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Album Sales Are Dying as Fast as Streaming Services Are Rising (rollingstone.com)
In 2018, Best Buy decided to stop selling CDs, with the change partly brought on by record labels' increasing reluctance to even issue them. Both choices are symptoms as well as causes of a seemingly inevitable trend: Buying music is now going out of style nearly as fast as streaming music is rising. From a report: In 2018, album sales fell 18.2 percent from the previous year and song sales fell 28.8 percent, according to U.S. year-end report figures from data company BuzzAngle, which tracks music consumption. Meanwhile, total on-demand music streams, including both audio and video, shot up 35.4 percent. Audio on-demand streams set a new record high in 2018 of 534.6 billion streams, which is up 42 percent from 2017's 376.9 billion streams.
It's tricky to compare the specific unit numbers of sales to streams --since such a comparison would be pitting continuous playback of a certain piece of music against a one-time purchase of it -- but certain other milestones in the consumption market can help highlight just how much streaming is replacing physical sales and downloads in America. For instance: Even though total song downloads are still in the hundreds of millions, they're coming down in scale at the top. In 2018, there was not a single song that broke 1 million sales -- compared to 14 songs that reached that figure in 2017, 36 in 2016 and 60 in 2015. At the 2 million sales mark, two songs took that trophy in 2017, while five claimed it in 2016 and 16 songs made it in 2015, throwing the modest figures of this year's sales into even sharper relief.
It's tricky to compare the specific unit numbers of sales to streams --since such a comparison would be pitting continuous playback of a certain piece of music against a one-time purchase of it -- but certain other milestones in the consumption market can help highlight just how much streaming is replacing physical sales and downloads in America. For instance: Even though total song downloads are still in the hundreds of millions, they're coming down in scale at the top. In 2018, there was not a single song that broke 1 million sales -- compared to 14 songs that reached that figure in 2017, 36 in 2016 and 60 in 2015. At the 2 million sales mark, two songs took that trophy in 2017, while five claimed it in 2016 and 16 songs made it in 2015, throwing the modest figures of this year's sales into even sharper relief.
Honestly though I can see some of the appeal. Once Netflix matured I stopped buying as many movies. I'll own the few that I truly love and most others I watch once. Music was different, in fact I still buy CDs or Vinyl of the ones I love the most (granted I rip them and listen to them as MP3). The desire to stream music other than to sample it to see if I like it just isn't there.
I wonder if streaming is representative of entertainment quality or just the meh consumption attitude?
I'm not a fan of streaming, but there is almost literally no places left where I can go in and buy CDs just by looking through the stacks and seeing what they have -- which is how I've bought music for the last 15+ years. I'd just go in, wander around, and buy a couple of CDs I found.
If I can't buy it on CD and rip it myself, I'm not interested. I'm definitely not interested in paying to stream music which is then going to be subject to ads and analytics of my information -- I don't trust the streaming services not to be douchy assholes who share my information and violate my privacy, because at this point you have to assume all online stuff is douchy assholes.
So, I can't go anywhere to buy CDs, I refuse to stream ... which means I simply no longer buy music, and listen to my already very large collection of MP3s ripped from CDs I've bought.
I miss actual music stores, but at the end of the day, if they don't want to make CDs, and will only give me digital DRM'd versions of the music or be forced to stream it ... then I simply won't buy their product and will get on with my life.
The music industry didn't adapt to the modern world, and refused to sell a product in the form people wanted. Now, they're losing out on even more revenue.
rabble rabble rabble blah blah.. this is a surprise to noone. albums are overpriced and inconvenient. streaming is (relatively) cheap and much more convenient.
It's so convenient: not depends of internet connection... if you, like me, stay out of a wireless network in a major part of the day, to listen offline is a necessity
CD's were always my default fall back when I couldn't find lossless audio compression file formats. Also, CDs are guaranteed to be DRM free. I hope lossless audio becomes more prevalent than it is now.
No good deed goes unpunished.
When music gets taken down and there is no physical back up.
With no option but streaming left, audiophiles have no physical media to enhance. The green marker manufacturers will be hit the hardest. In a bright spot for the industry, there will remain a market for $1000 power cables to ensure only the best quality electrons make it into the next generation of streaming devices.
