An industry commits suicide and blames us

http://gwolf.org/blog/industry-commits-suicide-and-blames-us

by mariuz • 14 years ago

54 51 14 years ago

dsirijus2• 14 years ago

During the holiday season 2011/2012, the most sold record in the most popular record store in Croatia (4+ million people) sold 52 copies. And that was a land slide against the second most popular record - 16 copies sold.

I was flabbergasted with that info, thought the numbers would be MUCH higher.

thomasfl• 14 years ago

Seems like the sales charts is rather insignificant.

dsirijus2• 14 years ago

Also, a lot of those are probably purchased by some media/radio/archiving companies.

benologist2• 14 years ago

This has nothing to do with the recording industry. The reason the record is / has died is progress. The labels didn't shut down record stores in Costa Rica, people stopped caring about them. There barely even is a recording industry in Costa Rica and this is the most developed country of centroamerica.

The reason latinos want MP3s and MP3 players is they're cheap as piss and they can jump on limewire in any internet cafe and download more songs. It's convenience and it's progress and it's why the MP3 won everywhere, not just in CR.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

Interestingly, the vinyl record is still making a comeback in the US, even while MP3s continue their inevitable spread.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

I used to DJ and think something has been lost with the virtualization of media, which is why I'm in no hurry to get a Kindle. But when you say vinyl's making a comeback, I'm skeptical of whether this amounts to more than a niche market of hipsters, among whom the space and cost requirements of collecting vinyl can serve as a status marker. Could you expand on your comment?

benologist2• 14 years ago

It doesn't really matter in a country like CR though - it's got a tiny population and online shopping is a pain in the ass, it can barely even contribute to a revival let alone support one within its own borders.

iamben• 14 years ago

I see a lot of smaller bands putting their record out on just vinyl, but providing it with a download code for DRM free MP3.

rmc• 14 years ago

Friend of mine is in an amateur band. They sell vinyl records and download links. They have ignored CDs. If you want the physical object, you probably want a record.

smackfu• 14 years ago

That comeback has a pretty low floor though. It's never going to come back like it was during its heyday... it will be a niche thing forever, just coming back from extinction.

relix• 14 years ago

The bashing of MP3 in that article is unwarranted. I can't find any decent source, but I'm pretty sure a 192kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from a CD for 99.999% of the people. Especially with the crappy included headphones everyone is using.

I would bet you my day salary I could find an article from 30 years ago, bashing CD's vs vinyl in exactly the same way.

geon• 14 years ago

> bashing CD's vs vinyl in exactly the same way

And tubes vs. mosfets.

raverbashing• 14 years ago

I though it was tubes vs. bipolar junction transistors

And mosfets behave much more like a tube than them. Oh well...

antris• 14 years ago

Many (most?) vinyls are pre Loudness War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war). But CDs are mostly post Loudness War, where all the sound has become wimpy due to bad mixing practices driven by marketers. This also affects digital music, no matter how it's compressed.

So in general, many vinyls actually do sound more dynamic and clear. It's not because of the media, but because of how they were produced at different times in the industry.

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

Which is hugely ironic as the major advantage of CDs over vinyl (at least, the one that was touted back then) is their wider dynamic range. Which we now use all of 5% of.

tsotha• 14 years ago

One of my biggest disappointments in life was buying CD after CD that sounded absolutely muddy compared to my old vinyl. At first I thought they were just hiring, you know, lumberjacks to do the transfers. I'm still floored that was done on purpose.

viraptor• 14 years ago

I have to completely agree here. You can still find some material that was published (on purpose or not) before it got adjusted and the difference is huge. I was really impressed by DM's Lillywhite sessions CD which was leaked before it was "finished". It's got the best sound I've heard in a long time on a professional recording. I wish more were released that way - without the unnecessary compression (of sound, not the file format).

StavrosK3• 14 years ago

Oh God, Holy Mountains from Hypnotize actually has CLIPPING! This isn't some college band, it's System of a Down. They couldn't hire an engineer that knows the first thing about sound?

I'm just a guy and I know your fucking track shouldn't clip ever. They ruined that song.

chaostheory• 14 years ago

Aside from cost, size, and convenience; the problem with vinyl is consistency. I remember reading a study stating that the quality degrades after only 8 plays. Then again if you're an audiophile maybe 8 good plays is better than what they consider garbage 100% of the time.

StavrosK3• 14 years ago

I would back your assertion up. I think I could only distinguish one 192 kbps mp3 in my blind listening tests, but I don't have especially great equipment. I couldn't tell anything above 192, and for Ogg the threshold bitrate was much lower.

I'm fairly certain that the vast majority can't tell a 192 kbps mp3 from CD, and that's a good thing.

white_devil4• 14 years ago

> I'm pretty sure a 192kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from a CD for 99.999% of the people.

That's because people are completely oblivious to the existence of proper loudspeakers (ie. "studio monitors").

yock• 14 years ago

Near-field monitors are expensive and entirely inappropriate for most applications.

gregsq• 14 years ago

The pursuit of 'state of the art' in audio has changed a little I would say. That 99.999% of listeners can't hear the difference between audio sources has been true in the past as well, even in the pre compressed era. Most people listened to car radios and other lo-fi equipment.

Consumer formats aggravate the audiophile alchemists regularly. Looking through chat from a few decades ago about CD's versus vinyl, adjectives like 'hard' and 'brittle' crop up a lot. The solution technically, was of course to add more distortion, in the form of dithering, to provide an early form of psycho acoustic modelling.

