Dr Howl - Can mad science fix the music industry?

[LMNO]

And you still think it's douchey to state the truth?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

And you still think it's douchey to state the truth?

No, really, I did read the article that I just quoted and commented on, so I didn't need it restated in tl;dr terms. I just don't get (and don't care about) the whole "rip to WAV" etc stuff; it's not my bag and is gobbledygook to me, although I totally believe you about it.

The other thread is a completely different topic.

[Mangrove]

Thank you for the support.

Just for the record (ahem) I am definitely not an audiophile. I have some vinyl, lots of CDs and have, so far, avoided any kind of MP3 player.

As the Alphabetical one has pointed out, MP3 is inferior to CD but if musical nuance ain't your thing, then it probably doesn't matter. (cf: Jason Bieber)

I was reading in the 'audio' section of either Downbeat or Jazz Times magazine about sound quality. I don't ordinarily read the audio section but it was interesting because it raised the dilemma that:

a) CD recording, mastering, reproduction etc - is a shit ton better than it was when CD first came out and has, therefore, improved considerably.

b) Market forces has pushed people towards downloaded music even though it's not as good (sonically) as older, already existing technology.

c) Most people who like music (and aren't Hannah Montana enthusiasts) don't want to download their tunes. They still prefer the physical object of the CD which, at this point, sounds better if that's something you care about.

But, the INDUSTRY has spoken. Downloaded music is the future and we've returned to a singles based market once more but with i-Tunes instead of 45rpms. (Some people reading this post might not know what a 45 is.)

I am not an anti-technology person per se. I really like my Barnes & Noble 'nook' e-reader for example even though I've had some really snarky self-righteous snobs get in my face about it.

Still, what bothers me about the music scene, aside from the content of my frothy rant is the fact that someone, somewhere 'decided' that people like myself, who enjoyed browsing record stores were no longer relevant. Thus all the specialist music sections that used to exist in the Virgin Megastore that I once worked in were cut. The store shrunk and the selection of music across all genres descended into utter pointlessness.

The same thing happened here too. There was a Borders that I frequent that once had a great music section but no, that got axed because they only wanted to offer 'best sellers'. Well wait a minute. What if I want to buy something that's not a best seller? What if I wanted to find something enriching to my life that wasn't going to shift mega units? Nope. Fuck off Mang' - teh kidz w@nt dwnldz.

Because of that, people who are given to musical curiosity and experimentation have been deprived of an opportunity that used to be quite a lot of fun and, for me, a source of personal pleasure and artistic stimulation.  Like the day I listened to Sonic Youth's 'Washing Machine' album on the instore headphones. Or the day I scooped up The Smiths and Curtis Mayfield.  

Of course, it's all my fault for having a really long attention span. I can actually listen to a whole album from beginning to end and concentrate on it. I got to like records that had some sort of arc to them, a beginning, middle & end like a film or a novel and shifting moods yet capturing an overall feel of the moment the record was made. I like it when someone hits a guitar and not only does it sound like a guitar but you can hear the room it was recorded in. Sometimes it's great when someone hits a guitar and it sounds like something from another planet, at least they looked for a new texture or tonal palette.

That's hard to find in Best Buy or other equally shitty musical outlets. Mainstream record stores are a shadow of how they used to be and personally, it's a cultural travesty. For god's sake the teeny chick from CT on Idol sang 'Feeling Good' and everyone kept talking about that 'Michael Buble' song! WTF?? NINA SIMONE, BITCHES.

As I said, it's not the technology that's irksome so much as a deliberate lowering of the bar in terms of musical achievement. The $$$ offered by Idol far outstrips the sort of money an artist would earn on a regular record label but even they won't invest the time or money to find new artists and develop that. It's make a hit album straight out the gate or you get dumped.

I don't know about here, but the bubble burst in the UK around 1996 or 1997. During the Britpop boom record companies were doling out money like pedos handing out candies at a scout jamboree and just about anyone who could stand up with a guitar got some cash in their pocket and some demos recorded. But after that, development deals stopped. Then all the smaller labels got bought up and bought up and bought up some more until all the companies were just imprints and tax shelters of corporate monoliths.

Maybe I'm wrong here but it just feels, in my poor little bowels that the industry no longer wants to spend money/time/effort on finding anything new, interesting, innovative or provocative. Of course, fake controversy is fine just nothing genuinely challenging.

My only hope right now is Brian Eno's 'culture compost heap' theory is that when you have a big enough pile of shit, something will eventually grow out of it. Whether I'm around long enough to see it is another thing.

Fuck, I'm supposed to be in bed!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Mang, I buy most of my music on Amazon because I don't really like going to stores, and Amazon has a couple of great features; one, anyone can sell their CDs on it so they have almost everything you can imagine, and two, they have software that compares your purchases to other people's purchases and makes non-random suggestions based on where those coincide. I have made many impulse purchases of music I've never heard of before, and rarely regret it. A lot of it's indie-produced local bands.

Just a suggestion.

[Requia ☣]

Downloaded music doesn't have to be lower quality.  There are a couple options that are identical in quality to CD, and AAC (which iTunes uses) is perfectly capable of high quality audio if you increase the bitrate.

The industry simply chose not to provide the service, though iTunes will give you high quality (and no DRM) if you pay extra now.

