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

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161–170 of 397 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the quality has absolutely cratered You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap. People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.

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

> The average complexity is at all time lows.

there's more than enough breakcore out there if you measure music quality like that. theree's definitely more than in the 20th century.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the quality has absolutely cratered You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap. People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.

It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.

Yes! One of the many joys of the internet and cheap computers is that anyone can produce music with very little upfront cost compared to before.

If you trawl around through youtube videos with 100 views, obscure bandcamps, audiophile forums, niche discord and subreddits, etc, you can find all sorts of absolutely fantastic music.

It obviously takes some work, but it's a lot of fun to discover as well!

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need something new every day Neither do I, but I'm also not going to spend decades - or even years - listening to the same thing week after week. Not to mention that my music tastes are much more varied than they were years ago.

That's fine, not everybody is the same in this respect. I can drive people absolutely nuts by listening to the same piece a few hundred times in a row. Recently: Miriam Stockley, Perfect day (1999, sorry).

> That's fine, not everybody is the same in this respect.

Which is incongruent with:

> the quality has absolutely cratered

You have no measure of music quality and everyone's views on quality are different, e.g. "not everybody is same in this respect".

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the quality has absolutely cratered You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap. People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.

It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.

Aslo go to rateyourmusic (RYM).

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the quality has absolutely cratered You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap. People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.

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

What an HN comment.

"Is this song good?"

"One sec, let me check how complex it is"

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

#166
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware there was an objective 1-to-1 correlation between the complexity of music to its quality.

There's not but it's a good heuristic. In pop music the average entropy is much lower, not only because the songs are simpler, but because they are more alike.

Since you're not required to listen to pop music, the average entropy is utterly irrelevant. If you prefer more complex music there is a huge amount out there, probably more than you can listen to.

Average artwork has always been garbage throughout human history. But I still found a few good paintings to hang on my walls. As long as you can get what you want it doesn't really matter what else is out there.

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

#167
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…

I think the increasingly-impossible long slog is actually a mathematical certainty.

It’s actually a mistake of the goal, in nearly every field, because it’s intrinsically contradictory.

“I want to be at the top, but I don’t want to make the stuff that isn’t to my taste that the current people at the top make”

There will be very few winners as the participation increases, the “winners” don’t scale nearly as aggressively as the amount of people fighting to be one do.

OnlyFans, YouTube, Twitch, Music, Acting. They’re all headed to the same place. Look how intuitive it is when you apply it to something like Crypto then ask why the same logic doesn’t apply virtually everywhere.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.

Yes! One of the many joys of the internet and cheap computers is that anyone can produce music with very little upfront cost compared to before. If you trawl around through youtube videos with 100 views, obscure bandcamps, audiophile forums, niche discord and subreddits, etc, you can find all sorts of absolutely fantastic music. It obviously takes some work, but it's a lot of fun to discover as well!

Oh yeah, I forgot about YouTube, some of the best stuff I’ve found in recent years have been on channels that curate/promote music in particular genre. I have one for all sorts of punk genres, as well as one for doom metal and its related genres. They’re great, because they have all sorts of stuff, old and new, and help cut down on the cruft.

My only complaint about bandcamp is the mobile app. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to change the sorting when you’re looking through a genre, so it’s usually filled with albums and artists I already heard years ago, but their website is much better.

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

#170
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…

> the quality has absolutely cratered You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap. People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.

That’s a real thing but it’s also real that investment in artist development cratered along with the market for CDs in the 2000s.
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