It is now official. Rolling Stone has confirmed: albums are dying .
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered album community when Rolling Stone confirmed that album market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all music. Coming on the heels of a recent Rolling Stone survey which plainly states that albums have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Albums are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve Top 40 test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict the future of albums. The hand writing is on the wall: albums face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for albums because albums are dying. Things are looking very bad for albums. As many of us are already aware, albums continue to lose market share. Black vinyl melts and flows like a river of blood.
Albums are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core musicians. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time album developers Nirvana and Nickelback only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: albums are dying.
Let's keep to the facts and skip the numbers.
Even though total song downloads are still in the hundreds of millions, theyâ(TM)re coming down in scale at the top. In 2018, there was not a single song that broke 1 million sales â" compared to 14 songs that reached that figure in 2017, 36 in 2016 and 60 in 2015. At the 2 million sales mark, two songs took that trophy in 2017, while five claimed it in 2016 and 16 songs made it in 2015, throwing the modest figures of this yearâ(TM)s sales into even sharper relief.
All major surveys show that the album has steadily declined in market share. The album is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If albums are to survive at all it will be among vinyl-collecting dilettante dabblers. Albums continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the album is dead.
I bought my first CD in 1981, and guess what, it still works. That is close to 40 years old. I've got records that still play from the 70's, albeit with some scratches now. Do you really believe your streaming service will be around in 2060?
technology marches on & doesnt give a shit about buggy-whip manufacturers.
I dont think i even have anything capable of playing cd's anymore. I think my computer has an optical drive... but IIRC i unplugged it so i could hook up a SSD instead.
Sometimes i still listen to the mp3's i downloaded from napster tho.... well except for the metallica ones.
Doesn't everyone just rip music from YouTube? Certainly good enough for the car, and alternate versions are usually available if one would like (radio sessions, non-released versions, live versions, cover versions, etc.)..
I just use a tiny USB stick in my car, with MP3 files.
At home, I gave in and we have Alexa the associated music service. Merry Christmas to me (I'm working on a couple of Skills)!
I need to run, there's a package from Amazon being delivered....
BlameBillCosby.com
Selection size and convenience both.
If I buy an mp3, I have that mp3...... and only that mp3. My catalog to listen will always be small. If I subscribe to a streaming service, suddenly I can listen to anything I want, any time I want, new things constantly. I have thousands of times as much music at my fingertips.
The convenience of streaming is so higher than mp3s that this market shift is unstoppable. Times change. Nobody buys music on reel-to-reel any more either.
There are several reasons to purchase disks or records (which I do).
1) You actually own the media and can leave it to your posterity
2) The music is of a higher quality than MP3
3) You can rip the music yourself in a couple of minutes (I use Asunder)
4) You can put the ripped files on your various devices without worrying about someone looking over your shoulder
They are apparently all outweighed by the convenience and instant gratification of purchasing digital only media.
It must suck to be someone who loses thousands of dollars worth of purchases when they lose their device, switch providers, or get locked out of their accounts.
I thought that Video killed the radio star!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The higher-quality, lower price option (CDs) are fading yet the shitty quality high price (vinyl) is going up, albeit slowly.
I've yet to see any reason to subscribe to a streaming service for music. I suppose if I wanted to enjoy the feeling of listening to artists I like whilst simultaneously knowing that they're being as badly ripped off as I am, I might give it a go.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I know stores still sell those rather small portable radios with a CD player. But this Christmas I was shopping around for a medium to large size battery powered one with speakers that can be separated from the head unit and spread out. They are hard to find now in Houston. And the CD player on them is usually broken. So whenever I happen to come across another decent one in a resale shop or flea market, I will probably buy it and give it to a friend or family member.
Sadly, BuzzAngle's report doesn't seem to list any sources, or note how they have determined this information. People are still very much buying albums and music. Vinyl has been breathing life back into music stores across the US.
I buy CD's all the time. I've got a couple of great local new/used music stores. Streaming doesn't work when there's no Internet connection or you want to hear a particular album.
I don't respond to AC's.
Find me a generation that spends more and owns less.. go on.. try...
