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The Day the Music Burned

nytimes.com

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Re: The Day the Music Burned

#61

Post by antisemiotic »

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.

Forgive my ignorance, but was what.cd the private tracker with an insane interview process that people have written guides about? If so, then I see parallels - self-appointed gatekeepers of culture create a single point of failure, shit hits the fan one day, countless amount of work is lost.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#62

Post by bogomipz »

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?

>"Why wasn't this material protected in, at least, a fireproof area, or, better, in some salt cave in the Utah desert?"

Normally they are kept in at least a climate-controlled vault as the oxide will eventually start flaking off the tape if its not stored correctly. I think the issue here was the sheer number of consolidations that UMG and the record business as a whole. The article mentions that were just a tenant at that point. Since the tapes are the assets that are acquired in a merger I'm sure someone made a call to some storage facility and said "move those things over here now." And eventually it became the purview of some warehouse worker.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#63

Post by magduf »

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…

That's all well and good, but the problem with this obsession with master tapes is that they don't last forever, and degrade over time, along with every time they're taken out and handled and run through a player to create another "remaster" that has no dynamic range and lots of clipping distortion, since that's apparently what consumers want these days.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#64

Post by samfriedman »

antisemiotic wrote: post #61
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.

Forgive my ignorance, but was what.cd the private tracker with an insane interview process that people have written guides about? If so, then I see parallels - self-appointed gatekeepers of culture create a single point of failure, shit hits the fan one day, countless amount of work is lost.

That's the one. Although the interview was mostly to make sure you knew the basics of how audio files worked and why people on the site cared about upholding their quality: nothing an hour of studying couldn't prepare you for.

The database of various rare releases, artist graphs, user collages, etc. were the biggest loss.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#65

Post by DoubleCribble »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #46
dehrmann wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, most b-sides are b-sides for a reason.

As a counterpoint, here are the B-sides from that British quartet of yesteryear, most of which were only released as singles (until the discographies were published decades later). Some of these are better than the A-sides. YMMV.

P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why, Thank You Girl, I'll Get You, This Boy, You Can't Do That, Things We Said Today, She's a Woman, Yes It Is, I'm Down, Day Tripper, Rain, Yellow Submarine, Penny Lane, Baby You're A Rich Man, I Am the Walrus, The Inner Light, Revolution, Don't Let Me Down, Old Brown Shoe, Come Together, You Know My Name

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#66

Post by jdietrich »

A lot of old master tapes self-destructed due to bad chemistry.

The binder material used to adhere iron oxide particles to the tape backing was, in many cases, slightly hygroscopic; over time, the binder absorbs water, breaking down that adhesion and causing the oxide to flake off when the tape is unspooled. The only known remediation measure is to bake the tape at low temperature, which will temporarily reduce the moisture content sufficiently to allow the tape to be played back and re-recorded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#67

Post by lisnake »

daurnimator wrote: post #22
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.

IMO the shutdown of Oink's pink palace was much worse than what.cd. What.cd was the bits of OiNK that people had bothered to archive...

In the end, what.cd collection was several times bigger than oink

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#68

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#69

Post by antisemiotic »

samfriedman wrote: post #64
antisemiotic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance, but was what.cd the private tracker with an insane interview process that people have written guides about? If so, then I see parallels - self-appointed gatekeepers of culture create a single point of failure, shit hits the fan one day, countless amount of work is lost.

That's the one. Although the interview was mostly to make sure you knew the basics of how audio files worked and why people on the site cared about upholding their quality: nothing an hour of studying couldn't prepare you for. The database of various rare releases, artist graphs, user collages, etc. were the biggest loss.

Thanks. I never really had the patience to manage ratios and survive on private trackers, and fishing for invites and passing an interview to get into the secret treehouse was too much for me.

Too late for that of course, but couldn't that data have been stored somewhere away from the questionably legal stuff?

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#70

Post by pjmorris »

DoubleCribble wrote: post #65
freewilly1040 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, most b-sides are b-sides for a reason.

As a counterpoint, here are the B-sides from that British quartet of yesteryear, most of which were only released as singles (until the discographies were published decades later). Some of these are better than the A-sides. YMMV. P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why, Thank You Girl, I'll Get You, This Boy, You Can't Do That, Things We Said Today, She's a Woman, Yes It Is, I'm Down, Day Tripper, Rain, Yellow Submarine, Penny L…

Well-illustrated point. And, 'Rain' might be my favorite Beatles song.
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