How a file format brought an industry to its knees

By Mona Lalwani 

MP3. It's the format that revolutionized the way music's been consumed since the late '90s. When Karlheinz Brandenburg, a German acoustics engineer, discovered that an audio file could be compressed down to one-twelfth of its original size without distortion, he created the file-shrinking technology. Stephen Witt's debut book, How Music Got Free, traces all digital music piracy back to the invention of that format, which inadvertently made it possible for people to download and share music illegally. The book details the science and struggle behind the widely used audio technology. And his investigation uncovers the politics and the manipulative men who kept MP3 files from seeing the light of computer screens for years.

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How Music Got Free

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When the MP3 format became accessible, after a long corporate battle, it eventually led to the rise of music piracy and simultaneous demise of CDs. But Witt reveals more than just the technology that systematically tore the music industry to pieces. He narrows the story down to two men at opposite ends of the same spectrum: Doug Morris, one of the most powerful record label CEOs in the industry, who made rap music top the charts and eventually led the fight against piracy; and Dell Glover, a factory worker at a Universal Music CD-manufacturing unit in North Carolina, who leaked about 2,000 albums, made Eminem change his album release date and became one of the biggest pirates in the largest underground scene, Rabid Neurosis (RNS).

When pirated music found its way online in the '90s and early 2000s, almost all of it came through RNS, which relied on Glover's access to the CDs weeks before release. Tech-savvy teens spent hours scouring the internet and loved having access to music before it hit the record stores, even if that meant jeopardizing the careers of the very artists they worshiped. At the time, it became virtually impossible to not download the MP3 files or know someone who did.

Witt's book is filled with nostalgic moments for a generation that grew up on piracy. But it's also informative for people who skipped that phase completely. He draws parallels between the inventions, the decisions and the theft that led to the downfall of the booming music industry -- an industry that never quite regained its glory. I caught up with the author to get the lowdown on his expansive work on digital piracy and his views on music streaming.

When and why did you get interested in music piracy?

I showed up at [the University of Chicago] in 1997 with a 2GB hard drive and by the end of the year, I filled it with pirated MP3s. This was really the first time in history that you could do it. Even a couple of years earlier the technology wasn't there. Over the next decade, I was a serial media pirate. I just hoarded tons of stuff. I was on all the underground pirate networks. It was such a thoughtless action to go and take something from the internet; I never really thought about who might have put it up there in the first place. As I got older, around 2010-2011, I wondered where all this stuff came from. When I started investigating it, I found all this fascinating stuff that turned into this book.

The original iPod from 2001

Your book underscores the technology that led to music piracy and the corporate drama behind it. It was fascinating and frustrating to know that half a dozen German engineers sat on a gold mine but couldn't share it with the world for years because their invention was systematically and viciously suppressed. Why was the music industry snubbing MP3 even though it was clearly a superior format to the MP2, which was widely accepted?

The music industry was [made up of] technophobes. When this information [about the MP3] first became available, they rejected it multiple times. The pirates [started] providing leaked compressed music through the internet and filling a vacuum that the music industry would not. The music corporations could've done that. They ended up being forced to do it much later anyway. But for a long time, they had to be dragged screaming into the modern era. Now I think anyone who owns a music company is thinking 20 years ahead about distribution. They've learned their lesson. But at the time they were totally clueless.

There's a moment when Ricky Adar, an entrepreneur, asks Brandenburg, "Do you realize what you've done? You've killed the music industry." Did the invention of the MP3 really destroy the industry or did it, in fact, push it to change and adopt a new way?

It was a bit of both. Adar was trying to push a service similar to what we call Spotify today. This was in 1995. He faced enormous resistance from the industry and at the time it wasn't even clear such a thing was technologically possible. When he saw the MP3, it was the first time he saw a device that actually shrunk music, but made it listenable. Previous devices did it, but they sounded pretty crappy. Why did he say it killed the industry? I think once the stuff got out, it wouldn't be copy protectable, people would start trading it online, which is exactly what happened. The profits would disappear because you could get it for free. It pushed the industry into the future, but even today they're only operating at about half the size that they were at the peak of compact discs in 2000. Still, it's not clear if they're ever gonna recover. They actually shrunk last year, even with Spotify.

