How the compact disc lost its shine

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/28/how-the-compact-disc-lost-its-shine

by bufordsharkley • 11 years ago

61 52 11 years ago

jerf• 11 years ago

"Webster remembers one industry Cassandra, Maurice Oberstein – who ran CBS and then Polygram in the UK – making a similar point. “He was the only one who went: ‘We’re making a huge mistake. We’re putting studio-quality masters into the hands of people.’ And he was absolutely right in that respect. Once you made a CD with ones and zeroes it was only a matter of time before that was converted into something that was easily transferable.”"

Emphasis mine.

Well, the Loudness War fixed that problem right up, didn't it? Now CDs aren't "studio-quality masters" anymore.

mark-r• 11 years ago

Once you had digital mastering and digital manipulation, the loudness wars would have happened no matter what the output medium.

What I don't understand is how this appeals to the bean counters. Were any of the best-selling albums of all time noticeably louder than their peers?

DanBC• 11 years ago

Loud works for radio, which used to drive sales.

bsder2• 11 years ago

The loudness wars were about CD changers. Radio always normalized anyway.

You didn't want your CD sticking out as "quiet" when put in a 5 CD shuffle.

lamby• 11 years ago

CDs aren't "studio-quality masters" anymore

Well, not sure many studios are still using 16-bit 44.1kHz either... ;)

ArkyBeagle4• 11 years ago

Wow, I had never heard that about anyone in the music business. Amazing. But there is no way they were gonna pass on reselling all the back catalog one more time - at from $15 to $20 a pop retail.

16/44.1 is a studio quality master. The best practice to send a mix in is to use the same format as the end product unless the mastering engineer wants something different.

gregsq• 11 years ago

Film is 24/48 so 16/44.1 isn't what you'd call a studio master in general. A lot of music used in film originates from 44.1k CD's but then you have up sampling to add to the workflow. 16/44.1k is becoming something of an anachronism.

nemo44x3• 11 years ago

I'll never forget when Apple introduced iTunes (before the iPod) with the tagline "Rip, Mix and Burn". Classic Steve Jobs direct assault at an industry his company was about to take over. Looking back, seeing how the iPod was under development at this time puts the entire strategy together.

Apple wasn't the first company to let you rip music, share it and burn CD's, etc but they were the one's who made it accessible to everyone with a seamless, fully integrated user experience. Users ripped all of their and their friends music, got used to the MP3 format and then the ease of buying MP3's from Apples store with iPod integration.

soperj• 11 years ago

Everyone? it took almost 3 years for them to release a windows version. Hell it didn't even run on OSX for nearly a year.

stephengillie2• 11 years ago

Harvard Business case studies cite the delayed Windows version as a marketing tactic. "Everyone loved" the iPod, and apparently quite a few people bought a prerequisite Mac in order to use the iPod.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

Porting iTunes to Windows might have been quite the effort, though. IIRC it's not a true native app, and runs on some port of Apple's libraries to Windows.

LeoPanthera• 11 years ago

iTunes never sold MP3s. It was originally encrypted AAC, then later plain AAC.

The "FairPlay" DRM system (classic marketing name to make it sound good) always supported codecs other than AAC, leading to much speculation at the time that Apple would sell lossless tracks for a higher price, but it never happened.

lucaspiller• 11 years ago

I can't remember what I used to rip music, but I remember having a healthy collection of Winamp playlists with all my CDs in MP3 format way before Apple came on the scene. I had dial-up until late 2006 so I never really got into downloading music (20 minutes for a track wasn't worth it).

nemo44x3• 11 years ago

Definitely. Some of my friends had an apartment together in college and they had a tower connected to their TV and stereo with 1000's of songs on it. This was 1999 and was a pretty impressive idea I soon aped. Needless to say, small parties, LAN parties and get-togethers at my college apartment (really a huge place with 5 bedrooms, 2 living rooms) were awesome for the time.

douche• 11 years ago

Oh, boy, those days in the early 2000s when iTunes was a usable piece of software. I was able to resurrect a couple of badly scratched Hendrix CDs with it.

Can't remember the last time I allowed iTunes on one of my machines. Somewhere I think I have an iPod kicking around in one of the culch drawers in my desk... With Pandora, I haven't even thought about buying a CD in half a decade. Well, except for the copy of Master of Puppets that I found for a dollar at Marden's.

makeitsuckless• 11 years ago

I immediately stopped buying CD's forever when I encountered the first "copyright protected" CD I couldn't play in my computer.

