An import distinction to make is that this is about the (major) record labels in pop music. The vast majority of (independent) record labels are small companies, that focus on the music. They won't make you dirty rich or famous, but if your music is good they will publish and make your music available to their respective scene.It is not an easy path, it requires a lot of commitment and you have to very talented, but you can still become a professional artist that way.
If it is just about being famous and a commercial success, well then those 'artists' and record labels get what they deserve with this tiktok bs.
Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
151–160 of 198 posts
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing reproduces the original signal, it's distorted by the inertia and impedance of the microphone and amplifier that recorded it. As you know it's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave, cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value.
Agreed - and after quantization nothing reproduces the signal before quantization. So claiming Nyquist-Shannon proves the OP wrong is incorrect. >It's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave. After an ADC it is not stored as a sine wave. It's stored as quantized values, thus the 'D' in Analog-to-Digital-Converter. >cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value Pretty much al…
> which is the same as square waves ... There is stuff far outside human hearing coming from the speaker because of these square waves.
Maybe back in the 1980s on some of the early consumer digital equipment; but those problems were solved in the early 1990s by oversampling in the DAC, and then using some basic analog filtering far above the human hearing range.
IE, a consumer DAC will oversample a 44.1khz signal to (example) 705.6khz in the digital domain; and then use a very gentle analog lowpass filter to deal with the ultrasonic distortion. At that point the difference between the original analog signal and the one coming from the DAC is approximately as accurate as if there was no DAC in the first place. (Granted, some people can hear up to 27khz, which is why some people like 96khz sampling rates.)
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#153Even though TikTok is a new platform the phenomena this article describe isn't new. It can also be attributed to other publisher industries than music, i.e. book publishing. Imagine you where a startup and you go to a VC. The VC tells you that they want to invest. However, they want full ownership of your IP, they want their investment money repaid by taking 100% of your startup's earnings before the company can use…
>But artists, writers and other creative producers of their own content have had to live with these kind of terms since forever. The reason has been that the publishers control the market. People accept these terms but others do not. Independent artists and collectives exist. Publishers control the fame and stardom market. They do not control the entire creative market.
Absolutely true. But for the majority of artists there is not much money for each there, in my experience.
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed - and after quantization nothing reproduces the signal before quantization. So claiming Nyquist-Shannon proves the OP wrong is incorrect. >It's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave. After an ADC it is not stored as a sine wave. It's stored as quantized values, thus the 'D' in Analog-to-Digital-Converter. >cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value Pretty much al…
> which is the same as square waves ... There is stuff far outside human hearing coming from the speaker because of these square waves. Maybe back in the 1980s on some of the early consumer digital equipment; but those problems were solved in the early 1990s by oversampling in the DAC, and then using some basic analog filtering far above the human hearing range. IE, a consumer DAC will oversample a 44.1khz signal to…
>but those problems were solved in the early 1990s by oversampling in the DAC, and then using some basic analog filtering far above the human hearing range.
You're writing about the sampling end. I said the physical speaker creates high frequencies on playback based on material properties of the device - and I gave a decent reference where you can read the discussion on it.
No amount of filtering at the sampling end will remove physically created noise due to the physical playback membrane that moves air to create sound waves.
I am fully aware of using bandpass filters during sampling. I use them all the time to remove things I don't need before doing things like wavelet transforms to pull music information out of the result. And I often design things up front based on the physical playback mechanism if I know it ahead of time. Or if the hardware (such as embedded devices) will only sample at certain rates, or certain bit depths. Knowing as much about the entire audio path up front helps design each and every piece of the complete signal path.
Here's a simple example: basic speakers are an electromagnet coil - apply voltage V and the membrane jumps to a position. Different values for V make different positions.
Quantized playback, going through an DAC, will create distinct voltage levels. 8 bits will give 256 such levels. 16 bits, 65536 levels.
When that hits a speaker, the speaker membrane jumps to that level. There is some noise with inertia and momentum and point to point, but the end effect is the same - the speaker trying to make a square wave edge. There is no uniformly smooth movement from position to position - only jumps.
This can be seen by putting a mirror on the speaker, and bouncing a laser off it to a large wall, and record the wall in high speed - you see jumpy movement. Fiddle sometime with a pure tone sent at various bit depths to a speaker and watch the laser.
Now, these movements create frequencies in output not in the original analog signal, not in the digital signal, but purely as a physical artifact. And they depend on the playback device - all sorts of work and research is spent on speaker tech, materials, reproducible construction, and on and on, to make the output physical waveform as uniform and smooth as possible over all the possible input voltage jumps and frequencies desired. But all are imperfect, similarly to how all physical lenses (well, except 1-1 and flips) must distort images. It is all about the tradeoffs.
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#155I suspect the problem with music (and writing, and art in general, really) is that there are way more talented musicians than there is demand for music. A few get lucky and hit the big time, and everybody fights over how to get a piece of the money generated. The great majority of musicians will never be able to make a living at it.
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what about your own ears? To hand me this secondhand abstraction contrived by this guy I never met. It's a bit crazy.
Our own senses deceive us >. We have a literal blind spot in the middle of our eyes yet we aren't even aware of it unless pointed out through precisely designed experiments...
No post body was provided.
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#157Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a musical genre, a sound, it has many definitions depending on context. It isn’t just a literal abbreviation of the word “popular”, not since about the 1950s anyway.
No that's exactly what it is. It used to be if it was on the radio, it was pop. Now I guess it would be if it goes viral on Tiktok or trending on streaming platforms. But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone s…
> But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone succeed.
This is impossible for any musical genre that isn't effectively dead. Genres change over time as artists experiment. Hip hop today isn't hip hop from the 90s, but both are hip hop. Rock in the 90s was different from rock in the 60s, and both are different from you'll see released by rock bands in 2022.
Pop isn't just a genre, it has tons of subgenres - bubblegum pop, synth pop, dance pop, hyperpop, K-pop, J-pop - that have distinct differences. There's crossover with other genres sometimes (which is also true of every other genre), but not all popular music is pop, and not all pop is popular.
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite - Nyquist-Shannon's theorem states the original signal can be reconstructed, but it usually isn't in reproduction. Digital playback does not reproduce the full original signal - it plays it back on whatever output device it has, which does not generally recreate the original waveform. That theorem also has some technical constraints that actual noise does not match, such as band limited and Fourier transfor…
Not this again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
On the flip side of this issue, I have been rediscovering my love for the sound of old pop tunes on an AM radio.
1008 AM is a great station available through this webSDR service: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing reproduces the original signal, it's distorted by the inertia and impedance of the microphone and amplifier that recorded it. As you know it's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave, cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value.
Agreed - and after quantization nothing reproduces the signal before quantization. So claiming Nyquist-Shannon proves the OP wrong is incorrect. >It's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave. After an ADC it is not stored as a sine wave. It's stored as quantized values, thus the 'D' in Analog-to-Digital-Converter. >cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value Pretty much al…
Up to the Nyquist limit, a digital signal will completely recreate the original signal, with no square wave steps. Digitisation does not result in square wave output anywhere in the output chain.
Chris Montgomery (of Ogg / Speech / xiph.org & RedHat) did a series of videos going into this in considerable depth. I encourage you to watch them.