The music industry eventually fought back against piracy. They went after Napster for copyright infringement. The RIAA also sued Diamond Multimedia, the company that created the first-ever commercially successful MP3 player. What was going on with these lawsuits?

"Apple almost acted like a money launderer for the spoils of Napster."

The judges ruled Napster was illegal, so the industry won that one. The legality of Napster wasn't obvious at first. Now it's clear that it was in violation of the law, but at the time there was no basis for ruling that. Simultaneously, there was a lawsuit against [Diamond] -- the earliest version of the MP3 player. But the judges ended up ruling that the MP3 player was just a hard drive and they could not limit its sales. So the music industry lost that suit. When it happened there were all these music files everywhere and then [the lawsuit] made all these portable players available. Essentially, the music industry won the wrong lawsuit.

Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify

Napster had the potential to shrink the massive profits that the music industry was making from CD sales, but for a time it wasn't impacting the sales at all. People couldn't go anywhere with their downloaded files. But when the MP3 player won the lawsuit (RIAA vs. Diamond), it made digital piracy portable and even led to the launch of the iPod, right?

For sure. Apple came kind of late to this. iTunes debuted in 2001. The iPod came in [later that year]. It didn't make an impact right away, but eventually people wanted to take all these files and make them portable. The iPod made that possible. So for a time it became the best-selling gadget ever. Apple's retail store had the highest sales per square foot of any retail business in history and a lot of it was from these $200-300 iPods. Eventually they moved to iPhone, but you can trace these developments in the global market all the way to the earliest days of piracy. It's like I say in the book, Apple almost acted like a money launderer for the spoils of Napster.

At one point in the book you say: "Controversy was temporary. Royalties were forever." I couldn't help but wonder how you perceive the aggressive shift from downloading to streaming services like Spotify and Tidal?

The stuff in the book is really nostalgia now. That era is closing and we've moved on to a new form. Instead of owning files, we license them from a large corporation; we're at their mercy. The trade-off is that artists get paid and we get access to everything ever written instantly. It's a pretty nice deal, but it limits the freedom of the user. What's going on right now is that there's more than half a dozen companies attempting to crack the music-streaming space. All of them are losing money and artists are making very little from these sites. But if they can get hundreds of millions of users to subscribe, it can work. They just have to make people willing to pay $120 a year. Half of Spotify's subscribers are under the age of 27 and these are people who grew up with piracy, including me.

I wonder if there's an all-powerful Doug Morris-type of the streaming world?

Daniel Ek -- the CEO of Spotify. He's Swedish and he founded the company in 2008 during the height of Pirate Bay frenzy. His entire mission statement for the company was to get people to pay for music again. Surprisingly enough, I would say he's been successful in doing that. Spotify is not a sustainable business right now. It's losing about $200 million a year and it's paying its artists a pittance. It's possible in the future it could evolve into a commercially viable model. It's not there yet. But for consumers it's been great.

If they can get their goal of 40 million [paid] subscribers, which is the size of the music industry right now, they might save everyone.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

[Images: Viking Press (top image); 37prime/Flickr (First gen iPod); Taylor Hill/FilmMagic (Daniel Ek, Spotify)]

In turmoil again, music industry once more looks to Apple to save it

By Cecilia Kang 

Taylor Swift will allow her album “1989” to be part of Apple’s service, the first streaming service to include her music. (L.E. Baskow/Reuters).

More than a decade ago, the music industry was in crisis. Songs were being passed around the Internet illegally free of charge. CD sales were in decline. So major labels and musicians embraced Apple, which convinced consumers to open their wallets again by buying digital songs through iTunes.

Now again in turmoil, the music industry is looking once more to Apple, which launches its new $10-a-month streaming service Tuesday. The challenge this time: Find a solution for the industry as it struggles with Web sites that are legally streaming songs for free online.