That was years before the first music downloads were legally available (at least where I live), so you can guess what happened to my music consumption from that point on.

maxerickson• 11 years ago

The copy protected discs were not compliant CDs. Which doesn't mean a whole lot, except that a disc carrying the CD-DA logo won't have any copy protection.

stephengillie2• 11 years ago

It's almost surreal when you know this, and you search far and wide, but every CD you're interested in buying has that logo missing.

killface• 11 years ago

Yup. The last album I bought was one where I couldn't rip a couple tracks and put them on my Diamond Rio (how's that for a flashback?). Then they came out with the "You didn't buy this song, you bought a license to play this song on one media type..."

And I've been digital since then.

doodpants• 11 years ago

You've been digital since before then, since all CDs are digital.

curun1r• 11 years ago

I stopped buying when the content industries declared war on my profession. When they started going after tinkerers for being inquisitive instead of the people who used the resulting code to actually commit copyright violations, that crossed a line for me and, because of that, I will never willingly give them another dime of my money.

To me, it's abundantly clear that people should be responsible for what they do with code, no matter who wrote it. Writing code should never be illegal.

ArkyBeagle4• 11 years ago

I didn't. But I never bought another Sony CD after the rootkit debacle with "My Morning Jacket"'s "Z".

hackuser2• 11 years ago

Almost everyone has forgotten this vision:

We now have a way to distribute works of art (i.e., any that can be digitized, including music) freely, easily, globally, and immediately to everyone, in an open, free-as-in-speech form that enables further innovation. Works of art aren't limited, as they have been for all of human history until now, to a specific object or location. What an incredible boon, a miracle, and or artists too, whose vision can spread from their studio, or parents' basement, around the world, effortlessly.

But an industry had been built on the old distribution medium; it earned money by limiting and selling access to the artwork. Rather than someone creatively disrupting that industry and replacing it with something native to and facilitating the advantages of this miraculous medium, instead we've imposed the old industry on the new tech, crippling it with DRM and laws (and by framing the discussion to the degree that everyone refers to music as an article of commerce and not as a work of art, to the point that even artists speak that way and buy into the 'threat' of the Internet).

If anything should be open and free, it's art.

nosuchthing2• 11 years ago

I agree, but it creates a conflicting economic issue for the artists who spend their time working on these creations.

The global economy is in a very awkward transitional state right now thanks to tools and networks of the information era.

I imagine a decade or two from now, the prevalent models for creative media outlets would be youtube + advertising views = payment to artists, subscription based netflix / spotify will still be around for niche markets, and as it is now - local copies of recorded media will be sold as physical artifacts bundled with other artwork that cannot be digitized like shirts or toys.

alexqgb2• 11 years ago

Great, so artists are reduced to "content producers" that learn to tailor their work - first and foremost - to the comfort level of advertisers.

That's not progress. That's a reversion to the medieval. It's like, "Sure, you can paint or write whatever you like - just as long as it doesn't run counter to the political agenda of the King or the Pope, and honestly, if you know what's good for you, you'll focus on who you're really working for, okay?"

I mean, the whole point of copyright was to get away from the suffocating effects of the patronage system, which was one in which a tiny handful of insanely rich and hugely self-serving players set the cultural agenda for everyone.

And by the way, if you think that advertisers are okay with having their brands associated with anything and everything that attracts audiences, you've clearly spent zero time dealing with advertisers.

qw• 11 years ago

If anything should be open and free, it's art.

I'm not sure that would work with all types of art and for all types of artists.

If an author spends a year writing a book, how is he supposed to make a living? A few authors can attend sci-fi and fantasy conferences, but most can't make much money from live performances, t-shirts etc.

It's not fair to limit the ways an artist can make a living. If writing was limited to hobbyists we would lose a lot of good literature that can only come from total dedication to their work.

The same can also be said for musicians. Consumers have a limited amount of time and money they can spend on concerts, donations and t-shirts.

The current copyright and distribution system is broken, but art has always been a product that can be sold and controlled by the artists, so why should it be free-as-in-speech just because it can be copied digitally?

The main issue with today's system is that artists no longer have enough control of the distribution and copyright is something that can be transferred and outlive the original artists.

