Vinyl has a quality of its own, but it degrades slightly each time you play it, even with the best equipment.
One point ignored so far in this thread: there is a quality difference between CDs and MP3.
When CDs came out, I was delighted by the clean clear sound (to some it is antiseptic), no need to swap sides, and no worries about degradation. Yup, a scratched CD is a dead CD, so I copy them. However, the copies don’t always last well, even with name-brand blanks.
I like the idea of downloading tracks, but feel that they are usually overpriced. Fer Chrissake, there are no production overheads or retailer margin, and no dead stock.
Well, they do have laser phonographs that do not physically touch the record, so there’s really no damage that I could think of being cause, except for taking the record out of the sleeve and putting it on the turntable. (ETA: OK, it looks like there is only one like that, and it’s something like $15K. I thought there were more of them out there at a somewhat more reasonable price, so nevermind.)
As a consumer: Physical media forever! Virtual media never! Ok, that’s just a preference. I’ve happily shelled out a couple of bucks for a download card, but I’d really rather have physical copies. I suck at archiving digital data, and have albums I bought as a child.
DFW still has more independent record stores than you can shake a stick at, and at least 5 good ones. CDs are the bargain basement now, if you put your $120/year toward CDs, you’d probably have 120 CDs. You’d have them most of your life if you took care of them, and could buy 120 more next year. That’s 10 CDs a month. I listen to a lot of music, but even that’s on the outside of my ability to ingest, truly digest and enjoy new music made by others. If you were judicious and careful and knew how to judge a vinyl by looking at it, you could do the same with albums. I have many great albums and CDs (and yep, even tapes) that only came in those formats, and they’re never likely to make it to a streaming service or Youtube. When they do, they’re removed fairly quickly. Heck, if you were willing to pick up the boxes of discarded records after garage sales in the late 80’s/early 90’s, it was free for the investment of your time (and lo, they were glorious years). I’ll keep my eyes peeled for boxes that could contain CDs stacked on the curb in the coming years.
But as a producer of both virtual and physical media, I’m of two minds on the subject. I’ve bought (at least part of) 500 copies of the same album. Twice. Because we were effectively the label. I’ve also been a co-conspirator in the release of several tapes and CDs over the years. Putting out records today is pretty cheap. Even with recording costs, shrinkwrap, professional artwork and full color covers; at low volumes it still works out to around $8 a pop. Stick a download card in it, and if you can draw a crowd at regular shows, people will buy them at a price that will make you a profit.
But that profit will still pale compared to your merchandise sales if you make merchandise of the same quality. Folks just seem to be inclined to buy shirts and patches, etc. when they’ve had a drink or two. Maybe they’re just buying memorabilia of the experience rather than the music. So it goes.
On a pure musical salesman level, though, the sunk costs in a digital-only distribution are teeny compared to the physical route. That’s why I’ve bought quite a few tapes with download cards in them. The band didn’t want to invest the cash necessary to print even CDs, but cassette dupes are almost as cheap as getting nice download cards printed, and it supplies that experience memorabilia mixed with the music in a pocket sized form. If someone figures out a decent, durable, attractive standard for digital storage that is also ubiquitously accessible, it’ll probably replace them. If the USB standard persists, gets a cheap way of write-once storage (even cassettes a protected from you accidentally copying over them) and folks get creative and efficient at 3D printing of them, I could see USB being the physical media being the thing that gets a nostalgia boost in 20 years. Maybe I’ll fool around and put out a few of our next album on a custom made USB stick if I can figure out how to accomplish the above under the cost of a vinyl.
Well, for me as a consumer of music and as a concert-goer (and also someone who was on the stage side years back), I almost never buy CDs at a concert. Why? I can get that at any time, especially these days. (And, with most concerts I go to, I already have the music, anyway.) The other merch is the more interesting and less available stuff. So, I, at least, find that more interesting and a better memento of the concert than a CD.
I don’t know how much 3D printing would help; the cost of a USB drive is in the solid state storage, not the half-penny’s worth of plastic shell. You’re not going to drive the price lower than some factory in China is banging out unless you’re going for some weird custom plastic body.
Spot on. Brilliant for their day, now thoroughly superseded.
And as for the whole “Digital music sounds like crap!” thing: I cannot hear any difference between a CD audio file and MP3/whatever format iTunes uses now.
