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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

#191

Post by volkl48 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #174
bazoom42 wrote: post #131

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.

> 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. Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1], another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use…

Movies + Music aren't the same medium, though.

Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs, and if anything it's easier than ever to get something out there on the primary distribution mechanisms used by the public to consume media.

It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I can't keep up with it all.

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

#193

Post by empath-nirvana »

pessimizer wrote: post #173
bazoom42 wrote: post #131

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.

> You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century. Recorded music hasn't been around long enough to think that platitudes like this actually have any meaningful content. I'm here whining about how you're using a Beatles example because your argument is literally a teenage Baby Boomer a…

> I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century.

People were complaining about the loudness war in _classical music_ in the early 19th century, unfavorably comparing Beethoven to his predecessors, and how his imitators were ruining music. Human nature doesn't change, and the phenomenon of people having their taste in music frozen in their teens and twenties is not something that was invented with the phonograph.

“It is not surprising that Beethoven should, occasionally, have entertained blasé notions of his art; that he should have mistaken noise for grandeur, extravagance for originality, and have supposed that the interest of his compositions would be in proportion to their duration. That he gave little time to reflection, is proved most clearly in the extraordinary length of some movements in his later symphonies… His great qualities are frequently alloyed by a morbid desire for novelty; by extravagance, and by a disdain of rule… The effect which the writings of Beethoven have had on the art must, I fear, be considered as injurious. Led away by the force of his genius and dazzled by his creations, a crowd of imitators has arisen, who have displayed as much harshness, as much extravagance, and as much obscurity, with little or none of his beauty and grandeur. Thus music is no longer intended to sooth, to delight, to ‘wrap the sense in Elysium’; it is absorbed in one principle—to astonish.” Letter to the Editor in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, London, 1827

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

#194

Post by mjr00 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #174
bazoom42 wrote: post #131

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.

> 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. Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1], another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use…

Firstly, the loudness war largely died with Spotify. LUFS normalization means that pushing beyond -14 is an artistic choice and not necessary to compete with other tracks on loudness alone.

Secondly, more compressed (less dynamic range) doesn't mean worse, or better. It means more compressed. In some genres, tons of compression is desirable; in others, less so. Is an orchestral Hans Zimmer piece that maxes at -10 momentary LUFS better than a Skrillex song that hits -4 during a drop? You could argue either song is better, but I don't think your argument would have anything to do with its LUFS measurement.

Compression is similar to distortion. Too much distortion is generally seen as bad. But if distortion were always bad, people would use acoustic guitars and clean electrics and never run things through a distortion pedal. Same idea with compression. Too much compression will kill a mix, but not enough will reduce the impact the song has on the listener.

In other words, trying to say that LUFS is an "objective metric of quality" is complete nonsense. To me that's like saying that lines of code written is an objective metric of quality of a software developer.

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

#195

Post by mschuster91 »

volkl48 wrote: post #191
mschuster91 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1], another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use…

Movies + Music aren't the same medium, though. Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs, and if anything it's easier than ever to get something out there on the primary distribution mechanisms used by the public to consume media. It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often…

> Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs

It actually has. Venues are getting more and more expensive, and the effort to run shows has also increased - Rammstein is far from the only one requiring dozens of trucks to move their equipment around. On top of that you have Ticketmaster and their ilk on a brutal rent-seeking ride at the expense of both artists and fans.

> It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I can't keep up with it all.

Yeah, indie stuff still works out fine these days, if not easier as Soundcloud has replaced physical tapes, but to achieve major recognition still takes an absurd amount of money, connections and luck. Or all three of them.

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

#196

Post by cubefox »

rini17 wrote: post #154
cubefox wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, I imply it's mostly our fault. (Why "their"? You were part of us too, admit it.) The proof is that we didn't start buying music even when it was perfectly possible to do so. We kept pirating because it was free. iPods could hold thousands of songs. Who would buy them on iTunes? Almost nobody of course. Downloadable music sales never nearly reached dimensions of CD sales. Until Spotify offered impossibly low flat rate pricing so that pirating wasn't worth the inconvenience. For some people, at least.

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

#197

Post by cubefox »

bigbillheck wrote: post #182
cubefox wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh poor, poor Sony/BMG/EMI CEOs who absolutely couldn't buy another yacht while lowering their expenses by literally making money out of thin air by literally copying digital music. /me wets a handkerchief with the tears of compassion. You are conveniently ignoring the musicians which are hardest hit by our piracy. They make hardly any money from Spotify. > You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with 1981…

> They make hardly any money from Spotify. They make hardly any money from the record companies.

No, from Spotify. You aren't paying enough for it. Because you would switch to illegal downloads otherwise. It is hard to offer a successful product when it has to compete against a completely free alternative.

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

#198

Post by Chiba-City »

cubefox wrote: post #90
hbossy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute people selling filters?

Piracy was illegal long before cassettes or Napster were invented. Sulfur extraction was always legal, and for good reason.

[dead]

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

#199

Post by yunwal »

intalentive wrote: post #152
some-guy wrote: post #140

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…

> Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles

The most popular genre in America (the world?) isn’t sung and doesn’t focus on tone, so this is hardly surprising. I bet if you measured rhythmic complexity or lyrical complexity it’d show the opposite.

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

#200

Post by itintheory »

some-guy wrote: post #145
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for streaming music because I've pirated all my other music, and it's convenient. Quality is subjective, I'm no audiophile and unless I'm using it on the go with low data mode on, I can't hear the difference... except the one time with a more obscure song, but I reported that and they fixed it. Maybe that was an accidental low data mode though.

I’m someone who has a large FLAC collection and an obsession with my private music tracker. I do it because of an obsession of collecting music, but modern streaming is “good enough” for 99% of cases. And unlike video streaming platforms, most audio platforms have “most” content that people want to listen to.

> And unlike video streaming platforms, most audio platforms have “most” content that people want to listen to.

I'm worried about the potential for this to change. Netflix used to have a much larger catalogue, especially for movies. Nowadays the things I'm interested in may be spread across a dozen different services.

Currently it seems that Spotify, and Youtube music (probably Apple music too, though I've not tried it) have almost everything I can think of. But I can certainly see a possible future where these services get much more fragmented.

For instance, I know Apple is already pushing a classical only streaming service. Could/would they some day remove classical from their other streaming services and instead offer a higher priced bundle deal? I think it's possible.

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