The only way art can be free-as-in-speech is to build a post scarcity world where everyone is free to do whatever they want.

derefr2• 11 years ago

If an author spends a year writing a book, how is he supposed to make a living?

Usually, patronage: accepting donations, "pay what you want" sales, "holding works hostage", running Kickstarters, "collector's editions", selling merchandise that isn't very good but people buy it anyway to support the artist, etc. etc.

Alternatively, micro-duration IP rights. I'm especially fond of the idea of releasing books as chapter-at-a-time (or with even finer granularity) serials on a subscription model, where you pay to read right away, or can read for free if you wait. (I'm working on a marketplace service to this effect, in fact.) This model works to the incentive people have to consume new media at the same time everyone else is, in order to use the presumed shared experience as a conversation topic. The work is free, but you pay for the social benefit.

bsder2• 11 years ago

If anything should be open and free, it's art.

Wrong. Art really deserves copyright protection. However, that protection should not extend past the author's lifetime. Twenty years on a work is probably about right--maybe forty if we consider extended lifespans.

The social good of copyright is to incentivize creation. We tolerate the social bad--the monopoly--in order to get more works.

The problem is that copyright law no longer carries out the social good.

frik3• 11 years ago

That's it. Though the law (US, EU) has been changed recently to extend copyright protection for an even longer time past the authors lifetime. Some year ago it was afaik 70 years after the author died. The Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 is now public domain but songs from Elvis Presley were owned by Michael Jackson (his daughter was together with him for some time) and will make another generation or two of his childrens rich (or whoever owns the rights now/then).

icebraining2• 11 years ago

It's an opinion, it can't simply be "wrong". You disagree, that's all.

alexqgb2• 11 years ago

"If anything should be open and free, it's art."

Sure, and by extension, if anyone should have all their living expenses covered without question and be given whatever materials they need free of change, it's artists.

I mean, your utopian vision is great, and a world in which it was economically viable and politically acceptable is one that many artists would willingly embrace. But in the meantime, when artists still need to pay for food, rent, studio space, and supplies (to say nothing of health care, education for their kids, and retirement) your view seems...less than intelligent.

Indeed, what it really sounds like is bullshit - not unlike "We're going to reinvent leverage by diversifying engagement until we get a critical mass of traction with enough disruption to convert our best-in-class imaginings into free unicorns for everyone!" Because that's what happens when you remove political and economic reality from any equation and add a bunch of hype to all that remains.

"instead we've (framed) the discussion to the degree that everyone refers to music as an article of commerce and not as a work of art, to the point that even artists speak that way and buy into the 'threat' of the Internet."

No dude, it's not the "framing" that makes artists think about their work in terms of needing to make a living. It's the need to make a living that makes them think about the need to make a living.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

If anything should be open and free, it's art.

Oh hell no. Apart from the difficulty of making a living if there's no way to get paid - and don't go telling me you support basic income, because I can't pay my bills your support and I'm guessing that you don't have an action plan to redesign the economy on any sort of meaningful time horizon - I don't want Free Art. Free art isn't subject to any sort of quality control, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day to spend browsing all existing art. Putting a price on things, even if it's just a monthly Netflix subscription fee, promotes selectivity, and as an artist that's what I care about. I want you to be emotionally engaged with the art I make in some way (even if you dislike it; there's lots of art I dislike that I nevertheless consider to be Good Art), but if art is free then there's no incentive have strong preferences and so no real engagement occurs.

Of course, you might find a piece of my art and love it. But I would much rather sell it to you and see you express your interest albeit indirectly by buying a ticket or a copy of it. Think of how you donate to charity - you give some money to an organization or in response to a particular event or to someone on the street who seems sincerely needy to you. You could just throw a $10 bill in the air on a windy day every so often and the money would likely wind up helping someone, but that wouldn't be very rewarding for you, would it?

Free Art just says that art has no economic value and therefore the time spent on it doesn't either. It says some 3 year-old's finger paintings are no better or worse than the expression of someone's craft that took years to develop. It says that art isn't important enough that you should be willing to sacrifice anything to get it, and that anyone who chooses to spend their time producing it is being self-indulgent.