I prefer to buy and rip, as no Internet connection is required to play an mp3, and I have full playlist control.
You don't need an internet connection to play a song purchased online either. Even streaming services will let you purchase and/or download some songs for offline listening.
The downsides of ripping CDs being
1) You cannot just buy the tracks you want from a given album
2) It takes substantially more time to rip the track than to download it
3) You accumulate discs on your shelf which gather dust for the rest of eternity
4) Takes more time to acquire the album
5) It wastes physical resources given that you are planning to copy it anyway
The only real upside I can see is that it gives you a modicum of better control over your collection and a backup in case or data loss (albeit with a ton of work to restore).
And garage sales/used music stores are your best friends price-wise.
Only if they actually have something you want to listen to. Personally the thought of spending hours combing through someone else's used music collection hoping their is something good there to buy on the cheap sounds like a horrendous waste of my time. You be you but I've got better things to do.
Oh no! Fewer buggy whips sold since invention of automobile! World coming to an end!
While y'all are so busy yelling at each other like a divided bunch of little schoolchildren about blue this and red that, you've all been not noticing the corporations (all of them, really) moving to models that reduce or eliminate ownership.
And what's one of the most tangible ways we had to distinguish ourselves from heathen communists? Ownership. C'mon, boys and girls, all together now: Ow - ner- ship. It's your house, not the State's. It's your car, not the state's.
It's your music, not theirs.
But nooooo, you short-sighted, divided morons continue to fight amongst yourselves and you don't see this .. this thievery happening right under your noses.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Lossless is more about having an exact bit-for-bit copy of the original cd which is suitable for archiving. If music isn't exactly a passion for you then you probably don't even care about having your own music collection, and therefore lossless compression isn't much use to you. But if you do, the usual technique is to copy your original cds using lossless compression, put the cd away in storage, and from the lossless master copy you can generate lossy copies in any format, whenever you want. The master copy remains perserved as it was on the original cd: a true archive. Again, this probably sounds pointless to 99% of you, but for those of us who take our music collection seriously, it is the only way.
Speaking of collecting music, I have to put in a plug for secondspin.com. I've been buying used cds from them for about 15 years now, paying an average of about $4 to $5 per cd. I've built up a massive collection this way, and the best part is that the music I like most (jazz, fusion, classical, new age) is typically what other people like least, and therefore I have plenty to choose from at good prices. I have a list of artists/albums I'm interested in, hundreds of items long, and every 6 months I go to secondspin and simply run down the list of the currently "hot" items. I have an extensive system of shell scripts to do the archiving, tagging, and converting. It rocks.
This is a copy-paste that I wrote for somewhere else, do as you will with it.
I have observed something, and it has increased with time, having recently brought it up to my father-in-law, who is also a tech field worker, he agreed with me.
The people - both voluntarily and at some prodding are giving up control and ownership of everything - slowly.
What brought it to my attention is streaming services. Despite being a quite technical individual I skipped out on the early part of the streaming fad, due in part to living in an area with unreliable web access and literally working in a faraday cage without WiFi access during that time period. I doubled down on the previous fad - ripping and compressing, instead and continue that to this day.
The result - people are lost without access to Spotify. No Netflix, no movies. You unplug the average person from the Internet these days and they no longer have the ability to use their entertainment systems.
I originally contemplated the pros and cons of going all online versus what I was doing - are we really missing anything by not owning our media? In time I began to realize it didn't stop at media.
Younger people don't want to own anything.
We are watching the formation of dependence culture.
Young people aren't driving anymore, which like everything else is a mix of good and bad. Even when I was privileged enough to be able to bike to work and back, and even for my grocery shopping and most everything else I still kept a license and a vehicle. Something I've noted at work - the younger a coworker is the less likely they are to have any damned tools to work with, and it doesn't appear to be tied to not having had enough time to accumulate them. While doing a little research about that tidbit I stumbled across an article about the non-ownership topic from the other perspective written in a way that meets my approval.
It's important after that last article I make myself clear. I am not condemning the passing of materialism culture. Far from it. I personally have reduced my materialism and even the footprint of what I personally own. I am however against submission and dependence culture - both of which are adopted when you give up your ability to do for yourself by depending on services - AKA being served - exclusively.
