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The Day the Music Burned

nytimes.com

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Re: The Day the Music Burned

#81

Post by ukyrgf »

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.

Although people are always hesitant to say the name, I actually think you're thinking of Redacted. There's a whole website and IRC room prepping for the entrance exam. Unfortunately, the site is just as joyless as the exam process would lead you to suspect. The top discussion in /r/trackers right now is about exactly that.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#82

Post by bsder »

zeveb wrote: post #77
bsder wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why wasn't this material protected in, at least, a fireproof area, or, better, in some salt cave in the Utah desert? Because they don't actually care. No one in their right mind in these companies will sign off on releasing this stuff to somebody else. If some performance just happens to include someone famous and becomes worth any reasonable amount of money, the person who signed off will get fired. The best way t…

> The best way to preserve this stuff is to make copyright expire after 10-20 years. In that case, they’d just shred the masters unless someone offered to buy them for enough — and for most stuff, no-one would.

> In that case, they’d just shred the masters unless someone offered to buy them for enough — and for most stuff, no-one would.

Unlikely. Shredding costs time and money that no one will allocate.

Suddenly you have: "Well, these things are about to come off copyright, so if we don't get money now, we're never going to get any at all." So, someone looking to add a few bucks to his bottom line budget in the company will almost certainly toss them out at a reasonable price.

Contrast to now where the risk is that you sell off "Random Garbage 42" for $10,000 that happens to have a 10 second cameo of Elvis in it, and it becomes worth $250,000.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#83

Post by harry8 »

I'm deeply concerned about the impact that this will have on the music documentary. Without a fat idiot pulling a fader at a mixing desk in a poorly lit room so we can just hear the drum beat alone while describing an utterly standard 4/4 time, poorly played derivative drumming as "groundbreaking" I fear for the genre. We've already lost atmospheric cigarette smoke haze, what next?

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#84

Post by sexyflanders »

leoc wrote: post #78
tigeba wrote: post #37

50 years from now the problem will be that we have preserved digital masters in the form of session files for various DAWs and it will no longer be possible to patch together the correct hardware, OS, plugins, and virtual instruments to recreate the session. Artists and producers are encouraged to create stems or bounces of all the individual tracks for the purposes of long term preservation, but this does not always…

That's basically the reason Steve Albini gives for staying analogue: https://youtu.be/p-uziD9AvrI?t=822 . That said, in some respects I don't think (not an expert) the situation is clearly worse than it was in the analogue days: it may be difficult to use or replicate some DAW plugin effect in the future, but it's not as if some studio's physical plate reverb unit, for example, was easy to replicate in another place…

Yeah probably more forward compatible to send/bounce wet effects to their own tracks and print all the tracks as audio.

Then in worst case scenario you can load the raw WAV (or whatever format) tracks in a future DAW.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#85

Post by sifRAWR »

WrathOfJay wrote: post #56
andrelaszlo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was my exact process too, got to that section about Aronson, saw the scrollbar, and got out of there.

Looks like you followed my next step too, jumped into the comment section to see if someone posted about an interesting highlight that I might have missed by skipping the rest of the article :)

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#86

Post by tigeba »

a-afterglow wrote: post #74
tigeba wrote: post #37

50 years from now the problem will be that we have preserved digital masters in the form of session files for various DAWs and it will no longer be possible to patch together the correct hardware, OS, plugins, and virtual instruments to recreate the session. Artists and producers are encouraged to create stems or bounces of all the individual tracks for the purposes of long term preservation, but this does not always…

Besides from being able to fiddle with the multitrack myself at home, whenever I have studio sessions for my band I always ask for the stems. I remember a couple years ago while starting work on an EP at a local studio, the guy just deleted some band's sessions to make space for ours. He didn't want to give me the stems, but we never released that EP anyway. When/if we get to re-record it, I'll be sure that is clear…

If you are paying for the session its completely reasonable to ask for a copy of the session files IMHO. If you are going to tape and they want to erase it and re-use it or something I would at least negotiate dumping it to digital.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#87

Post by bogomipz »

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.

There's actually no shortage of B side tracks that went on to became of the most famous, favorite and popular songs in rock history. Sometimes even eclipsing the A side. [1][2][3]

Everything from Elis "Hound Dog", The Smiths "How Soon is Now" to Zeppelin's "Hey Hey What can I do." B-sides are/were often a chance for an artist to release something the record company rejected for the album but the artist really wanted to release. B-sides are actually often things for the fans.

[1] https://ultimateclassicrock.com/b-side-big-hits/

[2] https://www.yardbarker.com/entertainment/articles/25_of_the_...

[3] https://www.radiox.co.uk/features/x-lists/b-sides-more-famou...

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#88

Post by DalekBaldwin »

xamuel wrote: post #16
xoa wrote: post #6

Similar losses, though less dramatic and less all at once, have plagued the software industry too and in particular video games. An enormous amount of source code and assets for stuff made in the 80s and 90s in particular has been lost for good, which makes it far more difficult to preserve and update them. If there is some tiny silver lining possible out of these modern Library of Alexandria permanent destruction of…

>Back when copyright was purely a product of the written word the ultimate master information was also by definition included in every copy. Not strictly true. There is a difference between a copy of a Bach concerto and the original score in Bach's own handwriting, even if the copy captures all the notes perfectly. Original manuscripts can contain scratched-out parts which are nevertheless of great interest to schola…

On the other hand, the end result is released in polished form for a reason. As Llewyn Davis said, "In the entertainment business, you’re not supposed to let your practice shit out. It ruins the mystique."

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#89

Post by DalekBaldwin »

xoa wrote: post #6

Similar losses, though less dramatic and less all at once, have plagued the software industry too and in particular video games. An enormous amount of source code and assets for stuff made in the 80s and 90s in particular has been lost for good, which makes it far more difficult to preserve and update them. If there is some tiny silver lining possible out of these modern Library of Alexandria permanent destruction of…

I've got a lot of rare stuff downloaded from Soulseek back in the day that I expect I'll never be able to find again. One of my most spine-tingling tracks is a performance of "Flowers Die" by The Only Ones, far better than the one that made it into their rarities compilation, where a bit of feedback chirps serendipitously right after the line "There's a rustling behind me". You wouldn't even know it's a concert bootleg without the audience applauding at the end.

I realize this sort of contradicts my other comment, but I want to believe I didn't spend all those years as a music geek for nothing!

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#90

Post by bogomipz »

bsder wrote: post #71
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? Because they don't actually care. No one in their right mind in these companies will sign off on releasing this stuff to somebody else. If some performance just happens to include someone famous and becomes worth any reasonable amount of money, the person who signed off will get fired. The best way t…

>"Because they don't actually care"

You don't have any idea how the music business actually works then. The sound recording copyright allows the owner of the master recording to generates revenue from "master use license fees." This is the permission to use the actual recorded version of the song in movies and television. When Martin Scorsese wants to use a Stones song in his movie, he must pay the "master use license fee" to the record company. These companies care a a lot about those fees and the masters that enabled them. I can assure you. The tragedy of this is more the result of two decades of mergers and consolidations of record companies whose headquarter are all in Los Angeles.

>"The best way to preserve this stuff is to make copyright expire after 10-20 years"

That's not actually how it works. The master recording copyright follows the physical media not the owner. What you are suggesting would actually hurt the artist. More especially so at a time when their recording was becoming a "classic."

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