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The Day the Music Burned

nytimes.com

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Re: The Day the Music Burned

#51

Post by tomdell »

RIMR wrote: post #44

Blame Capitalism. If one company weren't hoarding master copies of these works of art for the purposes of profit, then the world would have lost nothing in that fire. If music were owned by the people, we would never risk a single point of failure wiping out musical heritage.

Sure, if the people financed the creation of this music or purchased the masters, then they could own the masters too. Would you expect Apple to put its iPhones in the hands of the public for free and easy copying and distribution? Why do you think music should be any different?

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#52

Post by illwrks »

mrbbk wrote: post #36
imtyler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical distribution network has the same effect as destroying music: it's no longer available to be consumed.

Mastertapes contain the music precisely as recorded by the artist themselves. They're not meant to be listened to or consumed actively -- they're there to serve as indelible recordings and references. Scholarly work on Jazz, for example, relies extensively on the existence of master tapes. Here's why: When you record music to a multitrack magnetic tape like most of the recordings in this vault, you then get the abili…

Source code vs compiled or layered Photoshop file vs flat JPEG.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#53

Post by okmokmz »

dehrmann wrote: post #40
sizzzzlerz wrote: post #8

Reading the list of jazz, soul, and rock artists whose material was lost just made me shudder. If an example of cultural devastation is ever needed, this is it. Jazz greats from the 40s and 50s. Popular music from the birth of rock and roll to the modern day. This is truly a tragedy. Why wasn't this material protected in, at least, a fireproof area, or, better, in some salt cave in the Utah desert?

To be blunt, there's a lot of it and it's not actually that valuable. We've had CDs for 30+ years. If there's an album UMG thought it'd be worth digitizing, remastering, and reselling, they'd have done it by now. Humanity generates information (works of art included) faster than it can be reliably archived, and as that information ages and no one is interested in it, it becomes less relevant. Maybe it's a bit nihilis…

They may not have been financially valuable to UMG, perhaps, but I would argue that other value was still lost

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#54

Post by code4tee »

YouTube has a nice video of Brian May going thorough the master for Bohemian Rhapsody. It gives a good idea of what’s on a master and also interesting insights into how they overcame some of the technical limitations of equipment at the time—like recording multiple times over the same track to make up for limited channels on the tape-based system. Really interesting stuff.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#55

Post by nitwit005 »

mrbbk wrote: post #18
easymodex wrote: post #7

I'd actually say the biggest disaster in history of music is what.cd being shut down. They had the largest collection of hard to find music, meticulously curated and in lossless formats. I doubt there will ever be such a complete collection and it was devastating to see it get killed like that.

I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at…

Assuming the original masters are preserved. Plenty of stuff does get lost, discarded, and occasionally the warehouse burns down: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/us/master-recordings-univ...

The digital copies often is all there is.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#56

Post by WrathOfJay »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #49
dredmorbius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Printed to PDF the piece runs 36 pages, about 12,000 words, or roughly an hour's read. It is long.

Exactly, it's more like a short book than a regular article, pretty long even by long-reads standard. I was curious if people rather read content like this on paper than scrolling for an hour on a screen :)

I stopped reading when the article turned toward a history of the guy Aronson. I said to myself "Oh hell no, I'm not wasting my time reading about this guy I don't care about", I looked at the scroll bar and nope'd out of the whole article. Nothing to do with the delivery medium.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#57

Post by bogomipz »

dehrmann wrote: post #40
sizzzzlerz wrote: post #8

Reading the list of jazz, soul, and rock artists whose material was lost just made me shudder. If an example of cultural devastation is ever needed, this is it. Jazz greats from the 40s and 50s. Popular music from the birth of rock and roll to the modern day. This is truly a tragedy. Why wasn't this material protected in, at least, a fireproof area, or, better, in some salt cave in the Utah desert?

To be blunt, there's a lot of it and it's not actually that valuable. We've had CDs for 30+ years. If there's an album UMG thought it'd be worth digitizing, remastering, and reselling, they'd have done it by now. Humanity generates information (works of art included) faster than it can be reliably archived, and as that information ages and no one is interested in it, it becomes less relevant. Maybe it's a bit nihilis…

>"To be blunt, there's a lot of it and it's not actually that valuable. We've had CDs for 30+ years. If there's an album UMG thought it'd be worth digitizing, remastering, and reselling, they'd have done it by now."

This is not even remotely true. Albums are re-issued and re-released all the time. Often times there will a renewed interest in an artist or their work from a death, some current artist sighting them as an influence or an artist making a comeback. Master tapes are the most valuable asset a record label has. It is also not uncommon for albums to go out of print for a period and then be released again many years later. And albums go out of print for all kinds of reasons. David Bowie's classic RCA catalog(Heroes, Low, Lodger etc.) were all out of print in the 80s and 90s. They weren't available until Bowie got the rights to his masters back - something called a "reversion"in recording contracts. So a record label could have ownership of the masters for 30 or 40 years before they revert back to an artist. After which an artist will likely reissue them since they generate income.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#58

Post by Scramblejams »

dddddaviddddd wrote: post #11
easymodex wrote: post #7

I'd actually say the biggest disaster in history of music is what.cd being shut down. They had the largest collection of hard to find music, meticulously curated and in lossless formats. I doubt there will ever be such a complete collection and it was devastating to see it get killed like that.

Is there anything like it left today?

Gotta be an onion site somewhere, right? Wish I knew.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#59

Post by asdff »

easymodex wrote: post #7

I'd actually say the biggest disaster in history of music is what.cd being shut down. They had the largest collection of hard to find music, meticulously curated and in lossless formats. I doubt there will ever be such a complete collection and it was devastating to see it get killed like that.

what.cd didn't host anything, so all the shutdown did was scatter the community. Since with p2p everything is on someone's local drive at the end of the day, it didn't destroy any files and didn't stop files from being seeded by peers. Only a matter of time before the community rallies again imo, or someone dumps all the magnet links into a text file and passes that around for all to seed. An unhosted what.cd would be immune to the RIAA and other scum.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#60

Post by asdff »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #33
randomsearch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steelmanning, if you’re certain you’re correct then you should assume the OP was misinformed, in which case why not kindly explain why without being aggressive? Educate us rather than attack us, please!

Remember that what.cd only stored metadata files like .torrents/magnets/.cues/etc. I doubt very few, if any, of the rare releases there were actually lost; they're still out there somewhere in the Internet. What was lost was the platform and the community that allowed said rare music to be easily shared and propagated.

Can you still use a cached copy of what.cd since all it hosted was metadata that you could pull downloads from?
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