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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

#241

Post by sspiff »

LanceH wrote: post #236
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.

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…

This is nothing new though, this has been true since the rise of TV and things like top of the pops. Because guess what? People prefer pretty people.

Once artists became visible, this was inevitable. The pretty people were going to become popular regardless of whether the music industry got involved or not.

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

#242

Post by bigbillheck »

cubefox wrote: post #197
bigbillheck wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They make hardly any money from Spotify. They make hardly any money from the record companies.

No, from Spotify. You aren't paying enough for it. Because you would switch to illegal downloads otherwise. It is hard to offer a successful product when it has to compete against a completely free alternative.

Artists were getting royally screwed over by the record companies decades before anybody'd ever heard of spotify.

(Personally I don't pay anything for spotify, I buy almost all my new music from bandcamp)

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

#243

Post by blowski »

LanceH wrote: post #236
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.

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.

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

#244

Post by bigbillheck »

samstave wrote: post #187
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.

Sure, but one cant deny the music of the late 60s and 70s changed a lot of human culture. But we dont have revolutionary music such as led zepplin, pink floyd, etc in the current crop. none of the above sought facade public images as much as every single 'influencing' pop-stars today. Their influence was organic. Today's music trends are forced. Aside from some EDM style folks, such as ZHU - great music but hes not o…

> Their influence was organic. Today's music trends are forced.

This is 100% purestrain revisionism.

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

#245

Post by mjr00 »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #221
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…

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…

Yeah it's true that people are still trying to make loud stuff. But as you say, people are so good at making it work now that's not really a "I'm making this -3 because I need to be competitive with other songs," it's "I'm making this -3 because it's a heavy bass record and I want this to melt people's goddamn faces when they listen to it." In other words, an artistic decision, rather than a business one.

I think most modern EDM-pop now is at about -7 or so. These are world-class engineers doing the mixing, they could absolutely push it to -5 or -3 if they wanted, there's just no need thanks to LUFS normalization.

Like when people think about the real victims of the loudness war, it's albums like Californication or What's the Story (Morning Glory), which really didn't need to be that loud except for sounding better (in the louder = better sense) on the radio. Something like Death Magnetic you could argue is both intentionally loud + a victim of the loudness war, but it's also just really poorly mixed/mastered in general.

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

#246

Post by cmgbhm »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #231
intalentive wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it goes both ways. Some do spend insane amounts of time on individual hits or compositing sounds to various functional points.

You can also get the same thing looped 4x that has no variation. Hard to fault either side. Musicians have to get work out rapidly and then occasionally something gets legs.

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

#247

Post by flyinghamster »

jacquesm wrote: post #80
dale_glass wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We did - briefly - have the DAT (digital audio tape) format.

That got kneecapped by the recording industry [0], and the result was that consumer interest was near zero. Once recordable CDs and then MP3 and friends came on the scene, it was rendered irrelevant.

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

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

#248

Post by agumonkey »

sspiff wrote: post #241
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…

This is nothing new though, this has been true since the rise of TV and things like top of the pops. Because guess what? People prefer pretty people. Once artists became visible, this was inevitable. The pretty people were going to become popular regardless of whether the music industry got involved or not.

A french singer contest saw a normal/chubby girl winning by a wide margin. The tour after te tv show bombed horribly.

There's a reflex in crowds to seek for some traits and physical "beauty" seems one of them. The rest seems the exception (and those singers have either very special skills or a super solid persona)

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

#249

Post by cubefox »

mrguyorama wrote: post #216
cubefox wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thanks to reasonable streaming prices What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly make any money from it.

Everyone on spotify is free to put their music on bandcamp for $10 instead, and I in fact have bought music exactly that way, getting high quality lossless audio from a niche artist that probably doesn't make a cent from spotify. But artists largely don't take their music off spotify to exclusively sell alone, because if they tried that they wouldn't make a dime. Music is hard to "find" and your average music maker t…

I doubt it works for almost anyone. Who is making $80k in donations? More likely seems the following: People listen to music on Spotify and don't even begin to think about donating any money to the musician. They already pay for Spotify after all. And of course Bandcamp can't compete with Spotify pricing, let alone piracy.

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

#250

Post by agumonkey »

scelerat wrote: post #205
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.

Ehh. I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966 and 1986. It's not necessarily an age thing. I mean, I remember thinking that at the time too. There are still tons of great musicians and bands making new music today, but the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years ago. Among o…

I think what changed is

The place of music in society. Availability doesn't mean wide impact. It often created smaller sub cultures.

The place of music in people, there are more things capturing your mind now.

The place of the industry, in the past access was granted through a tree of labels and record companies, it also had a weight in the inertia of styles and art. You went through more skilled eyes, it gives you a different legitimity.

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