I realize this is far from what you intended, but I think that's because you haven't through through the ramifications. I get that you think art is great and that you'd like everyone to be able to educate, entertain and edify themselves by making it widely accessible. But you haven't figured out how this works for people who produce art, or what signal it sends to the general public about the value of the art. Your proposal doesn't say anything about subsidizing artists or how any such subsidy would be funded, and even if there were subsidies then you've put artists in the position of appealing to a few charitable gatekeepers, who are inevitably going to take it on themselves to decide what is or is not art, while simultaneously wrecking the marketplace. You wouldn't expect a chef to come to your house and cook a meal for free, and somehow I doubt you'd expect that chef to give away all her recipes for free. Why do you think that people who labor over paintings or music or literature or _________ should be required to forgo any economic interest in their output?

Falkon13132• 11 years ago

Free Art just says that art has no economic value and therefore the time spent on it doesn't either. It says some 3 year-old's finger paintings are no better or worse than the expression of someone's craft that took years to develop.

So if someone gives a 3 year-old a nickel for their fingerpainting, does that make it as significant as The Last Supper? Or is the significance of art directly proportional to its dollar valuation? When one person thinks it's worthless and another thinks it's priceless, what dollar valuation does it have?

You could just throw a $10 bill in the air on a windy day every so often and the money would likely wind up helping someone, but that wouldn't be very rewarding for you, would it?

That actually describes quite well what shopping for CDs used to be like (except it was a $20 bill). Since you couldn't hear the music first, you were taking a random chance that there would be at least 1 or 2 songs that you might like on it. It was like an expensive lottery scratch ticket (complete with the joy when you found a rare winner and went to buy more of that band).

Artists absolutely should be able to make a living as well as anyone else (and make better money as they improve their skills/knowledge/experience). But I don't think the 'old' system was any better at that, except for the few who were both smart and lucky.

It's a difficult problem because the value of art is not always easily measured in dollars. Aside from some commercial or pop art, it's one of those cases where supply & demand and capitalist economics is insufficient for both the suppliers and the consumers. Traditional ownership also breaks down a bit when the thing becomes a part of you and also because the thing is not a physical object.

We do need a better solution that provides decent money to artists while not arbitrarily restricting access, censoring, or controlling what people have access to, or punishing/shaming them for accessing it. Crowdfunding and things like Patreon have made some progress toward providing alternatives, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.

A lot of people make a decent living now working with (and to some degree contributing to) open source software which is made freely available. I hope that more artists will soon be able to make a decent living while people can also have free access to (at least some of) their art.

acdha• 11 years ago

instead we've imposed the old industry on the new tech, crippling it with DRM and laws

Are we stilling talking about music and not movies? I have a ton of purchased or free music from sources ranging from small online vendors to major companies like Apple and Amazon. None of it had DRM.

I'm not a fan of the major music industry players but the problems are mostly contracts, not anything which can easily be changed by a tech company. If you want music without DRM, there's more freely available to anyone on the internet than anyone could listen to in one lifetime (seriously, don't visit https://archive.org/details/audio_music if you have a metered internet connection).

The catch turns out to be that musicians like to sleep indoors and eat nice food like everyone else. It's fine to pontificate about how art deserves to be free but if you really believe that you should be staying up nights trying to figure out a realistic way for someone to make more money from your approach than signing with a record label.

hackuser2• 11 years ago

I'm too late to edit my post above:

It's a little surprising that on Hacker News, people assume "free" means free-as-in-beer and not free-as-in-speech, especially when I cited the latter earlier in my post.

Also, it's sad that, on a forum dedicated to disruptive innovation, the responses are not creative ideas but people saying it's impossible. Just off the top of my head: Micropayments through a clearinghouse. Grants for artists. Some sort of minimum income support.

Also: Many great artists in history earned barely a dime from their work. I know many people here build startups hoping to make a billion, but not everyone is driven by that. I'm not saying artists should starve, I'm saying monetizing isn't always necessary.

Finally, not everyone must be paid what their work product is worth. Second-string basketball players make more than doctors, generals, US Attorneys, and diplomats. Was Albert Einstein paid what the Theory of Relativity is worth?

Falkon13132• 11 years ago

If anything should be open and free, it's art.

We've had free (both gratis and libre) art for ages. It just hasn't been convenient, and often only really free for the wealthy and/or those who have a lot of spare time to track it down. Otherwise, it's limited and controlled.

