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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

#11
post #4

I have some nostalgia for most technologies. Tapes and printers, not so much.

Tapes where great - if you mean audio tapes. Printers are crap even today.

Yeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard to find.

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

#13

People laugh at all of this but Napster really did kill the music industry. No really. It did. And whatever it didn’t kill, YouTube did. So. Haha. Stupid musicians and their stupid stuffed suit execs. Lol.

Maybe we do not need that industry to exist anymore.

You have more than hundred years of backlog at your fingertips as well as new stuff going out constantly. Music is abundant.

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

#14
Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6" button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"!

No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999).

Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-)

Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.

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

#15
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…

Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life?

My own music tastes change over time. I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time, especially if I'm walking places often.

That's the thing with streaming. I'm OK with paying an amount that is less than a CD was 25 years ago just to have a bunch of music at my disposal. A bunch of new-to-me music from various genres and from various places in the world. It isn't like I'm going to purchase physical media any time soon.

Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me.

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

#16
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…

Quality may have tanked but profits soared. Music, movies and any other corporate product are meant to appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore they have to be average.

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

#17
The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s:

https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000

Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes.

Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing substantially:

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/...

Piracy may since have receded, but only due to Spotify / Apple Music dumping pricing.

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

#18
post #6

What's interesting, 1980s was the heyday of Russian Rock tape albums. Soviet government did actually go after artists for doing live concerts (on the grounds of illegal enterpreneurship†), but not after tape recording stuff. You could duplicate as many tape albums as you wished in specialized tape copying booths, as well as at home if you had the hardware. † You are probably wondering whether there was "legal" enterp…

Even before cassette tapes become available people in USSR recorded and copied music at home using reel-to-reel tapes. LP vinyl record was the most produced media back then but it was state controlled - even is some music was not outright censored it was not published in large enough numbers if state official though massed should not listen a particular music genre or a record.

I wonder of people outside soviet block copied musing at home using reel-to-reel tapes (in non negligible numbers)?

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

#19
post #4

I have some nostalgia for most technologies. Tapes and printers, not so much.

Tapes where great - if you mean audio tapes. Printers are crap even today.

Audio tapes were crap for most people.

There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism.

Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed.

And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.

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

#20
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could probably fit my entire MP3 collection as FLAC on a single DLT. Shame abou the seek times but some kind of lower bitrate forward coding across the entire dataset, a cache and seek times might not matter as much for long plays. It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.

Why would you store MP3 as FLAC?

I would re-encode from the original or get flac. What I have digitally is compressed because of history, more than anything else.

It was a figure of speech. The point is a single DLT is huge. Well .. LTO.

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