I want to go back to tools. Even though I've reduced the amount of junk I personally own, something I do own a healthy share of is tools. Tools are to me, a different kind of possession. They aren't possessions that say "Look at me!", they aren't something that I use as a status symbol, they aren't pointless possessions. No - tools are something that says "I've got this." I use my tools to make a living, to do for myself, to teach. My tools give me independence and if used properly can even be used to spread independence.
I think we're heading down a dangerous path. When most of the people rent someone still has to own what was rented. When people do nothing but stream someone still has control of the source material. When you don't have your own tools you have to depend on someone to provide them for you. When you can't control your own propulsion you can only go where others will take you. In situations where the many are dependent on the few, the few tend to get fewer in time as they are bought out or consolidated after deaths, etc... In turn the fewer the sources of provision are, the more power the providers have.
Eventually we all become slaves existing at the leisure of those who control the resources.
I just realized after typing that last line that it sounds like some sort of socialist manifesto - at least when that line stands alone. Quite the opposite - w
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
The next generation seems perfectly fine with renting everything. Maybe too the lack of a physical medium for content has created people who don't value digital as much anymore. I definitely think streaming has hurt the content creators in that they don't get as much royalties for streaming and in fact their album plays are much less as people only listen to certain tracks. I still buy digital albums because I like to hear all that a artist creates, but I do think I am part of a dying generation of people who sit and listen to entire albums.
It adds a lot of dimension over singles when artists put songs together into a collection.
I still think the easiest way to instantly pull together a playlist of thematically congruent music is to just plop 5 CDs in the changer. It lets you have just enough control while not wasting your time with fine grained song by song control of a shuffle playlist.
I find it's way too much effort to assemble a long song by song playlist and do that many times. And it's never satisfying when pandora or amazon or apple synthesizes a "channel" for me, in part because I can't play it over again when I like the combination.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You guys seem totally unaware that every major streaming service offers offline listening. Maybe the reason you don't like streaming services is because you haven't given them a fair chance.
The "industry" has been eating its seed corn since they got pimp slapped by Jobs. Music will continue and there will be some musicians who aren't Mac jockey lab rats and streaming services will continue to make money on the previous golden eras catalog and hobbyist singer/songrockers but the support structure to generate audio tracks with the quality of last century is gone. No gigs for beginners, no audience except friends from work or college, no money for audio engineers or live production staff, no meritocracy anywhere except rappers. Disposable background to fill up space between selfies.
You file sharing wankers of slashdot comment threads past got the culture you paid for: nothing. But you can listen to the great music of the past for free less the time/cost of one skippable youtube ad and it's enjoyable to watch youtube keeping spotify on a quarterly starvation diet.
how much we gnash our teeth or complain - streaming will likely be the dominant music distribution method for the foreseeable future.
Personally, I hate monthly subscription fees. $5 a month here, $10 a month there, and suddenly you are spending $1,000s a year on services - services that you once considered a splurge (like buying a new CD) are now required for you to maintain access to your entertainment.
Between jobs, need to cut back on spending? Sorry. You'll have no entertainment this month because you have nothing to show for your years and years of monthly subscription fees to a streaming service. And there is something about having a physical copy of music to hold in my hand. It feels more real, more tangible, than gazing at an image on a screen.
On the other hand, having recently moved boxes and boxes of CDs, many of which I haven't used in years, I can see the appeal of having access to nearly every song ever made through my phone for just $6!
During the 1990s, the street price for a CD nearly doubled.
It would have been interesting if they came out with a DVD density, credit-card sized CD, with 24bit/96khz uncompressed sound quality.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
How about a listener sponsored human curated eclectic internet radio station? So, if I make my own playlist on Spotify I am limited sort of by what I know and already like. Algorithm-driven streams like Pandora also wind up feeding you what you already like in a way. I do subscribe to a paid streaming service and that is great when I know what I want. But I love to turn on Radio Paradise and let the expert DJs choose stuff that is sometimes new to me and often familiar as well. It is eclectic in taste, but so am I, from jazz to rock to classical one might get any cut.