Being a musician as well, I've taken a couple of online 'dare you to tell the difference' tests as well, while researching DAC's for mixing, but not under uncontrolled conditions. I put the top end through custom ribbons comprised of 4Kg of magnet focused on 0.001g of ribbon ( a crude description, but good enough ), and it's an observable difference.

Sitting outside listening to noisy wildlife of all types in the woods, I'm sure 100% of listeners could tell the difference between that aural landscape and any recording, including an MP3.

dedward4• 14 years ago

As much as Im' a fan of studio monitors - they're built for the sound engineer to do his work, not blow his hearing, and hear the details he needs to hear. He's not producing music to be listened on those speakers, though - he's producing music to be listened to on a wide variety of playback situations, none of which match what he's working with, and he knows it. If he made stuff only to sound perfect on his gear, it would suck everywhere else. Instead, he makes things to sound good on whatever it needs to (whatever that is in a given situation, I don't know).

That said - I'm the first to stand up and prefer a pair of nice towers and a decent amp, even if it's 20 years old -vs- some tiny "sound good" speakers. Those are fine for the family-room surround setup, with the big subwoofer that rumbles the house, but the secret bat-cave has only a nice little amp, a couple of nice towers (and a few good headphones for various types of music when it's quiet-time). mp3's, or any compressed music, are just fine if they've been recorded well, I think arguments based on those formats are ill-conceived; like anything, if you don't use the format properly it's not going to work well. I've found that a 192kbps mp3 can occasionally sound different than the source CD, but in a blind test I could only tell you that they were different - not which one was the CD - both sound good... and that difference could probably be engineered out in the majority of cases. Which isn't to say I don't have some humungous high-bitrate stuff hanging around - but I like to enjoy my music, not obsess over it or blow rediculous money on audiophile gear. (okay - one pair of really good headphones - so sue me)

audiolemon• 14 years ago

256 is indistinguishable from CD but must people want 320. 192 is near CD but I can hear phase alignment problems at higher frequencies most noticeably for me on hi-hats and in what is called AIR, or high frequency content that gives definition and space to individual voices.

That said I used to buy 3 records a week. When Napster came along it was basically catnip for music lovers. If they had worked out a deal with Napster then to charge me a monthly subscrptn it would have been a no-brainier for me. But they went the route of isolating the music lovers and creating political wedges between musicians and fans. It is unfortunate.

I can't remember the link but a professor for some distinguished US college does a blind listening test asking new students to rank different formats for subjective preference. As MP3 became more mainstream the preference for that MP3 sound increased. People like what they hear or are familiar with rather tan what is best - which should be clear to understandable to crackly record lovers. Also heavily compressed musical forms like pop, rock and dance can benefit from the digital phased hash that lower quality MP3 exhibit.

Personally I prefer MP3 at this stage. I have hundreds of records but MP3 is far more convienent. I can have a constant stream of music wherever I am, I do not have to have clean the stylus, record or change side, I no longer have to curse at noise and pops, and I can have my music on all my devices.

Also it is difficult to argue against the negative impact of payola on music. The standard for popular music now, during focus group listening tests, is not whether the music is good but whether the listener is more or less likely to change channel before the ads. Music as a form of expression can never live under those circumstances.

tehwalrus• 14 years ago

source: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/concluding-the-grea...

Altenuvian• 14 years ago

blaming the decline of the industry on the sound quality of mp3 is plain bs. well encoded mp3 with bitrates higher than 169kbps have repeatedly been shown indistinguishable from the original.

for an informed discussion and public listening test you may want to check the hydrogenaudio forums:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showforum=40

more background info in this article on audio codecs by christopher “monty” montgomery of ogg-vorbis fame:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

mechanical_fish4• 14 years ago

See "Loudness War", above, and the comments below that one.

Yeah, MP3s can be great if producers actually use them for greatness.

smackay• 14 years ago

The author's argument is based on the emotional appeal of vinyl and the experience of purchasing from people who care about the music they sell. I'd tend to agree that in the world of music company profits and MP3s (notice there were no references to CDs in the article) that this has been lost and in some ways this is regrettable.

A high value experience for people who care passionately about something is always going to be at odds with mass market appeal - the article could also be written for bookstores - and it is entirely possible that the value the author put in records and record stores was purely an accident of change, the same way that listening to early radio broadcasts on a valve-based, bakelite set was or people sitting around a piano to share songs.

I like the imperfect translation from Spanish to English it greatly adds to the style and appeal of the article.

ommunist• 14 years ago

This is why I bought some ethnic percussions and learned how to play. I enjoy it a lot more now than listening to flattened mp3 drums. Small live concerts is the place where the music lives now. Like one I visited in Prague during the last Xmas. You know, these guys don't even care for a "record". They earn their living by playing live. Like it was hundreds of years ago. And I personally think, it should be like this.

brudgers• 14 years ago

The death of "record" stores is just part of a larger tragedy in retail sales where cashiers have become scripted popups during checkout rather than being able to interact like with customers as intelligent adults. When I buy some pens at the office supply store, the poor cashier has to give me the same pimp for copy paper and the online survey she just gave to the two customers in front of me.

The bookstore is the worst. I remember when (Hey! You kids get off my lawn!) bookstore cashiers were expected to ask about or remark upon or share knowledge about books. No I don't want to buy the gold discount card, subscribe to People or go online for a chance to win. If I wanted to go online I'd already have ordered from Amazon. And get this, Amazon doesn't ask me to fill out a survey or pimp magazine subscriptions.

dedward4• 14 years ago

On the upside - now I know where to find an actual record store, even if it's across town...

An industry commits suicide and blames us

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