“There was a large concern about the album being sort-of released via grainy video and leaked out online,” said Wesley Schultz, the band’s lead singer.

So the band decided to lock up people’s phones — not take them away, exactly, but just lock them up for the show. Like a timeout.

At the concerts, The Lumineers started working with a company called Yondr, which created a locking pouch for people to hold their phones in during performances. Audience members keep the pouches with them, and they stay sealed as long as they’re inside an established “phone-free zone,” but unlock outside of that.

Schultz said he was surprised at how well it works.

“If you can set it up so that people can’t get to their phones as easily or are deterred, people actually really welcome that,” he said. “It’s just such a strong force of habit in our lives right now.”

Schultz has taken it a step further and adopted the mentality in his personal life: At his wedding, he and his wife asked guests to check their phones at the door.

“It wasn’t because of any sort of a, ‘I don’t want photos of anyone at the wedding’ — it was more, we wanted people to be present,” he said.

That’s become somewhat of a mantra for entertainers these days.

As Beyonce herself told fans at a recent show, “Y’all gotta put the camera phones down for one second and actually enjoy this moment.”

Adele, too: “Yeah, I want to tell that lady as well, can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I’m really here in real life — you can enjoy it in real life.”

Smartphones may be ubiquitous, but there are still limits to common courtesy. Recently the movie theater chain AMC backed off a proposal to allow texting in cinemas after it garnered enormous public backlash.

Schultz thinks that sense of decency should extend to live music.

“I think of it like, if we had that same attitude and you went to see Hamilton, people would be totally up in arms about that,” Schultz said. “But for some reason it’s completely acceptable to do at shows.”

(That said, Hamilton isn’t immune to cellphone faux pas either. As The New York Times reported, the musical’s star Lin-Manuel Miranda once chastised a certain celebrity on Twitter for incessant texting. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone grabbed a phone away from one audience member in the middle of Shows for Days.)

In this environment, Yondr has found fans of its own in artists like Alicia Keys and comedians like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. and Hannibal Buress.

It’s not just about cutting the distractions of glowing screens and, worse, ringing phones. For some, there’s also a concern of creative security.

According to a Washington Post article, Keys hired Yondr for a concert where she planned to premiere new songs from her first album since 2012’s Girl on Fire. Louis C.K. did the same when he was trying out a new set at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood.

A new patent granted to Apple — for infrared technology that could disable smartphone cameras remotely from the stage — might make those pouches obsolete one day. But the idea is the same.

Not everyone has reacted positively to the idea of a “phone-free zone,” however.

“Even at one of the shows, a guy brought in a knife with him — just, he usually carries a knife, I guess — and he tried to stab through the case,” Schultz said. “And it’s got steel, I think, woven into it. So his knife got stuck in the thing, and then when he had to leave, he had the embarrassing deal of having to tell the people that he tried to open it, and they had to pry his knife loose.”

Will Yondr, or methods like it, eventually become the norm in entertainment? Schultz thinks so: “Something tells me in a little while we’ll kinda look back and say, ‘We were a little out of control with our use of phones — we didn’t really know boundaries. We were sort of working it out.’ ”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The letter, from a law firm representing Universal, was addressed to the antitrust bureau of the attorney general’s office. It stated that Universal currently has no deals with Apple or companies such as Sony Music that would “impede the availability of free or ad-supported music streaming services, or … limit, restrict, or prevent UMG from licensing its recorded music repertoire to any music streaming service.”

The letter did not specifically say Apple was among the targets of the investigation. But Universal’s attorneys did say the company was not colluding with Apple or its two major rival labels, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had this response:

“This letter is part of an ongoing investigation of the music streaming business, an industry in which competition has recently led to new and different ways for consumers to listen to music. To preserve these benefits, it’s important to ensure that the market continues to develop free from collusion and other anti-competitive practices.”

The investigation centers on whether Apple may have urged the labels to drop support for free, ad-supported streaming services such as Spotify and Google’s YouTube. Such a move could be seen as anti-competitive.

Albert Foer, the founder of the American Antitrust Institute, says the current investigation may have been sparked in part by Apple’s history. The company was found guilty last year of conspiring with book publishers to raise the price of e-books when it launched its online book store. Among those who brought the charges were 33 state attorneys general, including Schneiderman.

There are some parallels between the music industry and the publishing business. At the time Apple entered into the e-book market, publishers were upset by the prices Amazon was forcing on them. Apple had a business model that let publishers set the prices higher. In the case of music, the labels have been unhappy with the money paid out by free, ad-supported services. Most famously, Taylor Swift withheld her latest music from Spotify over the issue.

“The suspicion would be of the corporate culture and how they operate,” Foer says about why the attorney general would investigate Apple Music. “It’s just that investigators will have suspicions in some cases because of what happened in the past.” But he says the investigation could also have been triggered by complaints from someone inside the music industry.

Chris Castle, a music industry attorney, finds it hard to believe that Apple would follow the same road that made it the target of an investigation that resulted in a $450 million settlement, along with supervision by an antitrust monitor. “The idea that these guys would blindly walk into this is crazy,” says Castle. “It just doesn’t seem plausible.”

In fact, Connecticut State Attorney General George Jepsen, who is also focused on music streaming, told Reuters that his office was satisfied that Universal did not have anti-competitive agreements to withhold music titles from free services. However, Jepsen did not say he’d stopped investigating Apple. And European Union officials are also investigating Apple Music.