Want a book? Go to your local library. Want to see inspirational paintings/statues? Head to your local museum! Music? It's being broadcast on the radio 24/7! Movies? They're also being broadcast for free on TV (you don't even need cable!)

Oh, your local library/museum isn't very local, you can't afford a taxi and there's insufficient public transport? Too bad. At least they're free for wealthy people.

Saved up, spent a lot of time, went there, and they didn't have what you were looking for? Too bad, it's free if you can travel to another location or wait (who knows how long) for it to arrive there.

That music you wanted? It's playing for free, but on a station that your receiver doesn't pick up. That movie? It played last December. If you wait 8 more months it'll probably be on for free again. But not right now, the station wants you to watch something different.

Free art is not new, nor is it a threat to artists. Writers never got paid more because you had to pay cab fare to get to the library. Actors never got paid more because you had to wait several months to see reruns of their movies. Ancient Greek sculptors aren't suffering just because you get to see their statue for free at the museum.

What's new is that it's much more ubiquitously and evenly accessible. And that you are free to choose/explore anything, rather than just what someone allows you to watch/listen to/read/view.

frik3• 11 years ago

Also almost forgotten:

An audio CD offers high quality lossless audio whereas MP3 is a lossy format meaning that some hear a quality difference with good loudspeakers.

The music industry should offer wav/flac audio files (at a slightly higher price) next to MP3 files, if they ever decide to stop producing music CDs!

deepnet• 11 years ago

In the case of music , nearly all of the money goes to corporations and thus shareholders.

It does not go to making new art.

DRM and anti-share laws benefit the big players who seek to control culture.

They use this money to manipulate the music that gets played, and as sole gatekeepers strongarm artists into exploitative contracts.

Before the net it was really hard to find out about good music - the radio was payola slop - finding & listening to it could take months.

This stranglehold has been weakened by the internet to the benefit of creators and fans - indie labels and self publishing have exploded.

Art is a field that advances, like science building apon the past - in this way copyright directly opposes creativity.

Just because someone makes something doesn't mean they SHOULD be paid but now it is more likely they could reach an appreciative audience.

Copying, deriving and sharing are the natural state - we give up the natural state with a limited copyright to enhace the public domain - this no longer happens.

Perhaps only the creator should enjoy copyright and the rights cannot be sold. Why should rights be sold ?

k-mcgrady• 11 years ago

> "Rather than someone creatively disrupting that industry and replacing it with something native to and facilitating the advantages of this miraculous medium"

What is the viable alternative in which artists still receive the necessary support to create and distribute their work? People seem to think that the record industry is trying to force an old business model. We seem to think these people are idiots. But I disagree. I can't see how they won't have spent the last 10 years considering alternatives and finding none that make sense. What would you suggest?

beloch• 11 years ago

In the nineties, there was a great local record shop that was set up in a former bank that had been built in 1930. Marble floors and walls. Wrought iron railing with a loft above the main floor, which had a huge vaulted ceiling. There were listening stations where you could sample music and several floors above, all full of music in various genres. It wasn't quite a large as Tower Records, but it was a much nicer building and was just a 15-minute walk from my high-school. I blew far too much money there. In terms of the sheer percentage of my disposable income it gobbled up, no other format has ever come close to CD's.

As great as this store was, it was still sometimes hard to find specific albums. Imagine special ordering physical media these days! I forget if you had to pay in advance or just put down a deposit, but sometimes it took months to get some albums in. Today, even if you still have to have physical media, you can get the most obscure releases off of amazon (heck, even amazon japan) in less time.

In every measurable way, online distribution of physical media is superior to the old mega-stores, and digital media is more convenient still. However, there was something special about walking into a big space that was packed with tens of thousands of different albums and being able to wander down the aisles browsing album art. One of my big hopes for virtual reality is to bring this kind of experience back to life, only with all the advantages of digital media. Imagine shopping in a virtual record shop, being able to walk down the aisles, pick a random album off the shelf and, just by looking at it, be able to listen to the tracks. Maybe there will even be a way to chat up other people browsing the same genre!

happycube• 11 years ago

Semi-related: MCA (Yes, Universal) invented the Laserdisc, their bean counters made the disks crappy (by underspeccing the factory), Phillips made unreliable crappy players that couldn't play said crappy disks... and Pioneer made it all actually work.

How the compact disc lost its shine

Related Stories