With its paid service, Apple will go against the grain of these proliferating sites — which partly fund themselves by requiring consumers to hear a few ads once in a while. Google, which has 1 billion music listeners through YouTube, introduced its own free streaming service last week. Pandora, the early streaming specialist, has 85 million listeners, and Spotify has doubled the number of its nonpaying users to 75 million in the past year.

3 times Taylor Swift was a savvy businesswoman

Taylor Swift's big win over Apple Music isn't the first time the pop star has proven her savvy business skills in the music industry. (Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)

The trends are a source of deep unease in the music industry, which would see a drastic change to its business model if it had to largely rely on advertising for revenue, rather than song sales.

“We are at an important inflection point of the evolution of music,” said Larry Miller, a professor of music business at New York University’s Steinhardt School. “After more than 15 years in digital music transition . . . only Apple has the potential to push streaming — paid streaming — into mainstream adoption.”

Apple is coming relatively late to the scene, but the tech giant arrives as labels and musicians have been searching for an alternative to Spotify. The privately-held firm was actually once championed by the music industry as an alternative to Pandora, but is now feared as it sees exponential growth.

After months of negotiations with music labels and artists big and small, Apple committed a vast marketing budget for glitzy TV ads and direct marketing to the hundreds of millions of e-mail accounts it holds. It also promised slightly better royalties to artists than Spotify and other streaming partners, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

And in a departure from its rivals, Apple promised to strictly enforce its policy that users must pay after a free, three-month trial.

“Apple is generally positive for artists in getting better pay because subscriptions pay about seven times as much as free services do to artists,” said David Lowery, a member of the bands Cracker and Camper van Beethoven and a lecturer in music economics at the University of Georgia.

“But we don’t want to create another monopoly where we end up like authors did with Amazon. What we want is more options,” Lowery said.

The stakes are just as high for Apple, which for the first time saw music downloads decline on iTunes for the first time last year. Two-thirds of U.S. consumers, meanwhile, are listening to streaming music each week, according to Nielsen Entertainment research.

When Spotify first launched in the United States in 2011, the three major music labels — Universal, Sony and Warner — threw their support behind the company and took equity in the privately-held firm. Spotify chief executive Daniel Elk pitched the labels, saying most users would come first as free listeners but then become hooked and eager to pay $10 a month for the service’s premium tier, which is ad-free and gives users more control over what they hear.

In a May earnings call, Warner Music chief executive Stephen Cooper reiterated the importance of getting users to start paying. “We continue to believe that the long-term sustainability of the ‘freemium’ model is predicated on high levels of conversion from ad-supported ‘free’ to paid subscription,” Cooper said. “Of course, in order to achieve those levels, the benefits of paid subscriptions must be clearly differentiated from the ad-supported offerings.”

But in the last four years, Spotify has struggled to grow its paid service. Almost all new users started out with the fee plan, but only about 20 percent to 30 percent of them became paying customers, according to industry executives.

Privately, music labels began to express frustration. Spotify wasn’t putting enough money into marketing its premium service and didn’t collect credit card numbers of new users to ease the transition to the premium tier, executives said. They complained that Spotify, preparing for a public offering, appeared more interested in bulking up its overall user numbers to impress investors than generating revenues that could be passed down to labels, writers and musicians.

“The irony of it is that there is nothing more that we wanted than to make Spotify a significant player, but what happened was that Spotify revealed its true colors — that it is no different than any Silicon Valley company that wants to build a whole business on audience and not subscribers,” said a music industry executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing relationships with streaming providers.

Apple and Spotify’s recent dealings with Taylor Swift was also telling, two music industry executives said.

Earlier this month, Taylor Swift complained that Apple wasn’t paying artists for their music during the new service’s three-month free trial period. Apple quickly agreed to reverse its policy.

But in November, Swift said she would keep her “1989” album off Spotify because she believed the company’s free tier of ad-supported streaming would never make enough money to support artists. She insisted her album “1989” should only be available to subscribers of Spotify’s premium tier. Spotify, however, wouldn’t budge; the company said it was sorry to see Swift leave.

