I have some nostalgia for most technologies. Tapes and printers, not so much.
Tapes gave us the mix-tape - a beautiful thing for sharing.
Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
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Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#52I have some nostalgia for most technologies. Tapes and printers, not so much.
Tape is still amazing in terms of data density and storage longevity
Not analogue audio cassettes though.
They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse, distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be ruined.
In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film dolefully flapping about in the breeze.
This is not a format to be overly nostalgic for.
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#53And the movie and TV industries wanted in on videotape back then. I remember reading a piece by one of the then big lobby shops, arguing that VHS tapes should be a tax, the income to be distributed to the studios.
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#54In Sweden there is still a tax on cassette tapes that goes directly to artists... So if you buy a cassette tape (any cassette tape for any use) artists in Sweden gets a cut... Not sure how many people today use cassette tapes for piracy...
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#55Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6" button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"! No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999). Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-) Now though I just have about 600 CDs ga…
Why quite sad ? There's nothing like crawling a collection of physical records or books and remind "Oh, I remember when I used to listen to this like crazy" and being able to simply put the record in a player and listen it" That kind of serendipity is just not possible with digital collections, especially when records get deletted from services without notices, or you have to browse deep in a .mp3 collection you affo…
It's nice to have those memories, for sure, but my CDs themselves get completely neglected nowadays - between mp3 rips, and streaming services conveniently tying in with my main hifi setup, the CDs just don't see active service any more. And my kids sure aren't interested :-D
I used to love exploring friends' music collections, seeing where tastes overlap. "Everyone has everything via Spotify" completely eliminates this. And I don't see us going back in any substantially wider sense, the genie's out of the bottle. Ah the march of progress, eh...
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#56The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s: https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes. Even 20…
The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice. The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.
By doing that, they also ensured that consumers went to great lengths to produce good-quality rips of their full catalogs, effectively establishing large libraries of content ready to be distributed for free. Thanks to reasonable streaming prices, my children will likely never have to know what a bitrate is, whereas I was forced to develop a full range of "pirate skills".
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves It wasn't the record companies which ruined the music industry. It was us, the consumers. We ruined it with piracy. https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 We always like to imagine big organizations as the "baddies", and us as the "goodies". But the reality doesn't always follow this convenient narrative. Sometimes it turns out we w…
You are trying to collerate loss of revenue with the loss caused by piracy, without any data of loss caused by piracy. Also, showing a graph without the last 10 years is making the data lying: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database The music industry earnings has never been that high than today. Also, actual studies shows piracy helped sales, not hindered earnings: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-fin…
> You are trying to collerate loss of revenue with the loss caused by piracy, without any data of loss caused by piracy.
The only explanation for the complete collapse of CD sales starting in 1999 is piracy. Napster & Co. Anything else is dishonest.
> Also, showing a graph without the last 10 years is making the data lying: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database
No, this data is lying because it ignores inflation. Here is an inflation adjusted chart, which shows a massive drop in revenue:
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/...
Moreover, even if revenue were on the same level today as it was more than 20 years ago, which it isn't, this would ignore the fact that in the meantime the global economy has increased substantially, such that the revenue without piracy would be much higher than back then.
> Also, actual studies shows piracy helped sales, not hindered earnings:
This is about video games and highly speculative. For music there is overwhelming evidence that piracy completely crushed the CD market.
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#58Can't believe nobody linked this masterpiece yet: https://youtu.be/R3jkUhG68wY
"So put down that C90, next time we won't ask nicely"
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves It wasn't the record companies which ruined the music industry. It was us, the consumers. We ruined it with piracy. https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 We always like to imagine big organizations as the "baddies", and us as the "goodies". But the reality doesn't always follow this convenient narrative. Sometimes it turns out we w…
The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the third round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that. Before that CDs sold for twice the amount that the original records cost when they…
> The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the third round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that.
That's not true. iTunes or Spotify did not nearly compensate for lost CD revenue.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/...
Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves It wasn't the record companies which ruined the music industry. It was us, the consumers. We ruined it with piracy. https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 We always like to imagine big organizations as the "baddies", and us as the "goodies". But the reality doesn't always follow this convenient narrative. Sometimes it turns out we w…
It looks way different if you include data of the last 14 years though (even inflation adjusted) https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
This isn't inflation adjusted as far as I can see. Even if it were, the revenue now should be much higher than in 1999, given that the world economy grew a lot since then. Here is an actual inflation adjusted chart, which looks pretty damning:
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/...