Oh, I did not explain myself well there. 3D printing would be useful to make the drives more attractive and recognizable as being from the band. I feel one with a customized case would be more desirable than one that just looked like a generic USB drive.
pulykamell that explanation is as good as any. Heck, I’ve been known to buy merch from bands that I’m not particularly fond of, just because it was cool merch.
I thought that might have been it. Honestly though, I think people would just want to upload the files and toss the drive in a drawer, at best. No one wants to drive around with a center console full of flash drives to paw through and plug into their dashboard.
Yeah, buying flash drives/USB sticks of music doesn’t seem all that appealing to me for the reason you state. I would think something like a music download card would be more practical in this day and age but, like I said, I don’t typically buy music at concerts, so I’m not sure how popular it would be.
The value I could see in a small flash drive from a concert would be that it’s easy to listen to on the way home without screwing on your phone with websites or apps for a download. But once I got home, I’d just upload the stuff at my leisure and never use the USB stick again. I certainly wouldn’t treat it like a CD or cassette.
I pretty much only listen to CDs. My car, which is the primary place I listen to music, has a CD player in it. I rarely drive for hours at a time, and so have no need for more than a CD’s worth of music in one trip. Occasionally I have downloaded digital music; without a physical presence to remind me of its existence, this music is quickly forgotten. Last year I copied all my CDs to my laptop so that I could listen to the music through digital means, but I rarely do, because those other devices are inconvenient and have bad sound, and earbuds hurt my ears. The other night my laptop stopped working and is apparently unsalvageable (without great cost). All that music was wiped out. The CDs live on.
Check out the Flaming Lips’ Gummy Skull. A nine pound, life size skull made out of gummy bear candy that you chew through to retrieve a USB stick containing the music, nestled in its “brain”. I don’t think it was cheap, though.
still, people seem to think 3D printing is this magical, do-anything solution to every problem. it’s good for things like prototyping, or where you only need a few pieces of something. Because it’s incredibly slow. in contrast, depending on how many cavities the die has, you can injection mold a few hundred thumb drive cases while the 3D printer is still warming up.
Even though I’m old I still occasionally like to go out to a club or a bar to hear a DJ, and it’s always a bit of a letdown to see the DJ’s got a laptop instead of vinyl/CDs. I just know the music’s going to sound a little less thumping, less “present,” less tactile. I think it’s in large rooms where you can hear this difference, particularly if you grew up hearing vinyl DJs. I sure hope mp3s keep improving in sound, but then I doubt people are going to replace all their older, more compressed mp3s with new ones.
Oof. A DJ really ought to be playing lossless music (or at least less compressed than MP3s).
there is no reason to believe this at all.
If all that’s lost is the imperceptible parts of the recording, then why bother? (What is important is for the musician to be doing any recording and mixing with lossless data, since compression artifacts will become painfully apparent after enough re-encodings. For the same reason, illustrators and graphic designers will always use lossless formats for their internal work, but may produce a final lossy JPEG version for deployment to a website or printer.)
MP3, like most lossy formats, doesn’t offer a fixed compression setting, but rather a wide range. It is possible to set the compression ratio such that the MP3 is indistinguishable (to the unaided human ear, at least) from the original recording. A good encoder nowadays will provide sensible defaults that make it easy to achieve this transparency.
In a loud bar or club, with lousy acoustics, and possibly a lousy house sound system? The sound quality of an MP3 compared to other media is probably not even noticeable in most of the environments in which a DJ would be playing.
I admit I’m out of my depth here, but I thought that, just as the difference between “normal” and high-definition video is most noticeable on a big screen, at least some of the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio is most noticeable when played loud, over big speakers in a big room.
I can believe that a DJ might play substandard audio tracks off a laptop. But I can also believe that what Ellis Aponte Jr. was hearing had nothing to do with that and was instead due to something unrelated, like a bad sound system or poor acoustics or poorly-mastered music or even purely subjective hearing what he expected to hear.
this discussion reminds me where theres a video on you tube where midge ure of ultravox is in a UK club and singing his ultravox songs and everyone thought it was a reunion…
But when the camera pans down … all the music is coming from an I pod hes just got a mic and speaker hooked up to it and its all so small its sitting on a bar stool … …
No one could figure out if it was sad or cool or both … But it led to a larger discussion that if bands and live music was going to be needed in the future at all …