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Neil Young Says His Music Is Too Good For Streaming Services
An anonymous reader writes: After years of complaining about modern music formats Neil Young today announced that he's pulling his music from all streaming services. He made the announcement on his official Facebook page saying: "Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans. It's not because of the money, although my share (like all the other artists) was dramatically reduced by bad deals made without my consent. It's about sound quality. I don't need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution. I don't feel right allowing this to be sold to my fans. It's bad for my music. For me, It's about making and distributing music people can really hear and feel. I stand for that. When the quality is back, I'll give it another look. Never say never."
Who?
Tidal streams losslessly. What his excuse for not putting his music on there?
Which is why Pono's DRM only allows you to play back through Neil-Approved headphones.
In no way did Neil say he music was too good for streaming. Read your own darn summary. The false headline is beneath even the Dice crowd.
I'll bet a steak dinner that he couldn't tell the difference between any of the streaming services and a CD, or any other commercially produced medium, in double blind test. Most sound engineers can't tell the difference between $11,000 speaker cables and wire coat hanger.
The reason most music sounds like shit is because the sound engineers compress the hell out of it, and balance it to make it sound louder. The streaming services can only stream what they're given.
AM quality is horrendous, and FM isn't as good as the average MP3 file. So, Neil, you gonna make radio quit playing your songs?
My ears are too good for Neil Young's singing. That guy couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
Nonsense. I have one. It sounds awesome, comparable to a Lavry DA10 at several times the price that can't play all the digital audio the Pono can.
Everybody I know who has one or has heard one, who actually know what they're doing audio-wise, think it sounds great.
If you get used to tone like that then it becomes more understandable why Neil would respond with a 'nuuuuu! go 'way!' to compressed streaming audio. Is it up to him to decide whether the experience of sonic presence and tone color is all that matters? When there are things like notes, lyrics, stuff not related to how good the sound is? I don't know. Not like you can't get everything he's done by mp3 anyway.
The real reason to bail on streaming services is, it's a con and ripping off the artists even worse than the original music business did. Everybody in the business knows rates are a sick joke, meaningless. You don't have to care about that but any musician has a right to 'nope' out of there, at least unless or until the tech industry sets up mandatory licensing so musicians can't even opt out of streaming if they wanted.
It's pretty classless to curse out Neil Young for doing this. He doesn't have a right to go and make his own tech if he doesn't like what the computer industry's done with his medium? As if CDs weren't bad enough. You can say "fine, shut up and go make your own music tech!" and I'd have thought that would be a real mic drop line right there.
And he DID. I own a Pono, thing sounds extremely awesome, ridiculously good for $400 (I have numerous digital converters worth more than that, it's my day job). He DID go make his own, and you're still bitchin'?
A 256Kbps AAC is objectively equal to CD sound quality, as confirmed by double-blind test after test. Furthermore, a huge portion of listeners will be hearing your angel's choir over cheap-ass ear buds or crap laptop speakers. Maybe you have a golden ear and can tell the difference between a CD and a FLAC file (are those good enough for you, or do they lack the sharp ones and smooth zeros of the digital masters?). Maybe you're not actually a delusional once-great who has lousy hearing and permanent tinnitus after years of playing rock concerts, and, well, being almost 70. Maybe your home hi-fi (do you still call it that?) was hand-wired by a wizened master of recording engineering fame. Maybe you have your own private anechoic chamber so you're not exposed to anything but the pure and sweet sounds of your own singing. But the rest of us listen to normal-person music with a dynamic range that's been shot to hell in the loudness wars, via normal-person audio formats, through normal-person digital-to-analog converters, into normal-person speakers, in a normal-person environment with kids playing and horns honking and dogs barking and coworkers chattering.
Your music, pristine to the heavens though it may be, sounds no better than Miley Cyrus when piping out of my MacBook. You've become a crotchety old curmudgeon trying to remain relevant to those kids who won't stay off your lawn, and maybe it's time to sit down with a hot cup of keep your yap shut and enjoy a nice book.
Good day, sir.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
No, Neil Young is not being misrepresented. Straight from his Facebook page:
I was there.
AM radio kicked streaming's ass.
Analog Cassettes and 8 tracks also kicked streaming's ass,
and absolutely rocked compared to streaming.
Streaming sucks. Streaming is the worst audio in history.
If you want it, you got it. It's here to stay.
Your choice.
Copy my songs if you want to. That's free.
Your choice.
All my music, my life's work, is what I am preserving the way I want it to be.
It's already started. My music is being removed from all streaming services. It's not good enough to sell or rent.
Make streaming sound good and I will be back.
Neil Young
I hope for his sake that he is really just trying to push his magic sound machine and doesn't believe any of this.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If he's concerned about sound quality does he prohibit people who are hard of hearing from listening to his music as well?