“Our feeling was that Spotify is too entrenched in very simple principles. They said they would never put anything just on premium and were unwilling to take a nuanced approach,” said one industry executive who spoke privately to protect an ongoing relationship with Spotify.

Spotify disagrees that it hasn’t grown the number of paid users quickly enough.

“Nobody is more interested in driving subscriber growth than we are. Nobody has more data about what works and what doesn’t, and nobody has had anything close to our success in actually getting people to subscribe,” said Jonathan Prince, a spokesman for Spotify. “The numbers speak for themselves — 100 percent growth from 10 to 20 million in just a year, the highest conversion rate of any ‘freemium’ business, whether it’s music, video, news or games, and orders of magnitude more subscribers than any of our competitors.”

Cecilia Kang is a staff writer covering the business of media and entertainment.

Universal Music Group Announces Dismantling of Distribution Company, Executive Shuffles

By Ed Christman | April 24, 2015 5:48 PM EDT

Signage of Universal Music Publishing Group hangs outside the company headquarters in Santa Monica, California.

Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Universal Music Group has updated its U.S. structure, dropping the Universal Music Group Distribution name and folding that business into separate commercial enterprise functions within the company. The move follows theretirement of longtime leader Jim Urie last fall. At press time, Billboard had no word of layoffs resulting from the move.

The Universal Music Group Distribution name will be retired, but Candace Berry(previously evp and general manager of UMGD) will remain as executive vp of sales, overseeing account management, account analysis, sales administration and label relations.

Brand partnership responsibilities that were previously under UMGD and Universal Music Enterprises have been brought together under the oversight ofMike Tunnicliffe, executive vp of business development and partnerships, who will oversee all activity related to brand partnerships, strategic marketing alliances and marketing programs for advertisers.

As part of the realignment, Cynthia Sexton -- previously executive vp of brand partnerships and (synch) licensing for the Group's East Coast labels -- has been named executive vp of partnership content, charged with maximizing revenue and exposure for UMG artists and their work through the company's outside partners.

Angela Sanchez has been named as vp of customer relationship management and Alisa Olander as vp of insights. They are charged with building and integrating consumer and artist data.

Four other positions previously under UMGD will get new superiors, with two also getting new leaders from outside the company.

-- Mavis Takemoto will assume the title of executive vp of commercial services administration, as well as overseeing creative services.

-- Todd Goodwin will join UMG as vp of college & lifestyle marketing, working closely with labels to build overall marketing strategies. Goodwin moves to UMG from Sony.

As well:

-- Peter Sinclair joins UMG from ScoreBig.com as senior vp of consumer engagement, charged with expanding UMG's direct-to-consumer and e-commerce operations and building deeper connections between artists and their fans. Sinclair will report to Anthony and Tom Bennett, CEO of Bravado.

-- Jason Kleve, vp of data & analytics, will now report to Boyd Muir, executive vp and CFO.

All four new appointments above will report directly to Michele Anthony, executive vp of U.S. recorded music. Also new to UMG, Christine Webby comes in as senior vp of artist & label integrated rights, to track and secure ancillary rights and revenues from 360 deals as well as to help coordinate non-recorded music operations between UMG's various business units. She reports to Anthony and Jason Gallien, SVP Finance, UMG.

H A P P Y H O L I D A Y S ! ! !

  H A P P Y   H O L I D A Y S ! ! !:   

Christmas Wishes

I am dreaming of a snowy white Christmas, with every Christmas card I write, May your days be merry, dazzling and May all your Christmas be bright.

