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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

#231

Post by empath-nirvana »

intalentive wrote: post #152
some-guy wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “complexity” even mean here? Is modern music any less complex than “I Want to Hold Your Hand”?

There are different ways to measure complexity: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0067... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/ Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive. Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and…

> Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.

You should see how much time EDM producers spend tweaking the waveforms of individual percussion hits. The idea that timbre in modern music is _less_ complex than in the past is just mind boggling to me, given the level of control that people have in sculpting waveforms and samples. There are entire EDM tracks that are basically just atonal explorations of timbre.

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

#232

Post by cubefox »

realusername wrote: post #114
cubefox wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam DRM (video games) is also not removable. And iTunes music did work on iPods. The main issue was that most people filled their iPods with pirated music instead.

But Steam games do work straight away on your computer, iTunes DRM music did not work on your average mp3 player everybody had. It's not like you could do something about it, it just refused to play it, I know, I had one. And if you're asking customers to pay money to get the legal music and then download a DRM removal software from some Russian website to be able to listen to it (that might existed at the time, I do…

Even iPod owners filled their hard drives with pirated MP3s. And every smartphone can support any DRM music software just as much as every PC can support something like Steam. The admissable reasons for piracy have long ceased to exist, yet people still don't like to pay for music. The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.

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

#233

Post by seba_dos1 »

cubefox wrote: post #204
seba_dos1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course industry's revenue will collapse when you steal billions from them, duh. After all, we all know there's no other rational reason for these profits to plummet than piracy... It's not like people's habits and technology has significantly changed around that time.

Yeah. The new habit was to illegally download music from the Web instead of buying it on CD or from iTunes. Or do you think that around the millennium, people suddenly lost interest in music?

I grew up during that time and I simply had no proper options to get music in a convenient digital way long after it became technologically possible. When something actually appeared, it was either DRMed or unacceptably lossy for the price (or both). How can anyone be surprised that people stopped giving money when it was made so hard for them to give money?

I ended up with a personal collection of CDs for other reasons anyway, but the music industry simply did nothing to meet the demand and gave up the playing field to Spotify and Apple on their own chord. Look at last.fm for what happened when someone wanted to step into the XXI century while respecting the music industry rules.

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

#234

Post by justsomehnguy »

cubefox wrote: post #188
justsomehnguy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Bullshit. You are conveniently ignoring the musicians were ripped by the labels way, way before mp3s and still are. Go, read this[0] from the musician itself, ffs. Piracy doesn't make this issue smaller, if anything, it makes it worse. Love wrote: > There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business? This piece was published in 2000, and sales w…

[flagged]

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

#235

Post by asifgnionio »

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.

[dead]

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

#236

Post by LanceH »

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.

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 Cline today? Producers would choose someone other than Patsy Cline for Crazy and twist Willie Nelson's arm to make him a ghostwriter on the song so the hot, autotuned, woman could claim she wrote it herself.

There is more to it than just getting older.

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

#237

Post by mjr00 »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #230
mjr00 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I'm talking about dynamic range compression[0] in this context, not audio compression (e.g. MP3).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

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

#238

Post by biorach »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #230
mjr00 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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."

This conversation isn't about file compression, it's about dynamic range compression. Very different.

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-audio-compression.h...

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

#239

Post by cubefox »

zirgs wrote: post #126
cubefox wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on But this scarcity is good. It enables, or would enable, production of music which wouldn't otherwise be produced. If music piracy weren't so much an issue today, the music industry size would probably be several times its current size (it would have simply grown with the rest of the economy, as…

There are more than 100M tracks on Spotify. More that one person can listen to over several lifetimes. Even if 99% of them are crap - that still leaves 1M of good tracks. The amount of available music is simply staggering nowadays.

Yeah, but it would be even better if there was no piracy and thus significantly more money to be made in the music business.

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

#240

Post by cubefox »

zirgs wrote: post #113
cubefox wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't, iTunes (and other services before that) existed before Steam. The music industry was ahead of the games industry, not the other way round. The difference is that video game DRM (Steam) succeeded, but music DRM didn't.

Steam was available in the Eastern Europe way before iTunes and Spotify. Music and movie industries really dropped the ball there.

In the US iTunes was available earlier, but people still liked piracy better.
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