[Mangrove]

Mang, I buy most of my music on Amazon because I don't really like going to stores, and Amazon has a couple of great features; one, anyone can sell their CDs on it so they have almost everything you can imagine, and two, they have software that compares your purchases to other people's purchases and makes non-random suggestions based on where those coincide. I have made many impulse purchases of music I've never heard of before, and rarely regret it. A lot of it's indie-produced local bands.

Just a suggestion.

Thanks Nigel.

Amazon can be good like that at times. There's been days when it seems like the 'recommend' software is on crack. My all time favorite being 'You bought X book about Aleister Crowley which is why we recommend this pogo stick.' No troll.

[E.O.T.]

MANG

         firstly, i would stop paying attention to what happens on "american idol". perhaps not entirely, but at least keep it in check. there's so much stuff out there. i heard some of LMNO's stuff recently at Nigel's and it was pretty cool. that, alone.

AND

         classic jazz was great. it's being killed(again) RIGHT NOW on the west coast. cuz it was too powerful to ever stop. but yeah, it's not all about holding a note. brian eno absolutely rocks, even in ambient. as usual, the revolution will not be televized.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Mang, I buy most of my music on Amazon because I don't really like going to stores, and Amazon has a couple of great features; one, anyone can sell their CDs on it so they have almost everything you can imagine, and two, they have software that compares your purchases to other people's purchases and makes non-random suggestions based on where those coincide. I have made many impulse purchases of music I've never heard of before, and rarely regret it. A lot of it's indie-produced local bands.

Just a suggestion.

Thanks Nigel.

Amazon can be good like that at times. There's been days when it seems like the 'recommend' software is on crack. My all time favorite being 'You bought X book about Aleister Crowley which is why we recommend this pogo stick.' No troll.

I've gotten some pretty hilarious "suggestions" as well, so I usually wait until I've gotten the same suggestion several times relating to albums I actually like before buying it.

[Jasper]

FWIW, the few FLAC recordings I've downloaded sound superb.

[East Coast Hustle]

That.

Also, I think the advent of the download as the primary form of distribution has enabled a diversity of available music that NEVER would have been possible under the old "you need someone else's money to get any sort of distribution outside of your town" model.

I have several gigs worth of obscure west african music, none of which I would ever have had the opportunity to have heard OF, let alone actually heard back in, say, 1995. In fact, I'd venture to say that as much as 75% of my HUGE music collection (I have literally 80 or 90 pounds of CD's, a hundred-and-something tapes, a dozen or so LPs, and several hundreds of gigs of music on my computer and external hard drive) would never have been found in a store in America ten years ago.

[Requia ☣]

Yeah, most of what I've bought in the last few years is either from bands who never even would have considered trying to get a market in Utah, or smalltime bands that could never get onto brick & mortar shelves.

Which cannot be making the powers that be happy.

FWIW, the few FLAC recordings I've downloaded sound superb.

FLAC is lossless, which makes it nearly ideal, but do you know any music stores that offer FLAC?

[Triple Zero]

First off, you can think of WAV as the same thing as a CD, uncompressed digital audio. The only difference is that CD audio is on a disc, while WAV audio is in a file on your computer. It sounds the same, unless your CD player is better quality than your PC audio card, but that's nothing to do with the format.

Then FLAC is in fact identical to CD or WAV quality. It's exactly the same information. Except compressed, so it takes about 2/3rds of the diskspace. It's lossless like ZIP compression, so it doesn't leave anything out.

Additionally, MP3 compression schemes have come a long, long way in the field of psycho-acoustics, since they were invented. A high quality VBR encoding* is no longer a size/quality trade-off but actually indistinguishable from the original to the human ear. Yes it leaves things out, but really only the things that human hearing really cannot hear. Only at lower bitrates it starts to leave out things you cannot really hear.


(* such as lame -V2 --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 19.7 -b96)

[Mangrove]

EOT - I try not to pay much attention to Idol, though it did kind of bug the crap out of me last week, hence the rant. I think also having seen a Justin Bieber song on Youtube increased my ire. (And I feel calmer when I listen to Eno's 'Music for airports'...I should dig that out.

Nigel - Amazon's suggestions have gotten better and actually, I wouldn't be on PD.com if it were not for Amazon suggestions so yay!

EHC - I do think there is virtue in the download in that it does allow some artists to bypass certain traditional structures and deal direct. I think that part is cool. One of the neat things about BBC radio (or at least it was - not sure if they've changed it) was that they had DJs like John Peel and Andy Kershaw you made their own playlists and they played anything & everything they wanted. You would get some folk singer from Mali followed by a demo of an unsigned band followed by an old ass dub plate and then maybe some brain drilling techno. You didn't always enjoy the selections necessarily but there was always a chance they'd throw out something that you'd want to hunt for. American mainstream radio is so heavily formatted and the play lists are so restricted that you know you'll never get anything other than what some suit says you should have. Perhaps I remember record stores being better stocked than they were? The decline in quantity & variety is noticeable.

[Maria]

Everyone gets exploited, and shit music is a fact of life.  It's the way of the world.  But I loved reading that.

[Requia ☣]

Additionally, MP3 compression schemes have come a long, long way in the field of psycho-acoustics, since they were invented. A high quality VBR encoding* is no longer a size/quality trade-off but actually indistinguishable from the original to the human ear. Yes it leaves things out, but really only the things that human hearing really cannot hear. Only at lower bitrates it starts to leave out things you cannot really hear.


(* such as lame -V2 --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 19.7 -b96)

I don't for the record, get the lame project at all.  Ogg vorbis and AAC are just as small as MP3, and a much better starting point for quality.