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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

#151
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just didn't provide any argument that piracy didn't cause the observed collapse of the music industry.

You just didn't provide any argument that piracy did cause the observed collapse of the music industry. You believe the business model based on selling overpriced media and feeding most of it into advertising instead of paying artists, was sustainable?

The launch of Napster in 1999 is the most likely explanation for the massive drop in CD sales starting in 1999. Do you have any alternative explanation?

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.

What does “complexity” even mean here? Is modern music any less complex than “I Want to Hold Your Hand”?

There are different ways to measure complexity: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0067... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/

Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive.

Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#153
post #67
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> Thanks to reasonable streaming prices What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly make any money from it.

That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated in streaming. In reality streaming should produce more money for talent, eliminate overhead, and put more pressure on recording companies profit margins.

The height of the CD was ludicrous. A CD cost 15-20$ in the mid nineties, and cassettes, a more expensive and complicated medium, were half of that.

So a lot of the collapse isn't EVIL PIRATES, it is that the industry was sitting on a massive monopoly and cash printing machine, and digital collapsed that profit margin.

Music production used to require million dollar+ recording studios that the labels had a semi-monopoly on. Even in the 1990s, you could get usable recording equipment and software from a PC and Microsoft Windows.

Radio payola is mostly the last gasp of label control, although that seems to be going strong.

The REAL killer of music revenue is the rise of video games and way more television/video accessibility. First of all, there isn't one TV in the home like it was up to the 1990s. TVs are cheap, and smartphones are ubiquitous. Video games. tiktoks/youtubes, and TV dominate the media of the youth, and music is a peripheral/decorative aspect of those.

Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#154
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just didn't provide any argument that piracy did cause the observed collapse of the music industry. You believe the business model based on selling overpriced media and feeding most of it into advertising instead of paying artists, was sustainable?

The launch of Napster in 1999 is the most likely explanation for the massive drop in CD sales starting in 1999. Do you have any alternative explanation?

It needs no alternative explanation. Napster was so successful because customers hated existing options. You imply it's wholly their fault?

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “complexity” even mean here? Is modern music any less complex than “I Want to Hold Your Hand”?

There are different ways to measure complexity: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0067... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/ Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive. Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and…

I notice that the authors of that paper are two physicists and a data scientist. I wonder if they even consulted a musicologist or a composer with a background in research before publishing this paper. What would you think about a paper on programming that featured no computer scientists?

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.

What does “complexity” even mean here? Is modern music any less complex than “I Want to Hold Your Hand”?

[dead]

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#157
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me. I don’t want to fuck over later me, so I’m still buying music. Probably not saving money, but I also get some music not on streaming services.

What is not on streaming services? From my experience - if it's not on spotify then it's on youtube.

Lots of old music is not there (I love collecting 30-40s jazz, many records are simply not on any streaming service because they were bootlegs/live recordings and weren't officially released)

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “complexity” even mean here? Is modern music any less complex than “I Want to Hold Your Hand”?

There are different ways to measure complexity: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0067... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/ Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive. Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and…

We're running out of chords. They've all been mined. We can't make new ones.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#159
post #7

"Home taping is killing music" The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of. I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a thir…

Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can 1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from FTP trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on YouTube 6. Listen on Spotify Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB? There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and compet…

The experience of Napster, Limewire and Kazaa was pretty bad at the time. Plenty of songs were low quality, mislabeled, skipping, incomplete, or radio recordings with announcers talking over them, which was especially frustrating when it'd take 5 minutes to download a single song.

I was a teenager limited to summer job money, but I was happy to buy music on the iTunes store when it launched. I bought CDs as well, but my primary motivation for piracy was that record stores had a limited selection and often exorbitant prices (because the industry was engaged in price fixing^), and the record labels seemed to care more about stopping online music consumption and forcing people to buy CDs than actually providing a worthwhile paid service–their official channels were godawful, see PressPlay.

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_price_fixing

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can 1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from FTP trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on YouTube 6. Listen on Spotify Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB? There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and compet…

> Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can... As someone that jumped on the Napster and, to a lesser extent, Limewire and Kazaa bandwagon, their value for me wasn't so much that I could get something for free that cost money at the local record store, but it was stuff that couldn't get at all at my local record store. That said, and much later on, the ability to legitimately listen to music on…

The bands I love now are all ones that I discovered by downloading tracks. They weren't played on radio (or the songs that had airplay didn't really represent their catalog). I was a teenager with little ability to go to the store let alone afford to buy albums. I have no moral qualms about getting those tracks.
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