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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

#281

Post by wizofaus »

taeric wrote: post #179
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…

There really aren't objective metrics. There are quantifiable metrics, but turning something into a number doesn't make it fully objective. And nothing pushes for bland personalities near as much as people pining for the past.

That last statement might hold for "recent past" (last 10 or 15 years, say), but the one recent top 40 hit that stood out for me has a 50s type vibe (Until I Found You, Stephen Sanchez). I'm not particularly a fan of that style (well before my time!) but it's surely not "bland".

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

#282

Post by uhmyeh »

EGreg wrote: post #279
uhmyeh wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And their resurgence with AI and Google’s web integrity thing The web is just TV3.0, reserved for acceptable political and commercial content now. Eh I’m done with that; switching off to all of it. Will stick to internet for job and not use it on my personal desktop, just phone. Copyright rent seekers can do something useful for humanity or stick to making it about “the art” and perform local theatre

You can’t opt of it, your friends will make decisions that affect you, bother you with political opinions, share your photos etc.

It’s a good thing my friends also hate the web. I was pretty much the lone holdout

“Opt out” from my references frame; I will use a gmail for government and services as expected, and do nothing else online but what my job asks. I’m done scrolling and collecting useless knowledge and anecdotes

I literally just switched to shit tier ISP speeds

Fortunately I deleted TwitFace a decade ago

Will be blacklisting HN, Reddit on the router end

Down to a stupid beefy ML machine through work, personal iPhone and old MacBook Air running Linux; feels good man dog

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

#283

Post by TimPC »

EGreg wrote: post #277
Jeslijar wrote: post #273

Is this really a problem? Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever. All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies. How much should music make as an industry? Wh…

Yup! And the same can be said for your work also, if you produce digital content It will all become hobbies

I think the big difference is some digital content has an exact audience and needs to be highly customized for them. For example, companies don't buy web apps and then modify them into the web app they want they program what they want from the frameworks they choose up. So while code is digital content, it's quite resistant to having its value lowered by copying.

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

#284

Post by carlosjobim »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #130
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 stream my own music, because you can do that now. It's $0/month, and I never have to worry about some cranky millionaire getting pissed at Spotify and yanking their music off of it. Nothing is so convenient that I'd ever pay an ongoing subscription. Those always feel like scams or ripoffs, and life in 2023 is so overfilled with subscriptions that they can't possibly be affordable to even you guys who make x3 what I…

Where do you get the free uplink?

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

#285

Post by [deleted] »

mschuster91 wrote: post #256
filoleg wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

> 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.…

[deleted]

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

#286

Post by jacquesm »

deepspace wrote: post #268
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.

Watch this video, and tell me that there is no objective difference in quality between pre-2000 and post-2000 songs. With a few exceptions, modern music is autotuned-to-death, boring, indistinguishable crap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uMW2XsMx8Q

Very interesting.

After 1990 it drops right off a cliff for me with a few exceptions.

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

#287

Post by Neff »

And then there are sites like https://bt.etree.org/ where artists allow for free and open trading of live shows.

Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and then mail it back.

With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.

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

#288

Post by jurimasa »

blowski wrote: post #243
LanceH wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the ugly singers? Music is represented my a disproportionately high number of hot women (and less so men) with no room for others. There is obviously a standard other than musical quality in play. Today, it's mostly true that everything is available. The music that reaches the masses, though, is defined by production over musical quality. Would we even see or hear from Cass Elliot, Janis Joplin, or Patsy Cl…

Lewis Capaldi, Adele, Meghan Trainor, Jay Z, Drake. I don’t believe any of them made it because of their looks. On the other hand, the Beatles, The Stones, The Monkees, Stevie Nicks, Olivia Newton John - their looks were very much part of their appeal. Same as it ever was. Face it - you’re old.

So, being old = opinion invalid?

Nice ageism you have there, kid.

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

#289

Post by pessimizer »

Jeslijar wrote: post #273

Is this really a problem? Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever. All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies. How much should music make as an industry? Wh…

We've fallen into decadence, and with it has come the desire to freeze society as it existed somewhere around 1965, when baby boomers turned 20. I've had conversations with people asking how new Marvel movies could be made if some political or legal change happened. Who cares?

Don't care if no one ever writes a novel again, there's plenty to read. It'll never happen, though, because people will write novels for free, and people will sponsor people who create things that they want or that they want to be seen sponsoring. Don't care if there's never another piece of recorded music, and we're stuck playing music with each other or being in the same room with people playing music for us. Of course, this will never happen, because the vast majority of music is made for free, and the rest nearly for free after the record companies recoup.

The state doesn't need to keep encouraging the production of art through police action. If the state wants to encourage art, give everybody a tax credit that they have to send to an artist.

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

#290

Post by ghaff »

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…

As someone in college in the late 70s we did a ton of taping each others’ vinyl onto cassette and pretty no one I knew actually bought prerecorded cassettes unless that was the only medium available.

Of course, as with software, not every cassette copy represented a lost vinyl album sale but copying in places like colleges was very widespread.

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