The new web player has a main stream, a rock stream, a mellow stream and a groovy (more ambient and psychedelic) stream. There is a smartphone app that lets you capture up to five hours on your phone for offline listening. Listener-sponsored so free unless you decide to kick in something. The DJs don't nag either. And they have forgotten more music than I have ever listened to. Let's not forget a song-relevant slideshow option.
FYI I have no connection to this operation except that I like it and am a modest supporter. And am known to talk it up from time to time.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I try to get all my music DRM free as downloads on line but its hard to find all the music you want. I usually end up buying some independent stuff on Bandcamp instead of the stuff I started out looking for. Maybe that is a good thing though?
I have a number of close friends that are working musicians, indie types. Every one of them counts the recorded music sales these days (whatever format or method) as a promotional expense rather than an income opportunity. Their income is from live performance. Except for perhaps a tiny minority at the top of the charts, recorded music is dead as a moneymaker for working musicians.
It may be worth mentioning that even back when record companies first started selling actual vinyl record albums, those sales were never the primary revenue source for the artists themselves; rather, concerts are and always have been their biggest income source by a pretty solid margin. So if you really want to support your favorite artist...
I buy more physical media, CD and SACD, than ever. Reasons: there is a huge used market and it's very, very cheap. Even new discs are relatively cheaper than ever. Even SACDs are rippable now (by using certain older networked Blu-Ray/DVD/SACD players, see Computer Audiophile forum for details). I get a lossless audio disc which is simple to back up/duplicate/rip. With classical music I usually get a full booklet which I can scan, and often I can download a full pdf from the vendor/label.
The only downside is physical storage space, but I quite like having shelves displaying my favourite music.
I'm not a Luddite, I do sometimes buy digital downloads, but it's usually cheaper to obtain the physical media and do the rest myself.
Four significant digits? Clearly the surveillance state is further along—and far better managed by the inerrant, wage-slave minions of the Deep State—than anyone heretofore suspected.
I think the real difference is people who enjoy music vs people who listen to it. If you just listen you don't care what the song is or who its by as long as there's another one after.
In which case there is no point in caring about ripping CDs. Just subscribe to a streaming service and be done with it or just listen to the radio.
Speaking of data loss though, how long is streaming service x going to be available and what happens when it shuts down?
Who cares? If one dies then switch to another. There will always be another. That's like asking how long a radio station is going to keep playing. You don't subscribe to that sort of service because you expect them to be around forever. Nice if it does but don't have unrealistic expectations.
So what happens if you "buy" a piece a music via a streaming service but later the service loses the rights?
Then you're screwed. How do we enable an individual's "right to stream" as a form of ownership... or is music suddenly just ephemeral like listening to the radio?
For stuff I really like, I'm sticking with buying CD and rip.
For me, an "album" is a whole experience. The music (all of it), the artwork, the notes, pictures, etc.
With that said, while I do keep all of that, I usually ditch the case (unless it's special too). Keeping the paper art work and then I rip to my media server and I do use that the most for listening.
There's a ton of stuff that is NOT on streaming btw.
I think what is missing in all of this is the number of folks that are "stealing", that is, downloading content without securing any rights at all or payment, esp. to the content producers (mainly talking about the artists). This number is significant btw, proabably accounting for 80-90% of those who are "listening" and not using a streaming service (something to think about).
I will never stream anything. I have enough music now to last the rest of my life. New stuff sucks anyways. As far as movies, I prefer high quality, hdr, 4k content on a high end home theater and sound system. I will never purchase a streamed pos low quality viewing. When they finally take away discs, I'm out. My plex server currently serves me around 32TB of movies. I'll just re-watch those till I die. Or, see what the pirates have in store for me for download.
It's a trap and too many of you are falling for it.
With today's disk sizes and prices. MP3 and Vorbis are pretty much obsolete for acquisition and storage. It's all FLAC now, though I do encode with a lossy codec to send up over ADSL to the cell network for the car, hotel rooms, etc.
On the home network, though, it's FLAC all the way to the speaker. (Even Chromecast Audio does FLAC, which is great for a back patio, where you're carrying the hardware out'n'in so you want it more compact than a "real computer." But I'm not necessarily recommending Chromecast because that's a sort of scary thing to allow on your LAN, so people need to think about what they really want.)
