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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

#251

Post by radicaldreamer »

mjr00 wrote: post #245
Slow_Hand wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mos…

Stadium Arcadium was a victim of this until the LP corrected the levels and is now considered the definitive version of the album.

I'm not sure if the high-res audio version on Apple Music has corrected this sin of the original CDs.

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

#252

Post by cubefox »

realusername wrote: post #115
cubefox wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices. The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead, they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against pir…

You had more piracy during the CD era than anything you can imagine right now. Basically every town had a pirated CD shop, everybody knew somebody to call to get some pirated CDs, it was a full business.

Not in my country. Our police apparently prevented such shops.

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

#253

Post by agumonkey »

some-guy wrote: post #140
intalentive wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.

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

Vocal harmonies for one

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

#254

Post by cubefox »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #153
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.

That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated in streaming. In reality streaming should produce more money for talent, eliminate overhead, and put more pressure on recording companies profit margins. The height of the CD was ludicrous. A CD cost 15-20$ in the mid nineties, and cassettes, a more expensive and complicated medium, were half of that. S…

> Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).

Interessanting hypothesis. Do people listen to music less nowadays? It seems indeed not as dominant as in the 90s, I admit that.

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

#255

Post by WalterBright »

mschuster91 wrote: post #174
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.

> 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…

It's hard to find a popular recording these days that hasn't had the vocal electronically altered. Autotune is just one of the effects applied.

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

#256

Post by mschuster91 »

filoleg wrote: post #213
mschuster91 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs It actually has. Venues are getting more and more expensive, and the effort to run shows has also increased - Rammstein is far from the only one requiring dozens of trucks to move their equipment around. On top of that you have Ticketmaster and their ilk on a brutal rent-seeking ride at the expense of both artists and fans. > It certainly has it's own business pro…

Venues and their increasing costs have nothing to do with production costs. Production costs refer to what it costs to actually produce a track and release it out there to the public. Not even talking about insane amounts of good educational material available online for free these days, the capable equipment required to produce a studio-quality track fell down in price significantly, and most older equipment is stil…

> These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to produce a track and the ease of getting your material released to the public, you can go from a nobody to someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-controller. And even that list is optional, as there are people who produce great stuff with less than this or even something entirely different.

But how many actually manage to pull off that feat? You can probably count them on two hands. One-hit wonders yes, there have been a fair few of these that managed to hit the zeitgeist thanks to social media (Wellerman!), but a sustained career after that, from scratch and with no prior experience? I couldn't name one.

Everyone has the chance to strike a lottery jackpot, but only one person will.

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

#257

Post by Karunamon »

cubefox wrote: post #150
Karunamon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. You didn't provide any kind of proof that it did.

The launch of Napster in 1999 is the most likely explanation for the massive drop in CD sales starting in 1999. Do you have any alternative explanation?

Again, that's not how it works. It's your job to substantiate your hypothesis. Whether I can come up with alternatives or not it is immaterial to whether Napster caused it or not.

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

#258

Post by JeremyNT »

the_only_law wrote: post #134
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.

It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.

> It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.

There's more recorded music than ever, and I don't care what your tastes are there are - new and interesting artists are out there to discover.

... which is also, in its own way, a new difficulty. There's so much to sift through, finding what you think is "good" is going to be difficult. This is doubly so for people who grew up listening to the radio or watching MTV, where these decisions were made for them.

The best advice I could give anybody is to find an actual radio station that plays what they consider to be good new music. This probably doesn't look like a commercial station, and you may not even have any in broadcast range of you, but there are plenty out there that stream online. I'm partial to my local NPR music station, but maybe you'd have better luck with college radio or a local low powered station instead.

DJs may be a rare breed these days, but try to find some you like and just let them do the work for you. The algorithms aren't going to cut it.

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

#259

Post by adamc »

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.

I've liked significant portions of most eras, but it's true that today's music is different and seems more limited. The average song is being driven down toward 2 minutes by the realities of streaming, songs use a lot more sampling (because musicians cost more), there is much less modulation than there once was, etc.

Objectively, it seems like less sophisticated music, in part because there isn't the same kind of money there once was in the system to pay for studio musicians, producers, etc.

Is it possible to create great songs despite that? Yes, but it involves a lot of "skating uphill".

You can see that older music is still getting a LOT of plays -- I think too many to make sense, unless we accept that the current industry is not healthy.

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

#260

Post by nitwit005 »

cubefox wrote: post #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…

I'm a little doubtful piracy is the main driving force there, until digital music became common.

They charged more for CDs, and they became cheaper to make than tapes, so naturally revenue went up.

Music videos, and a few super successful pop stars, greatly increased interest in pop music for a period, but that tapered off.

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