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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

#211

Post by ROTMetro »

intalentive wrote: post #136
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.

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

Complexity left to right may have gone down, but top to bottom has gone up. In a DAW people add way more tracks than ever and add all kinds of detail/texture/layers the weren't possible before so yeah, people search out the new and novel to experiment/have fun with. That happens all the time in music. No one used distorted electric guitars in music then all of the sudden music was over saturated in it. Just because you might not understand/recognize the current complexity doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

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

#212

Post by stcroixx »

bazoom42 wrote: post #131
jacquesm wrote: 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.

I like various music from the past 100 years or so, not just from when I was young, and agree quality of current pop is pretty low compared to that time period.

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

#213

Post by filoleg »

mschuster91 wrote: post #195
volkl48 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Venues and their increasing costs have nothing to do with production costs. Production costs refer to what it costs to actually produce a track and release it out there to the public.

Not even talking about insane amounts of good educational material available online for free these days, the capable equipment required to produce a studio-quality track fell down in price significantly, and most older equipment is still fully functional and compatible with newer offerings (thanks, MIDI and XLR). And newer equipment is still significantly cheaper than almost anything comparable from 20 years ago (if it was even available back then).

Back then, you wouldn't be able to produce anything that could compete in quality with studios from your bedroom, and not on a reasonable budget. And even if you somehow were so rich you were able to finance a pro studio in your house, and you produced a decent track, now the question is how would you even distribute it to the public and get heard.

These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to produce a track and the ease of getting your material released to the public, you can go from a nobody to someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-controller. And even that list is optional, as there are people who produce great stuff with less than this or even something entirely different.

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

#214

Post by Spivak »

scelerat wrote: post #205
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.

Ehh. I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966 and 1986. It's not necessarily an age thing. I mean, I remember thinking that at the time too. There are still tons of great musicians and bands making new music today, but the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years ago. Among o…

You weren't around for the garbage. You're getting the benefit of listening to only the best of the best music from an entire generation with ears untainted by it being overplayed. If I pushed you twenty years in the future, made you completely forget all music from 2010 on and played only the very best hearing it for the first time you would be convinced that it was a renaissance.

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

#215

Post by cubefox »

fipar wrote: post #139
cubefox wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes. You don't mention any of these possible causes though. > interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But cassettes weren't mu…

> You don't mention any of these possible causes though. I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that. Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to…

> I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that.

It's an inference to the best explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No empirical evidence conclusively proves its true explanation, but the best available explanation is the most likely correct one.

> Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were the cause for this.

But that seems a much less likely explanation. The GDP remained pretty steady during that time:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

Nothing there is indicating that the music market would suddenly contract by 30%.

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

#216

Post by mrguyorama »

cubefox wrote: post #67
toyg wrote: 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.

Everyone on spotify is free to put their music on bandcamp for $10 instead, and I in fact have bought music exactly that way, getting high quality lossless audio from a niche artist that probably doesn't make a cent from spotify.

But artists largely don't take their music off spotify to exclusively sell alone, because if they tried that they wouldn't make a dime. Music is hard to "find" and your average music maker trying to go their own way (I know several) makes you zero dollars, so why not put it on spotify, make ten bucks, and also possibly find a fan who will buy your music on bandcamp for full price and essentially pay for your life.

The modern creator economy has largely shown that the way you be an artist and make a living is by giving away your stuff mostly for free, making good quality stuff, gaining fans, and letting a small percentage of those fans literally donate you an $80k salary. This works for game makers, music makers, book writers, video producers, journalists, etc.

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

#217

Post by ideamotor »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #193
pessimizer wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

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

#218

Post by nemo44x »

scelerat wrote: post #205
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.

Ehh. I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966 and 1986. It's not necessarily an age thing. I mean, I remember thinking that at the time too. There are still tons of great musicians and bands making new music today, but the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years ago. Among o…

> I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966 and 1986.

Pop music or rock music in particular? Rock is a type of pop music and it's arguable that it is past its prime and was better when it was newer.

> the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years ago.

Likely some survival bias here. There was tons of awful music that was quickly forgotten about back in the day too. I will grant that the cost of recording and distributing music is much lower today so there very well is a lower barrier to entry which means there's probably more garbage than ever.

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

#219

Post by mixmastamyk »

cubefox wrote: post #67
toyg wrote: 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.

Yet many musicians could receive a living wage if just one executive gave up their corporate jet. Enough about that though... let's chide the 'entitled' consumer and supply and demand!

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

#220

Post by Spivak »

dmonitor wrote: post #201
the_only_law wrote: post #134

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.

“what’s popular on the radio /TikTok/charts” being gutter tier hogwash is exactly what they’re talking about. Humans didn’t lose the ability to create good interesting music, and nobody legitimately thinks that. The publishing industry prevents independent artists from reaching any kind of mainstream popularity. Indie artists need money and the publishers that decide the winners/losers by controlling all the traditio…

You have TikTok completely backwards. It's giving a platform and virality to independent artists at a scale that was simply not possible before.

If your only association with TikTok music culture is "TikTok charts" then you're just falling for the same Billboard top 40s but with a new coat of paint.

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