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Is the recorded music industry still viable?


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16 minutes ago, Norton said:

A few days ago, I was ripping a CD I bought 25 years ago. My eye wandered to the price sticker on it and I was suddenly struck by the fact that I was happily paying £14 a disc back then and probably buying 2 or  3 CDs a week ( from a super helpful high street classical store that’s been long gone now)

 

 It’s been a while since I paid anything like that for a CD or even SACD and now I’m super happy with Qobuz at £15 a month and hardly buying music at all. Maybe I’m an outlier, but I just wondered how financially sustainable the industry is with current models of music distribution?

Interesting question. My take on it is this. The record industry lived and died with the so-called “top-forty” pop music business. I don’t think it’s been “healthy” since the rock scene fragmented that model in the 1980’s. While the advent of the CD about that time gave the industry an infusion as rockers traded in their LPs for CDs of titles they already owned, the hand-writing was on the wall.

Streaming may be the final nail in that coffin, but like the buggy whip business* before it, the death will be gradual but til somebody comes-up with a business model that allows someone to continue making recordings for the streaming business that allows the recording industry to make money recording for streaming.

 

*Buggy whips became obsolete as the automobile replaced the horse as the only source of transportation other than walking and rail. But it took decades for it to go from a mainstream transportation accessory to a niche market serving historical and hobbyist needs only.

George

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New Band.

 

Record some tasty tunes.

 

Get some good press.

 

Get popular on a streaming platform.

 

Make some money with live performances.

 

Welcome to C. 21.

 

Hopefully the VIRUS will allow some live performances in the near future!?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake ~ Sayre's Law

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1 hour ago, loop7 said:

Do we know if piracy of music specifically is on a steady decline? Has it "stabilized" at a certain percentage?

 

Well, sites like Napster which were the major source of digital piracy were shut down years ago. Then Steve Jobs opened iTunes and others followed, allowing people to buy individual songs rather than complete albums. I am sure that piracy has declined significantly from its peak, but I have no data to offer regarding the degree to which it has has declined or to what extent it has "stabilized". And, of course, today we have streaming.

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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49 minutes ago, Allan F said:

Then Steve Jobs opened iTunes and others followed, allowing people to buy individual songs rather than complete albums

Allan,

how many people have you met  that have filled up their 240 GB IPOD (2007) with music from the ITunes only???
In my opinion, Mr. Job's technololgy was THE enabler for making piracy valuable to customers because you had already paid a high price to Apple and 
If you had bought 1000 songs on iTunes for a grand, you may have only used 1/200th of its capacity.
The labels made this deal for having a chance to enter into digital distribution, however at that point they paid the price of ignoring their customer base and the consumer's needs for almost 2 decades. They still suffer from their strategic faults in the CD era. YMMV
Best, DT

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1 hour ago, Allan F said:

And, of course, today we have streaming.

This is absolutely correct, imho.
There are two generations todays (teens and twens) that are not very familiar with piracy, because they have the easy access to everything they want in the cloud. If I look at my sons environment, that's looks like the majority. 
When Napster (which is, here in France, the streaming offer my teenage son uses since 3 years!) was introduced 1999, these age groups were the drivers for the misery of the music industry.

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1 minute ago, Rexp said:

Lets face it alot of digital recordings ain't worth buying, labels need to fix their product first. And even if a good recording is released most folks don't have a capable playback system. 

They have been selling us inferior product since CDs came out, and even HI-Res digital downloads aren't always the same as what was originally mixed and sent to the tape recorder (when they were actually used.)  I have found some properly mastered stuff from MFSL, and it probably exists on other crafted releases.   The standard recordings as purchased nowadays are 'junk' quality, barely good enough for top 40 FM radio.   There is still some margin against AM radio quality, but the wizards designing processing software will likely find a way to totally destroy any of the dynamics and sense of nature left over.

 

John

 

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4 hours ago, Rexp said:

Lets face it alot of digital recordings ain't worth buying, labels need to fix their product first. And even if a good recording is released most folks don't have a capable playback system. 

 

Maybe so. But these are hardly justifications for stealing them. 🙂

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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1 hour ago, Allan F said:

 

Maybe so. But these are hardly justifications for stealing them. 🙂

I agree -- it would be very good if they'd fix the nonsensical problems in the recordings though.  My guess is that the industry is below the level of being able to support and correct their libraries -- I know nothing about the economics.  I would certainly repurchase some of my library if I KNEW that the quality was better than the copy that I have -- but almost every time I have tried, I have been very disappointed.

 

I wonder if there is a business case at all for truely high quality reworked recordings.  There is a lot of 'lip-service' about quality, but I have seldom found it.

