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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

#221

Post by Slow_Hand »

mjr00 wrote: post #194
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…

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 mom…

Agreed. LUFS as an "objective metric of quality" is nonsensical. I work as the assistant to a world class mastering engineer and we never discuss LUFS or aim to hit a target loudness. Such metrics (while well understood) are never a consideration.

All we do is listen. Often the goal is to get the record to feel as loud as it can be, but the moment our choices start to degrade the feel of the record we back off. We're doing very little in the way of actual limiting for loudness. We have ways of making the record feel louder, and they don't always involve dynamics processing.

Quite often no limiting is necessary because the mixes that we receive are mixed hot, which leads me to my next point:

Where I'll push back a little - for the sake of conversation - is the assertion that the loudness war died with streaming services. I consider their automatic level compensation features to be a big plus for audio fidelity. For artists and mixers who are sensitive to this issue it relieves them of the pressure of feeling that they need to deliver super hot mixes. The record can simply be what it needs to be and not conform to a certain loudness standard. It's a positive step.

Where my objection comes in is the reality that artists and mixers (who are well aware of the dilemma) nonetheless deliver us mixes that have been crafted for maximum perceived loudness. And they're really good at it. Even world class producers and mixers are sending us records that are squashed to hell, but very often they still sound good! The craft of mixing is evolving and people have become very adept at making an objectively loud record (-3 LUFS, etc) still work. HOW they do that is far too big of a topic to broach here.

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

#222

Post by Johnny555 »

coldtea wrote: post #4
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

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.

>Printers are crap even today.

If you stay away from the cheap consumer printers that are designed to sell ink cartridges, printers are not so bad. We have a Brother multifunction office inkjet printer that's been great, ink is reasonably priced (cheaper than the laser printer that we replaced with it), and it reliably prints around 5 - 10,000 pages/year as well as scanning almost as many pages. (Wife works in a state regulated industry and they require a lot of paper documentation, every year they promise to release the system that will reduce the need for so much paper, and it's always 6 months away)

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

#223

Post by stale2002 »

colpabar wrote: post #176
intalentive wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, but you know that "good" and "worse" and subjective, relative terms? Just because you have your own reasons for something doesn't make them "objective", you just don't like modern pop music.

Ok, so since it is all "subjective" then you have to concede that a song which is just 1 hour of a single note being played is equally good.

Or maybe, instead of devolving into absurdity we can just say that there are come qualities of being better or worse that most people can agree on.

Of course, you can simply bite the bullet and say "yep. The song with 1 note in it is subjectively just as good".

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

#224

Post by nemo44x »

stcroixx wrote: post #212
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.

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.

I'd give way to say that the music from your teens and before. It's much easier to appreciate music from before your time than after your time for some reason. I'd guess nostalgia in part and because when you first heard the old music it was new to you and part of your nostalgia. So you don't experience it the same way that teenagers did when it was released but you have a relationship with it that is meaningful none the less.

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

#225

Post by cubefox »

zirgs wrote: post #111
cubefox wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Piracy is a service problem. Maybe for two short years until iTunes came out. Then there was no service problem anymore. But CD sales kept collapsing while digital sales were hardly worth noting. Which proves that people loved pirated music because it was free, not because they couldn't buy it. > created online marketplaces for games. The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier - Sp…

iTunes was not available everywhere. It was officially available in Eastern Europe only around 2011/2012. And in many other countries even later. Around the same time as Spotify which was a lot better service. Before that I could either buy ridiculously overpriced CDs or go to ThePirateBay which was available in my country from day one. So yeah - it absolutely was a service problem. Soon after Spotify appeared I stop…

> Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.

The fact that revenue still hasn't returned to 1999 levels shows that the price is not "reasonable". They are forced to price it that low because otherwise people would just pirate the music. Many probably still do.

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

#226

Post by chiefalchemist »

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.

Yes and no. The problem current artists run into is coming up with something new. Disco, Hip Hop, Punk and even post-Punk were fresh and new then...but those sounds live on to this day in "new" artists. It's entertaining, but it's hardly something to get excited about.

It's not a matter of getting old per se. It's a matter of having more context, more perspective. Yes, there's a lot of good music today. However, so much of it relies on what we've heard before, it rarely qualifies as great. Or, at best, great is relative to the current, which often is average at best.

Do I want to listen to (e.g.) New Order, or a knock-off of New Order?

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

#227

Post by ok123456 »

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.

> Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.

Agree.

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

#228

Post by cubefox »

zirgs wrote: post #125
cubefox wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music. That's simply false, iTunes launched in 2001.

iTunes only launched in 2011/2012 in Eastern Europe and many other countries. Before that the only way to get music digitally was to download it from P2P networks.

And of course in 2012, Eastern Europeans started to pay for their music, right? No? Maybe they were pirating it because piracy is free.

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

#229

Post by empath-nirvana »

intalentive wrote: post #146
lwelyk wrote: post #137

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.

The only heuristic that matters the quality of pop music is "do people like it" and it's almost a tautology that pop music in any given time period passes it.

If people preferred more complicated music, then more complicated music would be popular and more of it would get made.

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

#230

Post by aqfamnzc »

mjr00 wrote: post #194
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…

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 mom…

I generally agree, but I don't think your comparison between distortion and compression makes sense. Distortion (guitar pedals, etc.) is something the artist intentionally adds to the song, in a specific way, intensity, and time. Compression is something added after the fact, for transit and storage. The artist doesn't really have control over what sort of artifacts lossy compression is going to add, so I don't see how "not enough [compression] will reduce the impact the song has on the listener."
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