141–150 of 397 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.
You’re right about the average, but that single summary statistic is too coarse. There’s probably much more great music being produced now than ever before, but there’s much much much more crappy music. And recommendation algorithms aren’t optimizing for quality.
"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…
Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can 1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from FTP trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on YouTube 6. Listen on Spotify Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB? There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and compet…
Digital audio from the listener end had its piece, but two other trends also converged:
- Digital audio from the producer end continued to advance and become cheaper. You can make pretty good recordings on a laptop with the appropriate sound interfaces now, if you have a decent soundproofed room. That is assuming your music isn't digital synth based. Studios are a thing of the past or what a person who likes to produce music calls their bedroom or basement.
- People started caring about the portability of music much more than the quality of it. That trend goes as far back as the Walkman. Regarding the quality, now no one cares if the SNR of your "recording studio" can accurately record all 20-20KHz band of a pindrop from 5 miles away at delta-sigma modulated 192Kbps. If it sounds good with headphones or a car stereo it's fine. This is why MP3 was successful despite its audio quality issues.
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 ga…
>No more rewinding/forwarding You did get adept at looking at a record to figure out where the songs were based on the record track "texture". (our high school had a radio station, and records being the music mode at the time). To cue up the next song, we'd play the record into the song, take the payer "out of gear" and manually spin the record backwards while listening till we hit blank. We did this part off the air…
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If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.
But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music revenue, as the chart shows.
I think the collapse is due to the death of vinyl, which was probably associated with disco and older dying styles.
CDs could always be recorded to cassettes. It was just an audio stream you could feed to the cassette player. So pirates and swappers wouldn't have cared that much.
And the sales peak of cassettes is during the late 1980s. So that was well after the collapse of sales.
"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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.
I wasn't aware there was an objective 1-to-1 correlation between the complexity of music to its quality.
"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…
Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can 1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from FTP trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on YouTube 6. Listen on Spotify Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB? There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and compet…
There is one thing i learned from Warez: If you like the game, buy it.
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.
"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…
Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can 1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from FTP trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on YouTube 6. Listen on Spotify Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB? There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and compet…
As someone that jumped on the Napster and, to a lesser extent, Limewire and Kazaa bandwagon, their value for me wasn't so much that I could get something for free that cost money at the local record store, but it was stuff that couldn't get at all at my local record store.
That said, and much later on, the ability to legitimately listen to music on-demand via Spotify and its ilk pretty much ended my trips to the store.
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You just didn't provide any argument that piracy didn't cause the observed collapse of the music industry.
That's not how it works. You didn't provide any kind of proof that it did.