Dinosaurs Will Die
Some very beautiful voices out there accompanied by some very beautiful women you get to chat up after their songs... Now thats music beautiful dinner music. :)
[($)]
I make a point to get clamshell CD players when I find them at by-the-pound thrift stores, particularly the ones with anti-skip support. I can go to Half Price Books, sit on the floor, then start listening through the clearance CDs. (they put the discs back in the cases when they go clearance, and the clearance section is usually the bottom row of the shelves) You can find a lot of cool stuff that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and it's only 2-3 bucks each. (sometimes that much for a 2 or 3 disc set!) If I get at least one good song per dollar, I'm doing good, more than that and it's a keeper.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I can buy a physical CD from the UK and have it shipped to the USA but I've tried Amazon & iTunes and cannot purchase songs from their UK catalogs. It's DIGITAL, just a bunch of bit FFS.
Is that a real site (I'm not googling that shit at work lol)? You understand you're talking about a Japanese album here, right? Rutracker sounds racist as fuck in that regard. U wanna egga row and flied lice wit dat?
His logic is sound. You only own what you can defend. If you cannot defend your body, then no, you don't own it. You're a slave. The old adage of "possession is 9/10ths the law" is part of ownership. That other 1/10th is your ability to keep it. I think those numbers are flipped since it's harder to fight an army, but the analogy works.
I like how all that screed was just a thinly veiled metaphor for your guns and manliness. I'm not even gonna quote the part where you slipped up and confessed it. You know where it is, you said it on purpose and figured no one but your gun buddies would notice.
Hint for the other readers: it's not the commie part that he corrected. That was a distraction.
There is so much garbage rap and other boring repetitive excuses for music spewing out these days that those of us out of our teens canâ(TM)t find much we really care to buy.
Iâ(TM)ve never bought a digital download. Iâ(TM)ve found that buying the cd with included digital download on Amazon cheaper than buy just the digital download.
all the shops where i was able to buy cd's are now gone, don't sell them anymore, or only in a few stores in the country (and those stores are too far to go to for buying cd's), i could probably still buy cd's online, i haven't really looked.
why? because i just buy my music digital, download put it on my nas and i have it available everywhere, much better then a cd.
i don't like streaming, i like owning my music (i know, i'm an old fart ).
what i think is funny is that you can find vinyl everywhere, in a regular supermarket, last week i even found them in a diy shop (what the hell are they doing there?). i don't like vinyl (i know, i'm not hipster enough) but it is being sold, and the joke is that this medium doesn't have any drm measures in place. which is weird, because, you know, the music industry has been telling us it is impossible to survive without drm in place.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
"The reason you think the older records are better is more likely to do with the quality of production, before the audio was stamped onto either media, in the 1970s, than it does the medium. "
No, the reason it sounds better is because the music was better!
There are cases where an album from the 1970's sounds great on vinyl and terrible on CD. The CD should sound better, and would sound better if correctly mastered, but many CDs are being mastered poorly.
It is not possible to master vinyl that poorly. Vinyl can't do as much as a CD can, which turns out to be good when people are doing dumb things and the vinyl just doesn't allow the dumb things.
To be specific we are talking about mastering CDs with the gain set way too high, on the incredibly dumb theory that "louder" CDs sell better. Overgained CDs have measurable defects and a human listener can hear the difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
I used to work at an audio company, and my boss analyzed a few very popular songs. In one of them he found that 50% of all samples in the song were the most extreme sample value possible. (Since CDs are 16-bit, what he found was that 50% of all samples had the value +32767 or the value -32768.) I used Audacity to look at one popular song and was depressed to find 15 samples in a row that were +32767. Audio is supposed to be a waveform, but that was clearly an example of a waveform so overgained that the top of the wave had to be sliced off. It's bad enough when it happens at all, but 15 samples in a row? That's just awful.
I have some Genesis CDs that I bought as soon as they were available. I've been told that more recent releases of the same albums on CD are overgained and sound worse than the old ones I have.
So it's not simply that the older music was better; the "loudness war" can ruin old music and new music alike.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely