Well, gosh, if that's the metric we're using here, then the DECstation I used in college had 3 mouse buttons, and is therefore the superior, most usable machine/OS. ULTRIX4LYFE, YO.
Traktor has basically taken over electronic DJing, except for old-skool house guys. Everybody else would rather haul a laptop and a controller on the plane than 10 crates of records.
HipHop still relies on vinyl, but less so for anyone who's not a scratch artist.
No reputable mastering engineer would ever print un-effected audio to a vinyl record. To deal with the vagaries of playback systems (unless, of course, your audience is exclusively those guys who buy $30,000 turntables mounted on granite slabs), there'd always be some dynamic range comrpession/limiting of the upper frequencies (and usually a gentle rolloff above about 12khz), the low frequencies would be mixed into mono (while generally bass and kick are mixed in center channel anyway, occasionally you get low frequency information in stereo, and that makes for a wiiiiide groove) and you generally have to limit your overall dynamic range to something that an average needle can resolve.
Plus there's the fact that the stuff on the outer edge of the record generally can be louder than the stuff on the inner edge, simply due to the density required.
So in theory, it'd be better than digital, but in practice it's just...different.
> Who said that God needs to inherently be unprovable?
Plotinus, I think. God ("The One") cannot be any existing thing. That laid the groundwork for much of monotheistic theology for the next few thousand years.
The market did. The market decided that, to quote one provider I spoke to when trying to get DSL access to a semi-rural area, "there's not enough money in that."
I am aware of this stuff because my family lives in said semi-rural area. Big vacation/tourist zone, about 10 miles outside a town of 3000. Their options for connectivity are: slow, expensive satellite (the faster, expensive satellite isn't available in their area either), or dial-up. One local telco says they might have DSL access in the area by 2015. *Might*. The big regional telco has said it's not worth their while.
The local library has internet access. It's 10 miles away, poorly staffed (municipal cuts have gutted the library's budget) and the network is frequently down. The McDonald's by the highway is the most reliable net access in town.
Yeah, the free market did it's thing, and decided that my family doesn't matter.
Because in a lot of areas, one ISP has a virtual monopoly on high-speed access. Sure, there are competitors, but they tend not to be great options or are not evenly available.
In my area, I've got Charter. The competitors are a couple of local Telcos and AT&T Uverse, neither of which can match the 30m default bandwidth Charter provides (although one local telco is rolling out some fiber backbones, so we'll see). Charter does, however, cap at 250GB/mo - and provides you no tools to measure your usage or no access to any metrics beyond their own network people calling you to say "you used too much." For most folks, that's plenty, but if you cut the cord on cableTV and watch a fair amount of HD programming, that 250GB can go by quick.
It's a ton of freaking work. The reason there *are* middlemen in the first place is becasue most artists are simply not skilled (or don't have the time) to write, produce and record albums AND handle all the business and sales crap. Middleman services like TuneCore or Reverbnation have replaced an active Agent or A&R guy in a lot of cases, but it's still a middleman, in a way. Even if you're a fulltime musician, sometimes there just aren't enough hours in a day to do everything without cutting corners someplace.
A totally DIY approach is the end goal for a lot of musicians. It's just out of reach for most of them.
If you're an indie artist, you'll note that streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, etc are slowly displacing a lot of traditional album sales. And if you're an indie artist, radio play and advertising are basically nonexistent.
So I don't think she's asking anythign unreasonable. You want to know what venues to book for your next tour? Then you need to know who's listening. And if you're not selling albums the traditional way, and you're not getting radio play, then what you need are the metrics from the services that are delivering your music. You don't need to know eprsonal details, but vague geographical and demographic info makes a huge difference when you're planning out a tour or trying to figure out what sorts of magazine ads to buy, etc.
The services are clearly collecting the data, but god only knows what they're doing with it.
I wonder if some sort of UV or IR filtering film could be overlaid (like, built into a case) and thus solve the problem.
Seems to me like they traded off no-purple-hazing for scratch-resistance. Given how scratched-to-hell the lens of my old iPhone4 is, it seems like it'd be an even trade for me. YMMV.
But in practicality, trying to play that back sounds like crap on vinyl most of the time. Most stuff mastered for vinyl has had the high end gently rolled of or peak-limited above about 15-16khz.
Don't be raggin' on mastering engineers. We, as a rule, HATE to do the whole Death Magnetic thing. But sometimes, someone else is calling the shots.
And sometimes, that's how the mixes get to you. I've received mixes that, before mastering, were already limited to within an inch of their lives. And no mastering engineer can put dynamic range *back*.
George Massenburg has been pushing really hard for industry-wide adoption of 24/96 as a distribution format. And I think as an option, that's great. But until it becomes feasible to stream/download that sort of thing in realtime without a telco crying foul and cutting everyon'e bandwidth to zero, it's not going to happen. One album would blow through a monthly mobile datacap in the US.
Of course, the whole "vinyl captures more" argument works in theory, but in practice is complete and utter hogwash.
I know this, becasue I've had to master audio for vinyl, and the gyrations one has to go through in order to make it playable and not, you know, destroy the cutting head or cause a playback needle to leap across the room are really quite intensive.
You need to: - limit high frequency so you don't have sibilance problems - roll off subharmonics becasue otherwise the groove has to be too wide - reduce stereo phase differences, particaulrly in the low end, so the needle can track properly - compress the whole thing to reduce dymanic range to something a turntable can handle it, usually about 8db.
AND your noise floor increases and dynamic range decreases the more stuff you try and put on a single disc.
One could argue that vinyl sounds *better*, though, partially as a result of these operations - no subs means your low-end instruments might be a little clearer, the extra compression means some more "glue" to the mix, the reduction in phase differences keep thigns tight in acoustically imperfect listening spaces, etc - and, of course, generally the people who do audio mastering for vinyl are pros or semi-pros who have really high-end gear and not just a cracked copy of Waves L2 or whatever. So there's that. But more accurate? Erm, no.
This article might as well be subtitled "music was better in my day, get off my lawn."
I can see this used by a zillion smug people all smirkily saying "see? Those stupid masses with their pop music. They're all so dumb."
But it's way more complicated than that.
Yes, it's louder than 50 years ago. The loudness wars are to thank for those last few decibels. But the first several? Since 1960, recording tech and recording practice changed a LOT. Even before the modern loudness wars there was a big rise in loudnesses. So that's not news.
Music composition has changed though, too. And not just "duuuh it gots dumber." That would be, to put it bluntly, a gross oversimplification. In the late 70's pop music started embracing minimalism, and genres like techno, trance and house went whole hog into it. A lot of modern pop music ahs embraced the electronic dance music scene, and thus has really embraced minimalism, so...yeah, you're not going to see a lot of chord changes or crazy modal work. But it doesn't imply anything beyond a more minimalist structure.
The timbral thing surprises me, though. 50 years ago they weren't using synthesizers much. Now they are, and the sonic palatte is wide-open. So I'm not sure why, exactly, that it'd show up as less timbrally varied.
However, there's one problem. Artists traditionally suck at anything in the process beyond making the art. Or they simply don't have the time. Creating content can be quite resource intensive, at least in terms of time. If the little time that's left over has to be split between marketing, distro, IT support keeping the wesbite running, packaging, order fulfillment, AND a robust and healthy touring schedule...well, something's gotta give.
The reason the music industry exists with as many middlmen and parasitic organizations as it has is becasue there's a real need for these services. The problem is these middlemen basically have the artist - and to an extent the consumer - by the neck, and can bleed both sides dry. If you got rid of them all right now, something new and equally horrible would evolve to take its place.
The INDUSTRY is an anachronism. However, the actual way musicians make music isn't really changing on a fundamental level. Yes, DAWs are cheaper than studio rentals, yadda yadda, but it still requires time and talent to write and perform original material. That's unlikley to ever change, so while industry models will come and go, those who actually produce the content are pretty much at the mercy of whatever's going on. They don't get a say in the matter.
I'm also a semi-pro musician. It's true that you can get paid to play a gig, and it can be alright.
But it's really not anything you can make a living at. You can barely break even at it, if you're lucky, given the costs for transportation, food, lodging, etc. - which leaves it at best a time and money-suck of a hobby. It's really not something that you can sustain long-term.
It's a hobby for most of us already. But it's a very, very expensive hobby. And...well, if you're a musician, it's not like you really have a choice in the matter. You're driven to create music and share it with people, it's just how your brain works.
And there is a resource scarcity for playing live. How many shows do you go to in a week? How many venues are in your town? If you go to see a band once, would you go see them or a similar band the following week? If there are two bands playing that you like on two different venues on the same night, how do you choose which one to see? Do you always buy merch?
See the problem here?
Eventually, there will be a market scarcity, because nobody will be able to afford to be a musician.
Recording and playing live, for about 99.9999999% of artists, represents a rather significant financial loss. I'm lucky enough to be competant at IT stuff, so I can afford gear and take the occasional vacation to tour, because my day job pays for it. But that's not the case for everyone. If this sort of thing continues, the only people who will be able to record and perform will be those that are wealthy enough in the first place. Do you really want that?
I don't think it really matters one way or the other - people remember Carnegie for being charitable (and not a union busting industrialist), and Henry Ford for being an industrialist (and not a raging anti-semite).
History will probably remember both Jobs and Gates for different reasons.
Except maybe #8. I've got boxes of unsold tshirts in my basement that contradict this. They are, however awesome for washing the car. So there's that upside.
That bugged me too. I was afraid that his baffling rant against the EFF would be used to discredit what up to that point was a pretty cogent and sound argument.
You willing to go to a concert every day of the week.
If you think your average artist can make a living performing, you should really try it sometime. The profit margins are razor thin, unless you're selling out big venues, and few people do that. Even a big band can have a hard time selling a big room out on a weeknight. Not every market has big venues. Not every fanbase is centralized around, say, New York and LA where there are lots of venues.
Multiply that by a few thousand bands. You've got thousands of bands competing for a limited number of venues, and those that do sell out a smaller venue are unlikely to make more than "what it'll cost to get to the next show."
He's got a weird obsession with certain copyright issues that I don't fully understand, and I think it tends to undercut his arguments. He makes a lot of good points but then goes kidna weird with OMG TEH EFF IS EEEVIL and I'm like "what?"
His main point is sound, that the model has changed but artists are still taking it up the back of a volkswagon.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, gosh, if that's the metric we're using here, then the DECstation I used in college had 3 mouse buttons, and is therefore the superior, most usable machine/OS. ULTRIX4LYFE, YO.
Traktor has basically taken over electronic DJing, except for old-skool house guys. Everybody else would rather haul a laptop and a controller on the plane than 10 crates of records.
HipHop still relies on vinyl, but less so for anyone who's not a scratch artist.
Sure, no lossless, compression...
But...
No reputable mastering engineer would ever print un-effected audio to a vinyl record. To deal with the vagaries of playback systems (unless, of course, your audience is exclusively those guys who buy $30,000 turntables mounted on granite slabs), there'd always be some dynamic range comrpession/limiting of the upper frequencies (and usually a gentle rolloff above about 12khz), the low frequencies would be mixed into mono (while generally bass and kick are mixed in center channel anyway, occasionally you get low frequency information in stereo, and that makes for a wiiiiide groove) and you generally have to limit your overall dynamic range to something that an average needle can resolve.
Plus there's the fact that the stuff on the outer edge of the record generally can be louder than the stuff on the inner edge, simply due to the density required.
So in theory, it'd be better than digital, but in practice it's just...different.
> Who said that God needs to inherently be unprovable?
Plotinus, I think. God ("The One") cannot be any existing thing. That laid the groundwork for much of monotheistic theology for the next few thousand years.
The market did. The market decided that, to quote one provider I spoke to when trying to get DSL access to a semi-rural area, "there's not enough money in that."
I am aware of this stuff because my family lives in said semi-rural area. Big vacation/tourist zone, about 10 miles outside a town of 3000. Their options for connectivity are: slow, expensive satellite (the faster, expensive satellite isn't available in their area either), or dial-up. One local telco says they might have DSL access in the area by 2015. *Might*. The big regional telco has said it's not worth their while.
The local library has internet access. It's 10 miles away, poorly staffed (municipal cuts have gutted the library's budget) and the network is frequently down. The McDonald's by the highway is the most reliable net access in town.
Yeah, the free market did it's thing, and decided that my family doesn't matter.
Because in a lot of areas, one ISP has a virtual monopoly on high-speed access. Sure, there are competitors, but they tend not to be great options or are not evenly available.
In my area, I've got Charter. The competitors are a couple of local Telcos and AT&T Uverse, neither of which can match the 30m default bandwidth Charter provides (although one local telco is rolling out some fiber backbones, so we'll see). Charter does, however, cap at 250GB/mo - and provides you no tools to measure your usage or no access to any metrics beyond their own network people calling you to say "you used too much." For most folks, that's plenty, but if you cut the cord on cableTV and watch a fair amount of HD programming, that 250GB can go by quick.
It's a ton of freaking work. The reason there *are* middlemen in the first place is becasue most artists are simply not skilled (or don't have the time) to write, produce and record albums AND handle all the business and sales crap. Middleman services like TuneCore or Reverbnation have replaced an active Agent or A&R guy in a lot of cases, but it's still a middleman, in a way. Even if you're a fulltime musician, sometimes there just aren't enough hours in a day to do everything without cutting corners someplace.
A totally DIY approach is the end goal for a lot of musicians. It's just out of reach for most of them.
If you're an indie artist, you'll note that streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, etc are slowly displacing a lot of traditional album sales. And if you're an indie artist, radio play and advertising are basically nonexistent.
So I don't think she's asking anythign unreasonable. You want to know what venues to book for your next tour? Then you need to know who's listening. And if you're not selling albums the traditional way, and you're not getting radio play, then what you need are the metrics from the services that are delivering your music. You don't need to know eprsonal details, but vague geographical and demographic info makes a huge difference when you're planning out a tour or trying to figure out what sorts of magazine ads to buy, etc.
The services are clearly collecting the data, but god only knows what they're doing with it.
I wonder if some sort of UV or IR filtering film could be overlaid (like, built into a case) and thus solve the problem.
Seems to me like they traded off no-purple-hazing for scratch-resistance. Given how scratched-to-hell the lens of my old iPhone4 is, it seems like it'd be an even trade for me. YMMV.
But in practicality, trying to play that back sounds like crap on vinyl most of the time. Most stuff mastered for vinyl has had the high end gently rolled of or peak-limited above about 15-16khz.
Don't be raggin' on mastering engineers. We, as a rule, HATE to do the whole Death Magnetic thing. But sometimes, someone else is calling the shots.
And sometimes, that's how the mixes get to you. I've received mixes that, before mastering, were already limited to within an inch of their lives. And no mastering engineer can put dynamic range *back*.
George Massenburg has been pushing really hard for industry-wide adoption of 24/96 as a distribution format. And I think as an option, that's great. But until it becomes feasible to stream/download that sort of thing in realtime without a telco crying foul and cutting everyon'e bandwidth to zero, it's not going to happen. One album would blow through a monthly mobile datacap in the US.
So we've got a way to go.
Of course, the whole "vinyl captures more" argument works in theory, but in practice is complete and utter hogwash.
I know this, becasue I've had to master audio for vinyl, and the gyrations one has to go through in order to make it playable and not, you know, destroy the cutting head or cause a playback needle to leap across the room are really quite intensive.
You need to:
- limit high frequency so you don't have sibilance problems
- roll off subharmonics becasue otherwise the groove has to be too wide
- reduce stereo phase differences, particaulrly in the low end, so the needle can track properly
- compress the whole thing to reduce dymanic range to something a turntable can handle it, usually about 8db.
AND your noise floor increases and dynamic range decreases the more stuff you try and put on a single disc.
One could argue that vinyl sounds *better*, though, partially as a result of these operations - no subs means your low-end instruments might be a little clearer, the extra compression means some more "glue" to the mix, the reduction in phase differences keep thigns tight in acoustically imperfect listening spaces, etc - and, of course, generally the people who do audio mastering for vinyl are pros or semi-pros who have really high-end gear and not just a cracked copy of Waves L2 or whatever. So there's that. But more accurate? Erm, no.
This article might as well be subtitled "music was better in my day, get off my lawn."
I can see this used by a zillion smug people all smirkily saying "see? Those stupid masses with their pop music. They're all so dumb."
But it's way more complicated than that.
Yes, it's louder than 50 years ago. The loudness wars are to thank for those last few decibels. But the first several? Since 1960, recording tech and recording practice changed a LOT. Even before the modern loudness wars there was a big rise in loudnesses. So that's not news.
Music composition has changed though, too. And not just "duuuh it gots dumber." That would be, to put it bluntly, a gross oversimplification. In the late 70's pop music started embracing minimalism, and genres like techno, trance and house went whole hog into it. A lot of modern pop music ahs embraced the electronic dance music scene, and thus has really embraced minimalism, so...yeah, you're not going to see a lot of chord changes or crazy modal work. But it doesn't imply anything beyond a more minimalist structure.
The timbral thing surprises me, though. 50 years ago they weren't using synthesizers much. Now they are, and the sonic palatte is wide-open. So I'm not sure why, exactly, that it'd show up as less timbrally varied.
This is what we would love to happen.
However, there's one problem. Artists traditionally suck at anything in the process beyond making the art. Or they simply don't have the time. Creating content can be quite resource intensive, at least in terms of time. If the little time that's left over has to be split between marketing, distro, IT support keeping the wesbite running, packaging, order fulfillment, AND a robust and healthy touring schedule...well, something's gotta give.
The reason the music industry exists with as many middlmen and parasitic organizations as it has is becasue there's a real need for these services. The problem is these middlemen basically have the artist - and to an extent the consumer - by the neck, and can bleed both sides dry. If you got rid of them all right now, something new and equally horrible would evolve to take its place.
> they are free to stop playing music any time
You're not a musician, are you.
You know what musicians call that point when they stop playing music? Death.
The INDUSTRY is an anachronism. However, the actual way musicians make music isn't really changing on a fundamental level. Yes, DAWs are cheaper than studio rentals, yadda yadda, but it still requires time and talent to write and perform original material. That's unlikley to ever change, so while industry models will come and go, those who actually produce the content are pretty much at the mercy of whatever's going on. They don't get a say in the matter.
I'm also a semi-pro musician. It's true that you can get paid to play a gig, and it can be alright.
But it's really not anything you can make a living at. You can barely break even at it, if you're lucky, given the costs for transportation, food, lodging, etc. - which leaves it at best a time and money-suck of a hobby. It's really not something that you can sustain long-term.
It's a hobby for most of us already. But it's a very, very expensive hobby. And...well, if you're a musician, it's not like you really have a choice in the matter. You're driven to create music and share it with people, it's just how your brain works.
"Tons" is relative. There are tons more now.
And there is a resource scarcity for playing live. How many shows do you go to in a week? How many venues are in your town? If you go to see a band once, would you go see them or a similar band the following week? If there are two bands playing that you like on two different venues on the same night, how do you choose which one to see? Do you always buy merch?
See the problem here?
Eventually, there will be a market scarcity, because nobody will be able to afford to be a musician.
Most of us do.
Recording and playing live, for about 99.9999999% of artists, represents a rather significant financial loss. I'm lucky enough to be competant at IT stuff, so I can afford gear and take the occasional vacation to tour, because my day job pays for it. But that's not the case for everyone. If this sort of thing continues, the only people who will be able to record and perform will be those that are wealthy enough in the first place. Do you really want that?
I don't think it really matters one way or the other - people remember Carnegie for being charitable (and not a union busting industrialist), and Henry Ford for being an industrialist (and not a raging anti-semite).
History will probably remember both Jobs and Gates for different reasons.
Yes. This.
Except maybe #8. I've got boxes of unsold tshirts in my basement that contradict this. They are, however awesome for washing the car. So there's that upside.
That bugged me too. I was afraid that his baffling rant against the EFF would be used to discredit what up to that point was a pretty cogent and sound argument.
And apparently, for at least one person, it did.
You willing to go to a concert every day of the week.
If you think your average artist can make a living performing, you should really try it sometime. The profit margins are razor thin, unless you're selling out big venues, and few people do that. Even a big band can have a hard time selling a big room out on a weeknight. Not every market has big venues. Not every fanbase is centralized around, say, New York and LA where there are lots of venues.
Multiply that by a few thousand bands. You've got thousands of bands competing for a limited number of venues, and those that do sell out a smaller venue are unlikely to make more than "what it'll cost to get to the next show."
It's not a sustainable model.
He's got a weird obsession with certain copyright issues that I don't fully understand, and I think it tends to undercut his arguments. He makes a lot of good points but then goes kidna weird with OMG TEH EFF IS EEEVIL and I'm like "what?"
His main point is sound, that the model has changed but artists are still taking it up the back of a volkswagon.