M E R R Y   C H R I S T M A S 

https://plus.google.com/111878589245354695381/posts/DH9g6uaRDGK Christmas Wishes I am dreaming of a snowy white Christmas, with ever... TopcaT@PeachTreeMusicGroup.Com
https://plus.google.com/111878589245354695381/posts/DH9g6uaRDGK

How to Play the Piano

The piano was once an essential addition to the home, a source of family entertainment and personal musical enjoyment. Today, it continues to be an important and beloved instrument, and knowing how to play one can give you many opportunities to enliven a party, join a band or compose your own music. Learning to play the piano requires dedication, a love of music and a willingness to keep challenging yourself––basically, anyone who wishes to, can learn to play a piano.

Edit Steps

Availability and Affordability

1. Make certain you're willing to practice for thirty or more minutes each day. If you're not, save yourself the expense of buying the piano, books, and lessons, to say nothing of the time. The first few weeks are quite an effort and you'll need to be prepared to persevere and learn through sheer work.
   • Check your calendar. Where are you prepared to block out half an hour a day? Do you have other activities that might interfere with this time or can you shift things around?
   • What about other members of your household? Are they going to be okay with the piano being played daily at certain times? If your walls are paper thin, this may also need to include consideration of your neighbors.
2. Be forewarned that pianos can be very expensive. If you can't afford to buy one, keyboards are an excellent, cheaper alternative. (There are also some great crossovers, such as digital Grands from brands like Roland and Yamaha.) If you can afford one, make sure you know which criteria you should consider when buying yourself a piano. With some luck or dedicated searching, you can often borrow a piano from someone or get an old piano that someone is getting rid of. Some schools, churches or community centers will also be willing to let you tinkle on the keys at a regular slot provided they know you're serious about learning and will take care of their property.
   • Look at online auctions and classifieds sites for old pianos at good prices. Also check out sites such as Freecycle, where unwanted pianos might turn up but you'll probably need to get the piano tuned and possibly even restore it somewhat.
   • Ring around estate sales auctioneers to see if they have any pianos up for auction. Ask to be alerted if one comes in. In some cases, you might pick up a piano for next to nothing.

Getting Lessons

1. Arrange for music lessons with a teacher in your area. The classifieds or a referral from a friend are good places to start. Many schools and colleges offer piano lessons at a subsidized cost. Ask other piano students for feedback about their books or teachers.
   • Find the right teacher! Your relationship with your teacher can affect the way you feel about practicing, so arrange for a trial period of a few weeks to find out if there's a good fit. This is important for parents to acknowledge, as much as it is for the pupil to grasp.
2. Know what the teacher plans to cover in the lessons. Make certain your teacher or lesson book includes time spent learning all aspects of the piano (including chords, theory, and learning pieces by heart) in the curriculum.
   • In addition to studying traditional chord relationships (harmony), take a class in composition and listen to as much music as you can. Community colleges offer excellent instruction in music theory, history, and composition. Learning music theory is fun and is the best way to become a great musician, whether you want to play classical, jazz or pop.
   • Playing with other people in ensembles is also an excellent idea for staying motivated and learning techniques from others.
3. If you do not want to take piano lessons, it is possible learn by yourself. However, you do have your work cut out for you and you will need to be very disciplined and conscientious about practice. Teaching yourself how to play well is a tremendous task, but it can be done.
   • Make use of online resources, such as the many excellent video lessons on learning the piano available on video sites.
4. Whether learning with a teacher or on your own, you can use technology to your advantage. There are free internet games, such as Jayde Musica and Grand Staff Defender, that can help you with both reading music and playing piano. There are also electronic devices that can help you to practice the piano more effectively. For example, the PianoMaestro is a strip of lights that rests on top of the black keys of your piano. The lights guide you on which notes to play, enabling you to progress faster and stay motivated.

