Bjork brings technology in from the cold

The Icelandic singer is breaking new ground, releasing her seventh album, Biophilia, as a series of apps, writes Ian Forde

IT IS no secret that the record industry is facing the greatest crisis of its existence. Over the past 12 years or so, the advent of MP3s and online music sharing has precipitated a massive slump in record sales, and the industry has had to look long and hard at how it is to survive in a world where endless free music can be accessed with just the click of a mouse.

Artists have reacted in radically different ways to the rise of what the industry decries as online piracy. Some acts have embraced it. In October 2007, Radiohead invited their fans to pay what they thought appropriate for downloading their seventh studio album, In Rainbows. In March 2008, the Charlatans released their album, You Cross My Path, for free online, and reported a four-fold increase in their income from playing live over the following year.

Now the Icelandic singer Bjork is going one better. Next month, she is to release her new project, Biophilia, as a series of apps in liaison with Apple. There will, of course, be a physical version of the album, but Bjork’s innovation has been to create a series of 10 apps, all housed within one mother app, that will allow her fans access to videos and games developed around each track, as well as the musical score and an essay by music academic Nikki Dibben.

Bjork still insists on the importance of her live performances. She debuted material from the album at a series of concerts in Manchester earlier this summer, and plans to tour Biophilia this year and next. She has also created several new instruments for the project, including the gameleste — a cross between a gamelan and a celesta — that can be heard on new single Crystalline.

Some of Bjork’s new music was composed on her iPad, and it is this, her enthusiasm for the new technologies, that will differentiate Biophilia from the glut of other music released this year. As the singer seems to appreciate, recordings are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of music, and it is up to musicians to make the most of their potential.

Great classical composers such as Beethoven, Bach and Liszt never had the opportunity of recording their music, and there is no physical record of them actually performing their own pieces.

Thomas Edison introduced the phonograph, or record player, as recently as 1877.

The long-playing vinyl record, or LP, was introduced by Columbia in 1948, and the seven-inch single was introduced by RCA Victor a year later. These facilitated the widespread dissemination of recorded music, and helped make the record industry a multi-billion dollar goldmine.

Magnetic cassette tapes came on the market in the early 1970s, and while they allowed greater flexibility — they could, for instance, be played in motor vehicles — they were despised by purists for the inferior quality of their sound.

Digital recordings also began to become popular in the 1970s. Compact discs arrived in 1982. Again, they were flexible, and seemed more durable than vinyl records, but many people thought their sound quality was inferior. Sales peaked in 2000, a year after Napster introduced its file sharing service, which allowed users to distribute MP3 digital music files online for free.

The advent of file-sharing was arguably the most revolutionary development in the history of popular music, as it wrested power away from the record companies. But the free distribution of music has impacted hugely on record sales, much to the chagrin of those same companies, and increasingly, of music artists, who have begun to appreciate how little revenue now accrues to them from royalties.

Worldwide, record sales are said to have decreased as much as 25% — from $38.6 billion to $27.5bn — between 1999 and 2008, and the slump shows no sign of abating. While music artists generate income from other sources — playing live, selling merchandise and leasing music to advertisers, film and television — everybody involved in the industry would love to recapture the glory days of multi-million unit record sales.

Bjork’s Biophilia may not be as revolutionary as those involved in it might like to think, but it certainly suggests that the way forward is for musicians to engage with technology and find new ways of harnessing its potential.

As music becomes easier to access online, it’s also worth noting that physical recordings, such as those on vinyl, have become collector’s items. Collectors will already be salivating at the prospect of acquiring the Ultimate Edition of Biophilia, limited to 200 copies, which includes the album, a second CD of bonus recordings, a manual, photographs and a booklet that includes the songs’ scores, lyrics and the stories behind their composition. The package will also include a set of tuning forks, each adjusted to the tone of one of the 10 tracks from the album.

* Biophilia is released on Nonesuch/One Little Indian on September 27