But Castle says he will be surprised if this goes anywhere. Apple, he notes, has a lot of competition in the streaming music space: Spotify, YouTube, GooglePlay, Amazon. “There are inquiries all the time” he says. “They ask a few questions. You send a response and that’s it.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Yanez worries that more artists will follow Taylor Swift‘s lead and pull their music from the streaming service, though she believes this is their right. Aside from the limits to Spotify’s library, offline listening has also been a problem for her on long drives when she doesn’t plan ahead. She expects other services to compete with her current preference, though, and she’s willing to think big about what tomorrow might hold (“chips in our ears or brains?”).

“The only thing I know for sure is that I love music so much, it gets me through my days, it comforts me, it excites me,” Yanez writes in an email. “And when I can’t listen it frustrates me.”

With Apple poised to roll out a full-fledged streaming music offering of its own sometime soon, the battle between streaming and downloads will effectively be over. So it’s worth taking stock of what, exactly, would be the ideal streaming experience for listeners like Yanez, as well as for the artists and labels whose music makes the whole system possible.

Spotify, which now counts 15 million paying subscribers, has used the 40 million mark as a magic number for when it will be paying a more traditional amount to musicians. The suggestion, essentially, is that scale is the key to creating a world where everybody gets what they want.

With that in mind, NPR asked a wide range of people, well, what they want — through crowd sourcing and traditional interviews — and also collected commentary about streaming from public statements by musicians and others.

Listeners who responded to our crowdsourcing questions about their streaming utopia weren’t, by and large, asking for science fiction. Many were happy with their current digital tools, from Google’s Play Music All Access to the nonprofit concert archives at archive.org, and just wished for slight improvements, though they frequently expressed concern that artists should be getting a bigger cut of the profits.

High quality audio was one common desire, as was improved cover art work and liner notes, but more often perfection looked like a matter of minor tweaks.

Laura Whitehead, a 31-year-old high school teacher from Baltimore, Md., has had a $10-a-month Spotify subscription for two or three years, and her only complaint is that she can’t control playlists on her phone as well as on her computer — “par for the course with most apps,” she tells NPR in an email.

“When I’m tired of something or I don’t want it anymore, I just delete it without feeling like I’ve wasted my money,” Whitehead says. “To be honest I’d probably pay a little more.”

Price, of course, hasn’t become less of an object for all. For Hana Sambur, a streaming utopia would unite unlimited music from currently disparate music platforms, whether Spotify or Soundcloud. And it would do so at a rate that makes sense for her as a 21-year-old international student from Indonesia, studying at the University of Washington.

“A $7.50 per month fee, I think, is reasonable, as it recognizes the ethical responsibility of paying back musicians who worked hard for their art,” she writes in an email.

Among musicians, accustomed to disappointing royalties statements from streaming and a lack of artistic control over the format, a perfect world for digital music may be harder to imagine.

Jay Z’s contentious rollout of his recently acquired high-end streaming service Tidal signals his streaming utopia might prioritize lossless audio, plus an ownership stake for artists — at least, the most established ones.

Aloe Blacc, writing in Wired last November, called for regulatory changes allowing songwriters to earn more than the $4,000 he says he received domestically from Pandora for co-writing the No. 1 hit “Wake Me Up!” by Avicii. Björk, in a recent Fast Company interview, praised the Netflix model, saying that perhaps music, like cinema, should be a physical experience before it’s available for streaming.

For musicians at a more modest level, trading the old record industry for new streaming overlords can be a case of “meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.”

“The big issue is finding something that is actually ‘artist friendly’ and not just ‘music business friendly,'” emails Casey Dienel, who has recorded three albums as White Hinterland. “I’m tired of the rhetoric that streaming will ballast the fallout of the recording industry — an industry that has a checkered past when it comes to exploitation and trust issues with artists to begin with.”

Dienel worries about artists’ control over the listening experience, not only their compensation. Comparing the current streaming process to “buying pre-packaged ground beef in the store,” she envisions a utopia where listeners could gain a deeper knowledge of their music’s sources and context. Specifically, she praises EMA’s 2014 digital zine Back to the Void, released through the web platform New Hive, and the online setup of Nicolas Jaar, whose Other People label offers its own $10-a-month subscription service.

Rebecca Gates, a solo musician and arts advocate who formerly led the ’90s indie-rock band The Spinanes, voices similar suspicions about industry forces. She’s putting out her own music now and has chosen not put it on Spotify, although she suggests she’d be open to starting her own small subscription service for fans on her email list.

“Who is benefiting the most?” she asks of the current streaming landscape. “It’s huge corporations. It’s a wealth and data grab.”

Fred Thomas, an indie-pop stalwart who recently released the solo album All Are Saved, remembers seeing new faces at shows — but selling fewer records — during a 2010 tour of Sweden, when Spotify was available in Europe but not yet in the United States.

“All the different streaming services — it’s a joke,” he says in an email. “How could one possibly be better than another? It’s all free music that almost never sees any money coming back to the artist unless they’re world famous.”

Sharky Laguana, who led the ’90s and early-’00s indie-rock band Creeper Lagoon, urges a change in how streaming companies calculate royalties.

Currently, in what Laguana describes as a “pari-mutuel” system, Spotify takes about a 30% share of its total income, and musicians (often via labels or another intermediary) receive a cut of the rest that’s based on their percentage of the service’s overall plays. Every listen ends up counting for the same amount of money, whether a given subscriber listened to 10 songs in a month or 1,000.

In a Medium post last November, Laguana proposed shifting to a system based on “subscriber share,” where only the artists that a subscriber listens to would split up the royalties paid out from that subscriber’s monthly fee. “The fairest measure of value is whatever the subscriber decided to do with the resources that were given for them with the money they paid,” he tells NPR. “If I listen to Led Zeppelin 25% of the time, Led Zeppelin gets 25% of my money.”

Streaming, however utopian, isn’t yet the end-all, be-all for all types of artists. Take singer-songwriter Josh Ritter. While streaming tends to be more convenient for his younger fans than his older ones, both cohorts seek out Ritter’s physical albums and live shows “as a mile marker in their relationship with him as an artist,” says his manager, Darius Zelkha, of Tough Love Artist Management. “In that sense, we’re lucky to have a fan base that toes the line here.”

In general, though, the line Zelkha describes is clearly moving. As the number of people willing to pay for a streaming services rises, it makes sense that the number who are willing to pay for physical albums will dwindle. At the very least, sales of CDs — which last year, at 141 million units, were down 82% from their 2000 level, according to Nielsen Music — would be set for a continued slide. (By comparison, vinyl album sales in 2014, despite hitting an historic high, totaled only 9.2 million copies.)

Against that backdrop of streaming overtaking physical discs, skepticism about the new paradigm’s ability to make up for what artists have lost over the last 15 years runs as high as a band that once signed one of the most lucrative recordings contracts ever. “For the consumer it’s great,” says R.E.M.’s longtime manager Bertis Downs. “[For artists] it’s hard to see the math ever working out.”

From a label perspective, larger outfits are betting the current streaming system could evolve into a flourishing ecosystem.

“An ideal streaming world would be one where there are dozens upon dozens of different kinds of unique services for fans to choose from, and all pay fair market rates to music creators while sustaining thriving businesses,” says Cara Duckworth, a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents the major labels. “Fans are happy, artists earn a healthy return and labels can invest in artists. Streaming is still a nascent business. We’re confident we can get there.”

Martin Mills, founder and chairman of the Beggars Group, a U.K. group of independent labels (many of which release music in the United States as well), has taken a public stand in streaming-related debates before, but he too speaks as if the utopia might not be too distant.

“We’re happy with how Spotify looks as a role model, and are confident about their ambitions for future growth, especially of the premium tier,” Mills says in an emailed statement. “Our artists are already seeing very significant benefits on their royalty statements and with their royalty checks from audio streaming income. But we also see the future as a mixed consumption model — streaming will keep growing, but downloading and physical are not going away anytime soon.”

Representatives of indie labels and artists have recently criticized a digital music business they see as damagingly opaque. Mills referred to “reduced transparency” in a February speech for a U.K. trade group the Entertainment Retailers Association. At the same event, Radiohead manager Brian Message also warned of non-disclosure agreements that mask tactics he said “distort the market,” including “equity positions at the expense of streaming rates.”

Some see sunlight as the best solution. Darius Van Arman, cofounder of the Secretly Group, a U.S. group of indie labels, explains that, by helping to build trust in an area riddled with artist criticisms about money, greater transparency could go hand in hand with an increase in the number of paid streaming subscribers.

“A more transparent licensing structure will ease some of the knee-jerk reactions and really help the creative community embrace streaming,” Van Arman says. “By doing that, I think there’s a greater chance that streaming will grow.”

In the business world, disclosure requirements tend to be enforced by federal regulators. Music is no exception.

Tony Kiewel, VP of A&R at Sub Pop, says streaming royalty rates in his perfect world would be set with government oversight, as is already the case for the so-called “mechanical” royalties paid for songwriting. “This would undercut the troubling trend of major labels brokering deals that grant them ownership stakes in the streaming companies in exchange for rates which may not in fact be in their artists’ best interests,” he explains in an email, noting his thoughts don’t necessarily reflect Sub Pop’s position.

For smaller labels, a streaming utopia might literally be “no place.”

Leeor Brown, who founded the Friends of Friends label in 2009, says that while “realistically an ideal streaming service is one that pays appropriately,” he worries that a short-lived moment when smaller artists could make a decent living may be coming to an end.

DFA Records label manager Kris Petersen concedes, “The strategy we’re having is, we’re sort of shrinking down a bit to match whatever market there is left for people who will actually pay an adequate price for music.”

What ultimately matters is the connection between audiences and artists, not between audiences and streaming providers, say Maggie Vail and Jesse Von Doom, co-executive directors of CASH Music, an artist career-sustainability nonprofit co-founded by Von Doom, Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh and L7’s Donita Sparks.

“Our ideal view of a streaming service would be one where artists and music are valued; where the service facilitates that artist/audience connection rather than trying to dominate it,” Vail and Von Doom write in a joint email. “That’s the only healthy way forward for artists of all sizes, and the long-term health of artists is vital to any music business.”

The idea that the valuable relationship is the one between creators and listeners puts a level of responsibility on music lovers. Not all music is valuable to any one person, perhaps, but some music has a great value. How much that’s reflected in the marketplace is for audiences to decide.

To electronic-pop artist Mauro Remiddi, who has released two albums as Porcelain Raft, in a way the music industry was ever thus. He points out that many people have long been what he calls “DIY streamers,” whether recording audio cassettes from the radio or videotapes from MTV.

“Let’s accept that in our century people pile up music, most of us never even listen to all the music we download (at times for free) or have on our streaming playlist,” Remiddi says in an email. “Here’s the catch. Stream for free, but if you find yourself going back to a certain song, to a particular album and you find yourself captured by that artist’s way of representing the world then you should support it [with purchases].”

Free music has been available to a lesser extent for decades, in other words, and so has the ideal way of expressing the worth of the music: some actual money returning to musicians.

Indeed, Acacia DiCiaccio, a 25-year-old marketing professional from Whitinsville, Mass., describes a streaming utopia close to concept of the so-called celestial jukebox. A self-acknowledged “huge music nerd,” she has shifted over the past few years from downloads on an iPod to Spotify streaming. In her utopia, both of these libraries would be integrated — which, to be sure, some services aim to do today — and it would all fit on her phone.

Her perspective, shared in an email to NPR, also illustrates that the perfect worlds of listeners, artists and musicians may forever be slightly out of synch, in a way that perhaps is endemic to a market-based society.

“For something like this I’d be willing to pay a subscription fee or one-time purchase fee,” she says, “although in a utopia it would all be free.”

Does she think that musicians should still be paid? “Definitely,” she says, when asked. “In utopia, they’d be paid for streaming more than they are getting paid now by Spotify and other streaming services,”

Given the unresolved dissonances between the priorities of artists, labels and listeners — let alone technology companies — a world dominated by streaming sounds like a work in progress.

In the digital music economy, nobody’s perfect.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Today, the original iPod, which was discontinued after just 13 years, looks as quaint as Sony’s Walkman cassette player, which survived more than 30. Last year, according to a report by Nielsen SoundScan, sales of digital songs dropped by more than 12 percent. Digital album sales were down almost 10 percent. They will not rebound in 2015.

Instead, more music fans are turning to free, ad-supported and paid-subscription services that offer instant access to libraries that would make the wildest dreams of the iPod user seem tame. The era of streaming music is upon us, and if you need writing on the wall, turn to the relentless coverage of Apple’s acquisition of Beats Music, a subscription service that is scheduled to be rolled into the iTunes platform sometime this year, possibly as soon as next week.

The timing can’t be an accident. Apple stands to gain plenty by luring its hundreds of millions of users to a subscription-based streaming service, but it stands to lose, as well: The transition will surely speed the decline of the single-song download, and iTunes, the world’s largest music store, will feel that pain acutely. Apple’s entry into the market isn’t the signal that the world is ready for streaming music; it’s proof that the transition has already begun.

So over the next week, rather than waiting to see when iTunes will launch its attack on established services like Spotify, we’re going to examine the world of streaming music that is upon us in a series called Streaming At The Tipping Point.

As these services have taken hold — Nielsen says that in 2014, on-demand streaming rose 54 percent — the news media has primarily covered them in two ways: as generators (but not always fair distributors) of cash and as technological novelties.

The question of money — of royalties — is a crucial one to the survival of the recording industry. But streaming music has unlocked other new questions for the musician and fan alike: of ownership, of taste and of morality. Do we listen differently when we have unlimited options? Does the rise of the streaming service eliminate the very need for a library of one’s own, or does it just change how we acquire and interact with that library? Do your musical preferences belong to you? What role do listeners play in ensuring the life of music and the livelihood of musicians?

For a large part of the recording industry, the move to embrace streaming actually solves a long-time paradox: one of ownership. Over digital music’s 30-year evolution, from the public introduction of the compact disc in 1981 to the international expansion of Spotify in the last half-decade, the question of whether listeners owned the music they purchased got murkier.

In an earlier era, there was no such question — buying a vinyl record meant you could listen to the music until you wore it out, filed it away forever or grew a new set of ears and snapped the old disc in half.

Call the CD — and the digital files it so precariously contained, the sources of the fundamental rift between listeners and labels — the digital infection. Once you could strip a song from its physical home and make a copy (or many copies), that control seemed to imply ownership. The recording industry’s fight against that principle took on the form of invasive digital rights management software, advertising campaigns, threats and lawsuits. You weren’t buying the music itself when you purchased an album or a song, it said, just the right to listen to it. But the MP3, the digital format gone airborne, turned this germ into a pandemic. The industry could argue all it wanted that listeners didn’t have the right to make copies and share them with strangers, but every new piece of technology made the counter-argument.

Streaming, at least the label-sanctioned version, puts the genie back in the bottle. Every time you click play on a streaming service, from Pandora to YouTube to Spotify, you’re licensing the right to listen to the song in that particular moment, whether you pay a subscription or sit through an ad. Ownership is never even an option. You listen, you license. If you want to listen again, you license again. In this way, streaming music suggests the passing of two eras: the digital download, but also the concept that fans might possess music itself.

No format lives forever. The LP, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 — each one dominated the market for about 15 years before ceding to the next technological advance. Will this latest revision define a new relationship between fans and cloud-bound digital files? The truth is, listeners bend each format to the utility they desire, and adapt to its particular attributes. The question we’ll ask over the next week is this: How will streaming change us?

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

But many people say they are leaving iTunes simply because it isn’t that easy to use. When the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs introduced iTunes almost exactly 14 years ago, on Jan. 9, 2001, he made fun of the other software-based music players like Real Jukebox and Windows Media Player. “They are too complex,” Jobs declared. “They’re really difficult to learn and use.” Jobs unveiled the first version of iTunes software from a stage in San Francisco, boasting that it was “really clean, really simple” and “far more powerful.”

It charmed a generation of music fans like Alex Newsom, who gets nostalgic talking about the first iTunes purchase she made when she was only 13 years old. “I downloaded this song by Liz Phair where it’s like ‘Why Can’t I Breath Without You,’ ” Newsom says. “I thought I was supercool because it was my first kind of grown-up-sounding song that I’d gone after myself.”

Newsom, who lives outside Seattle, is now 21 and increasingly frustrated with iTunes. For example, a recent update moved the playlist feature around. “You can still kind of go do things the old way but you have to go out of your way to do it,” she says. “And it’s clearly not the way that they expect you to do it.”

Newsom is not alone in her frustration. Jason Mosley, a Web designer who specializes in user experiences, says the last version of iTunes he used — 11 — made him work harder to do what he wanted. For example, instead of being able to create a stream of songs based on a single song he likes with one click, he now has to hover over the song and bring up a temporary menu and then select from different options.

Mosley says he was “shocked to see that they had this all nested within another link.” The Web designer says, “As a rule of thumb, for user experience you want less clicks to get to an action.”

Mosley says part of Apple’s problem is that the basic design is old. “It was built for older things,” he says. “I think it’s just kind of been added onto since then, and that’s just going to make it heavy and slow. Spotify, these new applications, they have the advantage. They are starting fresh.”

Indeed, iTunes has been through a lot of changes over the years. It’s more than a music service — it’s where customers buy and consume movies, TV shows and podcasts. Apple added a streaming radio service similar to Pandora.

Spotify is simpler. It’s all about music. Mosley has switched over, saying he’s willing to pay the $10 monthly subscription fee for the premium, ad-free version of the service because it’s so much easier to use.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, thinks Apple should get credit for breaking open a new model for music with the mix of its software and the iPod — the first easy-to-use MP3 player. “The reason iTunes was adopted so well in the beginning was really not because it was great software,” he says. “It was because it was connected to this hardware that was unlocking your music access and letting you take it with you on the go and that was such a novel sensation.”

But McQuivey thinks Apple got a little over-confident. “They dominated digital music for so long, and maybe they thought, ‘Well, this is good enough. Look, it’s working for people. It’s going to replace the CD. We might as well just sit on it.’ ”

Meanwhile, services like Spotify, Pandora and Soundcloud were perfecting a new model — one dependent less on hardware and more on increasingly ubiquitous and fast wireless and cellular networks and a simple, single function: Connect to the Internet and stream millions of songs.

The story may not be over for Apple’s music service. iTunes still has some 800 million registered users. This past year Apple purchased Beats, which, along with its popular headphones, has a streaming service, which many think will be added to iTunes this year. But it’s clear that even if Apple adds streaming, users will still have to deal with a fairly complex set of options.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Now, preservationists are worried that a lot of key information stored on CDs — from sound recordings to public records — is going to disappear. Some of those little silver discs are degrading, and researchers at the Library of Congress are trying to figure out why.

In a basement lab at the library, Fenella France opens up the door to what looks like a large wine cooler. Instead, it’s filled with CDs. France, head of the Preservation, Research and Testing Division here, says the box is a place where, using temperature controls, a CD’s aging process can be sped up.

“By increasing the relative humidity and temperature, you’re increasing the rate of chemical reaction occurring,” she says. “So we’re trying to induce what might potentially happen down the road. That gives us a feel for how long things are going to [take to] age.”

France says part of what they are trying to do here is determine the minimal conditions needed for libraries and archives everywhere to preserve CDs.

“Smaller institutions don’t have the resources to control environments tightly,” she says. “One of the things we try to do is sort of look at how wide can that range be, as long as it doesn’t fluctuate too much. And [if] it’s stable, then that’s usually the best thing.”

Unfortunately, this testing has also found that not all CDs are the same. Michele Youket, a Library of Congress preservation specialist, plays a CD of classical piano rhapsodies by Erno Dohnanyi. It crackles, and eventually the sound just cuts out.

This is a variant of what’s called “CD rot,” Youket explains. In this case. it’s what’s called “bronzing.” The outer coating of the CD erodes, leaving a silver layer exposed. And when you leave silver exposed, it tarnishes.

“So it’s actually changing the composition, and that’s why you hear the scratching there,” Youket says.

And here’s the thing about CDs: Youket says part of what makes it hard to preserve CDs is that they are not uniform. There were a lot of different standards of manufacturing, depending on the year and the factory.

“This phenomenon of bronzing was particular to only discs that were manufactured at one particular plant in Blackburn, Lancashire, in England,” and only between 1988 and 1993, Youket explains.

“Everyone always wants to know the answer to the same question, ‘How long do CDs last? What’s the average age?’ ” Youket says. But “there is no average, because there is no average disc.”

The Library of Congress has around 400,000 CDs in its collections, ranging from congressional records to popular music, and the library regularly gets donations of CDs.

Real estate records and titles were also moved from microfilm to CD beginning in the 1990s all around the country, says Jim Harper, president of the Property Records Industry Association.

“They just made the move because they thought anything that was digital, anything that was electronic, was going to be far superior to anything from the past,” Harper says. “And it turns out that that was indeed wrong.”

With budgets tight for local governments, Harper says most are not going to be able to move to another form of storage in the near future.

PRIA has been taking Youket out to speak to county officials, to at least make certain they understand the problem they’re facing.

“We’ve been working very hard to … say, ‘Listen, if you’re going to use these things, you better be careful what you buy, because it’s not all created equally,’ ” Harper says.

Increasingly, CDs aren’t being created at all. The record shops that sold them are going out of business, and new computers don’t come with CD drives any more. Even so, many of us still have dozens or hundreds of CDs.

Researcher France says many of them can actually last for centuries if they’re taken care of. “The fastest way to destroy those collections is to leave them in their car over summer,” she says — “which a lot of people do.”

Sadly, your favorite CDs — the ones you’ve played a lot — are often the ones that are most likely to be damaged.

These days, the Library of Congress is starting to archive material on servers, which France acknowledges could pose an entirely different set of still-unknown problems in the future.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Young was plainspoken as he explained what motivated him to develop a new digital music player. As the world has gone digital, he said, many things have gotten better.

“You know, cameras got easier to use,” Young says. “Everything went up — and music went down.”

Young says MP3 files, and the similar ones you get on iTunes, actually hurt his ears. The same compression process that allows these files to move faster over the Internet and take up less room on your computer or device also takes away a lot of subtle highs and lows in the music.

“What we decided to do,” Young says, “was to come out with a new system that was not a format, had no rules, respected the art, respected what the artist was trying to do and did everything that it could to give you what the artist gave.”

Young says the music sold in the Pono store will sound anywhere from 5 to 25 times better than an MP3 — though the 128GB player can handle files of just about any format, setting it apart from iTunes and Apple’s mobile devices, which do not support certain formats.

Visually, the Pono player lacks the sleekness of Apple’s products (many online commenters have compared its triangular prism shape to a Toblerone bar). And it comes at a heftier price — about 400 dollars for this first release. Despite those limitations, Pono’s Kickstarter campaign exceeded its $800,000 goal just hours after launching; at the time of this writing, supporters have pledged $1.5 million and counting.

Young received praise from many musicians after his speech in Austin. But some in the industry think Young might be coming a little late to the music player game.

“A lot of consumers are opting for the convenience of streaming,” says Mike McGuire, an analyst for the technology research company Gartner. “People are kind of feeling a preference for being able to carry it around and access it from any device.”

But even proponents of streaming music would like to see better audio quality. D.A. Wallach is the artist-in-residence for Spotify; he says he wants his little sister to be able to hear, say, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon in something other than MP3.

“She doesn’t even know what the experience is like of imagining the music in sort of three dimensions in between the speakers — and that’s always part of what I’ve found so magical about music, is actually how visual it can be when the conditions are right for listening,” Wallach says.

Wallach is hopeful, as more people get faster Internet connections, that streaming music services will deliver high-fidelity audio. But he says he’s still rooting for Young and Pono to raise awareness and create demand for higher-quality digital music. In his speech, Young made it clear that it would be fine with him if that’s all he achieved.

“If we fail, we’ve made enough noise so people know something’s wrong and they can hear it,” he said. “If some big huge company comes along and kicks our ass with millions and millions of dollars, that’s great for music. If they’ll do what we do, it’s a no-lose situation. We win.”

But Young still wants you to buy his player.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The map was created by Paul Lamere, who seems to have been caught by surprise by the popularity it gained after he posted it this week. And while he admits in the comments section of that post that there might be ways to improve his map, he certainly started an animated conversation with it.

“Yesterday I spent 45 minutes making a map to accompany a blog post, today I spend all day answering questions about it,” he tweeted. He later added, “Any second now I expect I’ll be getting a call from Seventeen Magazine for a photoshoot.”

The map caused a stir as people shared it on Facebook and Twitter. In discussing how their home state did, many also talked about the relief or disbelief the map inspired in them.

Those who were frustrated – “R.E.M.’s not from Maine!” “I’m from South Carolina and I’ve never heard of Hillsong Unlimited!” – might not have realized that despite appearances, the map depicts artists that distinguish states and regions from one another. That is to say, it doesn’t list your state’s most popular musical act; it lists the act that sets your state apart from all the others.

That point was lost on some folks, who were pushed down a confusing path by headlines that promised to reveal “Your State’s Favorite Music” or something along those lines.

Lamere is the director of developer platform at The Echo Nest, a tech company that works with streaming music services such as Rhapsody, SiriusXM, iHeartradio, and Rdio.

The findings “are based on the real listening behavior of a quarter million actual online music listeners,” says Marni Greenberg, the communications director for The Echo Nest. The map reflects the choices of listeners who have zip codes associated with their accounts.

And they emphatically do not reflect the popularity of artists in states. Instead, the data aims to reveal the differences in preference among states and regions.

