Game Over
11 September 2007 by jaksoul
(Image via)
Chris at ANOE has sparked an interesting debate amongst the collected beards at DJ History (who’s name might prove a bit too apt for some) by linking to this article on little white earbuds which takes a look at the arguments surrounding the rights and wrongs of mp3 blogs.
Obviously, as people who write for a blog or two, it’s a subject which we have given a lot of thought and hopefully what follows won’t just read like somekind of lazy justification.
The vinyl age is over. It’s not that it wasn’t fun or that for two or three generations we were so sold on the idea of music packaged as a 12″ cardboard and plastic artifact that we forgot that this wasn’t music’s natural state. And cd’s, which were a nice postscript to the vinyl age, had there moments too-but in being less of ‘a product’ they were far less able to disguise the fact that what we were buying wasn’t ‘the music’-it was just a means to make ‘the music’ into something that could be mass produced and sold.
I’ve got nothing against that-I love a dusty record shop, the feel of a think cut cardboard sleeve and heavy cut vinyl. But let’s not confuse this object (beautiful as it is) with the thing itself. Music was only a ‘business’ for the time it could be commoditized and that commodity could be effectively controlled (via distribution). That day has passed and music is evolving to new state, the economics of which are yet to be defined-but certainly won’t serve controlling interests of the ‘music business’, rather will return the age old dictum of supply and demand.(with supply increasing based on things like performance and controlled access to the artist rather than on ‘product’)
Within that context the discussions on mp3blogs are sort of missing the point. The question is more about managing change, finding things you love and telling other people about them, trying to build a community that will one day help support artists you admire however things pan out. If you want to be part of that then you can, if not there are plenty of other ways to express a love of music.
12 April 2008, on 4:09 pm
Cheers for posting Moodyman.
Some mention of the state of music audio quality would be a nice addendum to this post. I have no argument about ease of distribution and I’m not here gripping my vinyl like an old lady holding on to her typewriter, refusing to use a computer. I grew up on tapes and cds and always found vinyl discouraging because you had to be so careful with it and then it was the factor of transport. It is the sound quality that is the issue not many people seem to weigh as much in discussion. Older vinyl and the opportunity to listen to analog recordings on a loud speaker provide a much richer, warmer aural experience. These compressions are handy but the sound quality is not the same, and that leads to a diluted experience, if you play a 320kbps instead of a hot track. Many mp3s suffer from these symptoms: tinny, cold, and missing some atmosphere due to compression. Vinyl is expensive and therefore easy to discount as not worth it (and for many tracks it’s NOT worth the cash), but the issue of music for all is not purely distributional, so please remember to cover more sides of the issue if you write a ‘pronounced dead and this is why’ post. There are other factors I didn’t mention, including the dj cult of respect, the physicality of touching the grooves with your hands, but that’s for someone else to comment on.