Practicing the Piano

1. Sit correctly. Hand and body posture are very important. Slouching gives a bad impression and having a bad hand posture will be counter-productive to your practice.
   • Keep your wrists loose and your hands flexible.
   • Keep your fingers at a natural curve, as if you were holding your hands at your side. This gives you more power in your finger strokes.
   • If you're moving your hands, your elbows shouldn't be moving as if you were doing the "chicken dance". Instead of moving the elbows, move your wrists.
2. Warm up. Practice the arpeggios, chords, scales, and other basic things at the beginning of your practice sessions. Your fingers will be "warmed up" and ready for all of your songs.
   • It's best to warm up at the beginning of every practice session with a relaxing finger exercise. This will stretch your fingers and hands and help you play with your hands relaxed.
3. Practice daily for at least thirty minutes or more. Your fingers will "rust" if you do not play for even a week. However, you may find that a short break or holiday is alright, provided you practice diligently. At first, practicing might be a pain and you might get very frustrated. As your skills grow, you will become better and playing piano will become pure enjoyment.
   • When you play, you should be able to see your finger bones move. Let your hand just hang and move only your fingers.
4. Play covers of songs that you like. Chances are you won’t like a lot of the songs that your instructor or lesson book use to teach you piano basics. Don’t be afraid to mix it up by covering more enjoyable songs on the piano, even if they’re typically played using other instruments. Consider it an opportunity to learn from the greats while motivating yourself to play.
   • Go slowly and steadily when learning a new piece. A good thing to do is play the melody with one hand, and then the other part with your other hand. Play a few times separately and then put them together. Your hands will get used to playing, so when you put them together, it'll feel almost automatic.
5. Practice a lot. The more you practice, the better you will perform. This is especially important given the reality that even seasoned performers get serious nerves before a performance, so if your subconscious knows what to do, you'll feel a lot more confident when playing in public.
   • Practice a little more each day. If you try to play 5 minutes on your first few days, your hands and wrists will most likely get tired (do not push them to play if they do or you'll soon give up). If you practice easy pieces in little spurts each day though, your hands will build up the stamina required to play for longer.

Accelerating Learning

1. Improve your technique by learning in segments.
   • First, try to sightread the piece without worrying if you make mistakes; then, practice each hand separately.
   • Break the music into segments and learn the right hand part. Learn segment by segment, then connect them together. Keep practicing until you've mastered the right hand. Play through the entire piece. If you make a mistake, try to pick up from the beginning of that measure. Starting from the beginning each time you make a mistake will mean you learn the start of the song very well and perhaps never reach the end! Be patient, as this process will enable you to get through the entire piece flawlessly.
   • Once you've mastered the right hand, repeat the process with the left hand.
   • Then, repeat the process again, this time for both hands. Do not try to play at normal speed until you are secure in your fingering and notes.
   • Then, increase the speed gradually. Play the piece until you memorize it and you can play fluently.
2. Improve your understanding of the piece by learning in measures. Take a new piece apart by learning one or two measures at a time, and going over it again and again. The next day, do the same thing with the next few measures, and then include the last measures and play them all together. By practicing this way, you can spend quality time listening to how they sound and making sure your fingers know where to go and when.
   • Don't freak out when you can't play a measure (or two). Just take a short break. Give yourself some time to calm down before you attack the challenge again.
   • The measures on a song are not "stop signs". When you reach a measure, never stop. Instead, continue the song at the same speed.
3. Keep a regular, steady rhythm while you are playing. Just playing rhythmically makes a piece sound a lot better. Consider buying a metronome to help with this. Consider buying a piano with a metronome. A lot of pianos have them built in, and even if they don't, a hand-held metronome will suffice.
4. Try not to repeat your mistakes. Practicing the wrong way many times over will cement a mistake into your mind and muscle memory.

Improvising

1. Think notes and improvise. "Thinking notes" means that you know every single note you're playing. While that sounds easy, it can be very challenging. Play a piece that you have memorized and can play very well. Now, name every note that you played without looking at the piano. Then, take a melody you've heard on TV or somewhere else and try to play it using your ear. Aim for knowing every note you play. While playing by ear is good, it's a lot better if you know every note that you play.
   • Learn to sight read music. This will allow you to play a large range of pieces without learning them from memory. It's a useful skill to practice as early as possible when learning music.
   • Listen to your notes and tune your ears to the keys' pitches. This is needed on some advanced piano tests and will allow you to impress your friends by playing blindfolded!
2. Play whenever you can, even if you don’t have a piano. Borrow someone else’s piano, tap out a few notes on the keyboard at the store, use your digital device's music keyboard or just play from memory on the blank desk in front of you. Be like Paul McCartney, who can't walk by a piano without a very strong urge to play it; the only time he doesn’t is if he would get in trouble!
   • Play simple pieces by ear and make your own arrangements of them. This will help you to become less dependent on written music. When you are playing by ear, keep going! Do not start sections of the piece over again. If you miss a chord one time, you can practice so that you'll play it the next time. The main thing is to overcome repetition and hesitation and learn to play a piece through smoothly when you are performing it.

Edit Video

Edit Tips

• If you're at a recital and your hands shake wildly, sit on your hands for a few minutes before you go out to play. It calms them down.
• It is better to play too slowly than to play too quickly when you are performing. Play evenly and with a great deal of care in your touch and you will sound professional.
• Get used to the idea that some of the pianos you will be playing will not sound amazing or be in perfect tune. This is one of the hazards of being a piano player; you can't carry your favorite instrument with you. Try to make the best of things when you are playing an inferior instrument. A good pianist can usually make a bad piano sound reasonably good, although some pianos are in such bad condition that you should feel free to say that you cannot play that piano!
• If you are shy, practice playing in front of your family and friends. They will enjoy it, and in time, so will you.
• Curve your fingers for a stronger tone and a better quality of music. Resist the temptation of playing flat fingered.
• For players with some experience: Eventually, you will play faster pieces that are also long. If you keep pushing on the keys, you will tire out before you even finish the first page. To prevent this, lift your fingers up higher for louder notes and move your wrist so that it "follows the notes"; as the keys you press make higher and higher sounds, your wrist gets nearer and nearer to the right side of the piano when you're facing it. Do the opposite when the sounds made by the keys get lower and lower. However, if you overdo it, there will be no point.
• Make sure your fingers don't get cold when you play. When you have cold fingers (and hands), it'll be harder to play the piano, and it will hurt your fingers. If you hands are cold before you start playing, don't play, just warm them up by running your hands under warm water or holding them over a heater (carefully) for a few minutes.
• The fingering, speed, and chords in some pieces may be frustrating and difficult, but push through it. If you get frustrated, step away from the piano for a few minutes until you are ready to play again. If you do take piano lessons, remember this: You are very lucky; many parents want their child to learn piano, but not all can afford it.
• You may like to accompany a singer on piano and perhaps form a rhythm section with other instruments.
• For intermediate/advanced players: Try playing through that new piece using the chords written above the grand staff. Use your left hand to play octaves and your right hand to play the chord. Start off using the first inversion of every chord, then for a challenge, limit yourself to using only one octave and trying out different inversions of chords.
• Do not keep your foot on the sustaining pedal; it blurs your chords together and makes them sound "muddy." If you want to correctly use the sustain pedal, play a chord, press the pedal down, and then a split second after you play your next chord, carefully lift up the sustain pedal and put it back down. Whenever you change chords or play notes from a different chord, "reset" the sustain pedal. Do not "bump" the pedal by changing it too fast. Always listen to yourself when you pedal. Your ears will tell you if the sound is blurred or not.

Edit Warnings

• Don't set impossible goals for yourself, for example, don't tell yourself, “I'm going to learn how to play Turkish March in one week.” You'll probably be disappointed. However, small goals are important, so learning parts by certain dates is certainly a good incentive to work toward.
• Don't buy a piano when you're not sure you want to start playing it; a piano is a huge investment in both time and house space.
• Don't limit yourself to the notes on the page. Think about what the melody is trying to convey and play the song as though it was your own––from your heart.
• Never play the same melody the same way. If the composer puts identical measures in the piece, make it interesting by using dynamics or ritardandos.
• Don't be nervous at recitals, and play your piece with as much confidence as you can. Don't worry about how you look. Pay attention to the thing that really counts––how the music sounds!
• Don't slack off. Sometimes it may become tedious, but keep practicing.