On June 30th, Apple will launch Apple Music, a one-stop destination for streaming audio, radio, and artist-to-fan interaction. Apple's service is poised to be the first music source since mainstream CD store chains to have something resembling a monopoly on the listening market—the software will come preloaded on future iPhones, and will most likely flow seamlessly into the world's largest music retailer, the iTunes Store. The announcements have raised questions about small labels, big business, and the homogenization of taste, but they may also have big implications for the way music will sound in the future.

ADVERTISEMENT

We tend to think of MP3s as the offspring of the CD. In the old days, you would slide your Sisqo or Strokes album into your computer tower and rip the songs off the disc; in just a few minutes, you'd have a dozen or so fresh new files to play, pause, share, drag, and drop as you wished. Despite being digital files, MP3s are still loosely thought of as physical units of music, with tangible properties: an MP3 is still something you can buy and "own," and two different MP3s of the same song may not sound the same, in mix or quality. But as streaming services become more ubiquitous, our sense of music as physical units (songs, singles, albums, or files), may give way to something more resembling Netflix: a feed maintained by a private source, operating independently of the creators who populate it and the users who consume it.

Revisiting the history of the compact disc offers some context. CDs didn't pop off just because they were shiny, high-quality, and easy to frisbee across the room: the technology was invented, standardized, marketed, and distributed by Sony, whose label division pegged the new format to major album releases. Billy Joel's 1982 record, 52nd Street, was the first to be released on compact disc, distributed by Columbia/Sony in Japan and marketed in tandem with the Sony CDP-101, one of the earliest home CD players. Once the CD format overtook the audio cassette, artists were encouraged to tailor album run-times and recording practices to the new medium; the company that distributed the songs, the CDs, and the CD players won on all three ends. "Back in the day, all of the labels had deals with the distribution companies that they had to turn in those 1630, ¾ inch video tape, like a giant VHS tape, for the master," engineer and longtime Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean explained to The FADER during a recent phone interview. "Sony owned the label and Sony owned the tape machine company. And then they had interest in all the mastering places. They want to keep selling that tape."

ADVERTISEMENT

Every album you've ever listened to has a "master," the original recording from which all CDs and digital files are copied. The mastering process accounts for things like consistent volume levels between tracks, and against comparable music. When you skip through an album, no one track is louder or quieter than another, and if you toggle songs between two different albums, they're most likely close in volume as well. Mixing makes kickdrums fat, mastering makes all kickdrums equal. Although CDs have long been edging toward obsolesce, mixing and mastering practices optimized for CDs, and by extension, MP3s, have long been the industry norm. Apple Music will reportedly stream only 256K AAC files, Apple's own digital audio format. AAC files are similar in size and sound quality to MP3s, and are currently the default file format for sale in the iTunes Store.

Since 2012, Apple has provided artists and mixing engineers with a set of guidelines for mixing and mastering their music specifically for Apple's AAC format and devices; if you visit their "Mastered For iTunes" page today, you can even download a suite of plug-ins for optimizing your songs for the store. "For decades, the standard for consumer digital audio has been the compact disc, and most mastering has been done with CDs in mind," the company explains in a 2012 PDF brief you can download from that same page. "In recent years, the quality of digital music delivery has vastly increased, as has the number of digital music sales, with iTunes being a key driver of those sales. With more than 16 billion downloads encoded as AAC to date worldwide, AAC is the new standard for digital music. It only makes sense to create masters specifically for this format."