Here are the five states whose assigned musical act was comparatively unloved by the rest of America:

• Alaska: Ginger Kwan (No. 33 vs. No. 12,062, for a gap of 12,029)
• Hawaii: J Boog (No. 40 vs. No. 4,703 for a gap of 4,663)
• Louisiana: Kevin Gates (No. 15 vs. No. 1,359 for a gap of 1,344)
• Wyoming: Dirty Heads (No. 48 vs. No. 1,334 for a gap of 1,286)
• South Dakota: Hinder (No. 42 vs. No. 1,154 for a gap of 1,112

One thing that might have helped to confuse some folks is that for some states, the map reflects what you might expect. George Strait represented Texas, for instance, while Bruce Springsteen’s name was on New Jersey and Phish was in Vermont. But in other cases, names seemed out of place.

Among the findings, the artist with the smallest gap between their appeal in a state and nationally was Sufjan Stevens, who (as you might expect) was big in Illinois, at No. 38. But he’s also doing well nationally, coming in at No. 68 for a gap, or “delta,” of only 30 spots.

As Lamere points out, he used several rules to populate the map. For starters, the acts must have music available on the streaming services whose data he consulted. He restricted the list of candidates to the top 50 artists in the target state.

And there could be no repeats. If two or more states all listen to the same artist, the one with the largest population got the name, while the others slid down to their second – or possibly far lower – choice.

For example, we can look at Washington, D.C., which doesn’t seem to be on Lamere’s map but is in an app that allows comparisons between states, regions, or the nation as a whole. With that in mind, we’re told people in D.C. would be more likely to listen to Phosphorescent, because the artist is ranked No. 44 in the district and No. 189 in the U.S.

And in an interesting twist on the metrics, Lamere’s tool lets us look at things from the other side of the prism, as well. The biggest gap between what’s popular nationally and what’s hot in D.C. exists in the person of Luke Bryan, we’re told. He’s at No. 48 in the U.S. but only at No. 647 in the district – a gap of 599 spots. Chris Brown and R. Kelly are next in line, with gaps of 121 and 99, respectively.

We should note that in our tinkering with the music app we’re using the default setting of 200 spots for “depth.” If you change that — dipping into a deeper well of music, essentially — you would probably get different results.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Beatsy seems to know me. That time when we were walking by the river and he suggested I listen to “Struttin’” by The Meters? He must have known my mood was dragging and I needed a boost. Or when we were alone in the kitchen, me nursing an Old Fashioned, and seemingly out of nowhere he put on a deep cut from my favorite John Cale album? I hadn’t input anything about the years I spent right after college listening to Paris 1919 every late afternoon. What, was Beatsy reading my mind?

When I let myself go and don’t think too hard about the reality of Beats Music — that, like every customizable online service, it’s partly pre-programmed and partly tracking me in a way that could also be defined as intrusive — I can pursue this fictional relationship. It’s a lot like that Spike Jonze movie Her (and I’m not the first music critic to acknowledge that), except our romance is wholly defined by our mutual love of old soul, weird European art rock and Dolly Parton.

I’m not as deluded as Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Theodore Twombly, of course; I don’t expect Beatsy to pleasure me in any way beyond the musical. But the splash made by Beats, the first streaming music service to come to listeners from the center of the conventional music industry, directly relates to its makers’ commitment to the system preferences of the human heart.

It’s right there in the company’s slogan, which describes Beats as “A new music service curated by people who believe music is emotion and life.” The most visible members of the Beats team are celebrities known for corralling intense feeling: Jimmy Iovine, the producer and record executive whom most Americans got to know as a mentor on American Idol; Dr. Dre, the hip hop pioneer who created the moodscape of gangsta rap and mentored pop’s most expressive head case, Eminem; and Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman who was second only to Kurt Cobain in revealing the tortured soul of ’90s alternative rock.

Their well-publicized participation is one of many reasons Beats has been warmly greeted by the media and socially active music fans. From its well-regarded team of curators to the chummy presence of playlist makers like Jay Z and Bruce Springsteen, every marketing message Beats sends assures potential users that it will treat the songs and artists they love with care. More importantly, I think, Beats seems to love and respect the music lover. It does this through an interface that’s designed to make listening to music feel as interactive as possible — like forming a friendship, or even a love affair.

At the heart of every winning aspect of Beats is a commitment to what should be obvious in 2014 — that music is not a product, but a process grounded in the human impulse to connect. “Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life,” the philosopher Susanne Langer once wrote; for both its makers and listeners, music can become a kind of doppelganger for feelings as it unfolds over time and then replays, not only on vinyl or whatever other material that contains it, but within our musings and memories. Once music could be recorded, that analogue became actually analog, then digital; people confused the packages holding it with the thing itself. Which wasn’t a thing. Thus the age of recordings unfolded, confusing us. Kids slept with their transistor radios and kissed the faces of their idols on album covers.

The great thing about the fluid and disembodied nature of streaming is that it reveals that there is no product, no end point or object to music: just playing, listening, loving, remembering, reinterpreting. This has always been true. Yet we can’t comprehend this without a way to talk about it. The people behind Beats seem to understand that love is the way.

The Beats slogan “Music is emotion” sounds like a corny catchphrase. But “music is relationship” is science — the sound waves hitting my ear, its signals running through my brain. The Beats interface is all about that relationship, and more than that, it offers that relationship by becoming a companion.