/. story from several years ago about research that found young people who grew up with digital music prefer the compressed versions of songs. The people who grew up listening to Young's music probably prefer listening to his music on old vinyl albums. Are those still okay? Apparently so because he's still selling those on his store or at least the store he links to from his website, which I presume he owns.
Joking aside, I'll admit I'm a Neil Young fan and I enjoy a lot of his music, but this is just silly. The quality difference between a lossless and compressed stream isn't going to be noticeable at all to most people because of the low quality earbuds or headphones that they're wearing.
What makes it even funnier is a previous
Eh? Worse than mono AM radio? Worse than cassette tape? Yeah, we believe you Neil...
Log in or piss off.
... I can definitively and objectively say...
That claim is not true.
In fact, I said "When the quality is back, I'll give it another look." just the other day... about Neil Young's music.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Or AM/FM radio transmission. I wish they would at least be honest and say "I'm not making enough money on streaming".
Everybody I know who has one or has heard one, who actually know what they're doing audio-wise, think it sounds great.
No true Scotsman, huh? What's that, you heard the Pono and don't think it sounds great? Hmm, you must not know what you're doing audio-wise.
Whatever, if Neil Young doesn't want me to listen to his music on a streaming site because it's the worst quality ever, fine, I'll just request and then record his songs on local FM radio the way he intended them to be heard.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I think you'll find most people making arguments against the thing have not heard it. I'm thinking of a variety of sound engineer and musician friends not associated with Young. One guy was a mastering engineer, one's a modern-day musician who does interesting stuff with sampling and sound layering, including sounds like a dog bowl whirring on concrete.
It'd be pretty dumb to say 'the Pono doesn't sound great' when it blatantly does (it's battery life that sucks! :) ). What some people are saying is that everything, all the streaming and earbuds and detritus of the 2015 audio life, also sounds great, wonderful, perfect.
errrrrr no.
I'll just request and then record his songs on local FM radio the way he intended them to be heard
Quite. With the tape recorder sitting in front of the radio. So you can capture the sound of A/C, the whiny fridge, the clock ticking, and the neighbor beating his wife, allowing you to recreate the whole experience later when you listen to this music on your yellow walkman.
lucm, indeed.
Stubborn man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your pocketbook said
Yep. PONO is an expensive "solution" to a non-existent problem.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
"but I have to wonder if he could actually tell which is which in a suitably blinded test."
He could not, and you and I appear to be among the few that are aware of this.
I'm considerably younger than Neil and if he can hear better than I can, I'll eat one of his Pono gadgets on live TV. It's utter bullshit. He's 69, and NO ONE who's 69 still has their full range of hearing. And CERTAINLY not a guy who's spent most of his life playing in high-noise environments.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
> Analog Cassettes and 8 tracks also kicked streaming's ass,
This is where he proves to be full of shit.
Have you ever listened to an 8-track? AWFUL SHIT.
Cassette? Perfectly fine - if it was encoded with HX Pro and Dolby C, and you have a deck with Dolby C decoding, AND you've aligned the heads properly, AND demagnetized and cleaned them regularly. In that case it would sound near-CD-quality--- the first few times you play it. Cassettes degrade over time. Streaming already sounds way better than 8-Track (even if highly compressed, low bit rate), and as far as cassettes are concerned... I don't miss them.
Neil Young is obviously deranged from the Damage Done.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
AM radio was restricted to 30khz channels even in its best days, which would mean a maximum frequency response of 15khz. Now it is even lower, something like 10khz. Pretty awful compared to the 22khz that can be expressed by modern digital audio stuff.
Beyond that, AM is antique. It is vulnerable to multipath propagation, and the receivers generally have awful noise rejection.
It would feel warmer because of the implicit low pass filter effect, and more natural because of the terrible SNR. It renders voice in a non-annoying way. Super low bitrate MP3 is poppy and twangy.
and pretty well known. saw him live two years ago in Helsinki. a pretty good concert.
HOWEVER when it comes to his hifi music digital audio player, he's full of shit.
this is just so he can sell/promote PONO. I'm not sure if he believes that the hifisupadupasound of PONO is really better or if he's just a knowing shill. it's just a player that plays lossless files - nothing special there!
besides, streaming services have BETTER sound quality than RADIO and his music is played on radio all the time. streaming is also much better than cassettes.
he says it's not about the money, but sound quality blabla.. IT IS ABOUT THE FUCKING MONEY.
also, is he going to do home calls and check that his music is only played on hifi stereos and never on multimedia speakers?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It would be on topic if the music was streamed at 256kbps, but since it isn't you are writing about something completely different to the summary.
Well if he isn't he can (as usual) blame the record companies, who take 5x as much for themselves as they give to songwriters or performers, and nearly double what the streaming services get for actually hosting the infrastructure and handling the billing.
Well I heard mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow
Sweet home Alabama...
Most people probably stream music to their phone or computer speakers, but they still enjoy their music. Go figure.
"worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution"?! Neil seems to forget that AM radio was the prevalent listening method when his biggest hits were first released.