in a big way.

Stay tuned for an interview with Neil Young on a wide range of topics as my next post.

Disclosure: Sun is a client of my personal consultancy and paid my travel expenses to JavaOne. Despite that I feel a far closer connection to Neil Young than to Sun.