From the sign-up screen, with its gently rounded font and frequent, trust-building use of the word “you,” Beats Music is designed to resemble a sentient being. It’s nowhere near as good on the web as on my phone; it’s designed for the devices we caress with our fingertips and make our constant companions. Like Samantha, the operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Her, Beatsy doesn’t feel like a prop. It’s more like a character. Its success depends upon users’ willingness to feel something about a computer program, to use that program as an intermediary in creating human relationships, and ultimately to be in relationship with the interface itself, enjoying its subtleties with the smiling abandon of Joaquin Phoenix dancing with his virtual lover on the Santa Monica boardwalk.

The process of getting to know Beats reveals how it evokes artificial intelligence. It begins with the process of hooking up: during sign-up, Beatsy asked me a few questions that wouldn’t have been out of place on an early date with my own music-nerd husband. What kind of music do you like? No, wait, get more specific: Choose three favorite artists. No cheating! I pondered: Do I want to tell the interface I very occasionally listen to New Age? I could almost hear Beatsy chuckle seductively when I went ahead and filled in all of the available bubbles, trying to hedge my bets and, dare I say, impress him.

Because this process works through animation instead of a standard form, it feels more personal and continually compelling. Beatsy listens and responds. As soon as I picked my faves, he offered me a token of its esteem: a screen just for you with playlists and albums my preferences indicate that I’d like. I’d proven my grounding in classic sounds by selecting Dolly Parton and Percy Sledge, and shown a little daring by making my third pick the psych-metal band High on Fire. My new interface humored my old-school ways with a playlist of drinking songs by Willie Nelson and one introducing Sam Cooke (I’m familiar with him, Beatsy, don’t condescend) and threw in a suggestion to try the Japanese noise rock band Boris as a gesture toward my alternative side.

I could fall for this interface, I thought. It really did seem to be getting to know me. Next came the serious flirtation stage: playing with The Sentence, or what some have called “Mad Libs.” Thought up by Reznor, this feature has been much discussed as Beatsy’s most entertaining element: Fill in the blanks to make surrealistic sentences that describe the milieu, mood, and general style of a listening session. Here’s one I tapped in last week: I’m under the stars and feel like going out with Cupid to seminal indie. Your turn, Beatsy. The algorithm offered me Sleater-Kinney‘s “Words and Guitar” — one of my favorite songs! I almost blushed.

A game like this takes two, and as we played it, Beatsy seemed to understand me even better. Did it feel me getting bored with its selections when I proposed I’m on a rooftop and feel like working with beautiful people to vintage soul & funk? Once I switched working to chilling, the familiar Aretha and Otis tracks were usurped by semi-obscurities by Allen Toussaint and Betty Davis. But Beatsy wasn’t perfect, and even this I appreciated. Some of his moves were laughably clunky: Every time I’d change my location to in my underwear he’d whip out “Let’s Get It On.” I kind of loved that. The system was naïve; I’d have to teach Beatsy a few things.

But what if you don’t want to fall in love with Beatsy? What if you just want to use him, ahem, it? That’s possible, but not easy. The search function takes time to master; it presents cluttered pages that require wading to get to specific content. It also gets things wrong, in the way you’d expect from a young interface. Searching for tracks by the vintage ’50s crooner Johnnie Ray, I got Ray Wylie Hubbard and Intro to Sugar Ray. I expect Beats programmers will learn, as its users learn, to overcome these errors. But I doubt that’s a priority for the company. Just as public libraries have turned away from their archival functions to become gathering places for locals interested in meeting each other or using the Internet and other services, Beats will likely never prioritize active archival explorations — which aren’t about relationships, but acquisition (of information, if not actual downloads). That’s okay. The Library of Congress is still there for my nerd needs.

Beats poses two other problems; one it may evolve past and the other is more sinister. The service is highly curated, with playlists by experts and charismatic enthusiasts from the staff of XXL Magazine to indoor cycling hub Soulcycle to sports stars like LeBron James and musicians like Nikki Six (whose playlist of Best First Cuts From 1970s Albums rocks, man). But their identities are downplayed in favor of the interface itself, and as Eliot van Buskirk pointed out in his Hypebot review of Beats, those playlists are fixed. Beatsy still doesn’t provide what an old-fashioned record store clerk could give — or for that matter, a real sweetheart: human interaction that changes with you as your mood changes and your knowledge grows.

My other reservation about Beats is the same one some critics have expressed about Her‘s Samantha. Let’s be real. Beatsy is a corporate tool. I paid for him. (Actually, I was provided a free trial by the company, but I’m going to pay for him. No way I’m giving this guy up.) And he — it — must ultimately serve a bottom line that’s not emotional, but oriented toward profit. Beatsy wants my money, and that influences the ways it romances me: what artists are highlighted in the playlists, what pops up on my “just for you” page, and other factors I may not even notice yet. The deep intimacy and individuality of musical expression and reception always makes us forget that within capitalism, it is always a commodity. Beatsy is particularly good at erasing this awareness.

That’s the lure, if also the danger, of consumer culture as it becomes ever more sophisticated: its incomplete satisfactions keep expanding to suit the limits of the everyday. Music now often feels best within the comfortable constraints a great interface provides. Like the many other screen-frames we now put around our lives, Beats redefines solitary experiences (reading, tapping on a keyboard and, usually, listening on headphones) as communal. Maybe it seems strange that it works so well when applied to music listening, which can be so sweatily, sexily physical in other contexts. But isn’t music also somehow always experienced alone? My ears. My song. My Beatsy. It’s not as lonely as it sounds.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.