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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.
The wire/coat hanger point is irrelevant.
Compression used for streaming certainly affects quality. There is no debate. I can easily tell the difference between low bitrate and high bitrate MP3. It not even close. So you need to be more specific.
320Kbps MP3 can sound great, but often has clipping due to improper gain setting. So as a medium it has its problems.
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.
... 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".
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.
To be perfectly fair, nobody is talking about bit rates that would be considered low in any universe.
Most streaming services use at least 256kbps, and some use much more. Most streaming services use vastly superior codecs to MP3, such as Vorbis or AAC, that fully eliminate any rational complaint about lossy compression, even at low bitrates (which is irrelevant still, because we are literally only talking about extremely high bitrates).
Nobody has made the claim that lossy compression never perceptively degrades quality. You argument is a straw man.
Stubborn man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your pocketbook said
> 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
What I think is hilarious is Neil has been in studios all his life yet can't seem to grasp how (and more importantly WHY) digital studios work the way they do.
For those that have never recorded music? Its REALLY simple to explain why you use 192k in the studio and not on the finished product...ready? The music in the studio AIN'T FINISHED YET, its really THAT easy folks! When you are recording you are gonna be adding effects, EQ, layering multiple tracks, that extra headroom helps when it comes to adding these things without raising the noise floor, once the mastering is done? Its done and you don't need that extra headroom because there is nothing to be added later, you already know where the noise floor is and have dealt with it, its done folks!
And audio ain't like video folks, where they could add infrared and ultraviolet and you'd just never know it was there,because of the way AD/DA converters work all that no longer needed bandwidth you are adding to those tracks? Unless you bought pro studio monitors its gonna get translated as hiss, WITH pro studio monitors? You'll have paid $$$$ to hear the sounds of...silence. Because again the increased bandwidth is not there to give the 1% of the planet with super hearing a few extra high notes, its to lower the noise floor to give you room to work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
You are confusing sample rate and bit depth. Increasing sample rate doesn't lower the noise floor, raising bit depth does by increasing the dynamic range of a recording. Increasing the sample rate permits one to capture and reproduce higher frequencies, however this in practice has a collateral affect of RAISING the noise floor. This happens because although there is practically nothing musically interesting happening in the ultrasonic range, you do end up picking up electrical noise from your equipment, thereby raising the noise floor above what it would be at a lower sample rate.
I've worked with a very wide range of formats, sample rates, bit depths and dithering in a professional environment, and I can tell you many simple truths:
1. Sound quality is always second to music quality. A quality song will come through in a crap recording, and a crap song will always be bad no matter how polished it is. This is why people will happily sit around in a circle listening and singing along to classic hits with Spotify through their iPhone speaker.
2. As a final format to the consumer, there is nothing superior to 16-bit / 44.1 kHz (48k for video) WAV (AIFF is the same with reversed byte order). This has been repeatedly shown in double blind ABX tests. The overwhelming majority of people, myself included, cannot discern between a high bitrate mp3 and CD-quality audio.
3. Even private mastering houses don't have the money to spend on double blind ABX testing. Setting up a truly scientific test of audio quality is extremely difficult, and time (and therefore money) consuming. In ours we would do shootouts to decide which ADs to standardize, but we would only do 5 or 10 tests among 8 people. That would take all day, and mean a day of lost billing, and we didn't hire a neutral party to administer the test. So the results would be prone to multiple biases (limited sample size, not double-blind, no randomization to unskew first-choice bias, confirmation bias, etc).
4. Your instruments aren't making any interesting noises in the ultrasonic range. Neither are your microphones picking them up, nor are the majority of EQs built to do anything with them (has anyone ever rolled off 30kHz?), nor are most most amplifiers reproducing them, and if they are, the monitors almost certainly are not.
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...