 

John

 

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4 hours ago, John Dyson said:

I wonder if there is a business case at all for truly high quality reworked recordings.  There is a lot of 'lip-service' about quality, but I have seldom found it.

 

If there is such a case, John, I suspect that it is limited to the audiophile community. You have to remember that, both historically and currently, the largest group of purchasers of music is composed of young people. Today, for the vast majority, their prime vehicle for listening to music is via their phones. While differences in the sound quality of recordings are important to you and members of this community, that is sadly not the case for those young people who have been weaned on MP3. There are exceptions of course but, IMO, not likely in sufficient numbers to generally justify reworking catalogues.

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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1 hour ago, Allan F said:

 

If there is such a case, John, I suspect that it is limited to the audiophile community. You have to remember that, both historically and currently, the largest group of purchasers of music is composed of young people. Today, for the vast majority, their prime vehicle for listening to music is via their phones. While differences in the sound quality of recordings are important to you and members of this community, that is sadly not the case for those young people who have been weaned on MP3. There are exceptions of course but, IMO, not likely in sufficient numbers to generally justify reworking catalogues.

Unfortunately, your assessment of today's teen generation's way to enjoy music is spot on.
I would tend to disagree on the younger generation as generators of value apart of paid streaming services.
I may see the generations 35+ as the major contributors to the sales of individual units of music (DL/CD+/Vinyl) in terms of value.
The 2020 IFPI report for 2019 will come End of March, the 2019 reports contains the following information, though it is not adjusted to the spendings.

image.png.1313fc41742efa929ed2ebc56f6b138d.png

https://www.ifpi.org/downloads/Music-Listening-2019.pdf

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41 minutes ago, DuckToller said:

Unfortunately, your assessment of today's teen generation's way to enjoy music is spot on.
I would tend to disagree on the younger generation as generators of value apart of paid streaming services.
I may see the generations 35+ as the major contributors to the sales of individual units of music (DL/CD+/Vinyl) in terms of value.
The 2020 IFPI report for 2019 will come End of March, the 2019 reports contains the following information, though it is not adjusted to the spendings.

https://www.ifpi.org/downloads/Music-Listening-2019.pdf

 

Perhaps I should have used the term "consumers" of music rather than "purchasers", because young people comprise the largest group of offenders when it comes to piracy. They are also the largest group likely to share or exchange music. What is particularly noteworthy from this survey is the small percentage of people who listen to music via "Hi-Fi or Turntable" as this is the group that would be most willing to pay a premium for improved recordings.

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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I don't think the percentage of folks, young or old, interested in good SQ has changed much. When I was at college in the 80's I was the only kid with a decent hifi system in my group. Blaming young kids today for the sins of the labels is just wrong. 

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9 hours ago, Rexp said:

I don't think the percentage of folks, young or old, interested in good SQ has changed much. When I was at college in the 80's I was the only kid with a decent hifi system in my group. Blaming young kids today for the sins of the labels is just wrong. 

 

With respect, IMO your personal experience in the 1980's is far too narrow a reference. When you were at college, Napster and other peer-to-peer sharing services didn't exist and the record industry was flourishing. There was no widespread piracy. Nor did listening to music in lossy formats such as MP3 exist at that time. The "loudness wars", i.e. the scourge of severely compressed pop-rock recordings, came about to cater to young people listening to music primarily on their mobile devices.

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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31 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

With respect, IMO your personal experience in the 1980's is far too narrow a reference. When you were at college, Napster and other peer-to-peer sharing services didn't exist and the record industry was flourishing. There was no widespread piracy. Nor did listening to music in lossy formats such as MP3 exist at that time. The "loudness wars", i.e. the scourge of severely compressed pop-rock recordings, came about to cater to young people listening to music primarily on their mobile devices.

Well, the issue of quality has been real since CDs came out.  Remember, when they came out -- those who had ears at all -- I mean, cared about sound quality either complained about that 'digital sound' or stood silent.  I was one of the silent ones, because the usual explaination about 'digital' being naturally inferior or immature technology was mostly wrong-headed about defects that I was hearing.  Being a moderately competent EE at the time, I knew that the problems with the 'digital sound' had little to do with 'digital technology' itself.

 

A lot of people just adjusted to the fake-digital sound, maybe a few others like me got disgusted, slowed down my purchase because I no longer could get what I wanted -- vinyl was fading fast and CDs always sucking.   About 1990 plus or minus, I was gone, started working on FreeBSD instead.

 

I guess that the few of us that industry lost because of cr*ppy sound quality didn't make any difference, but a LOT of so-called audiophiles started frustratedly 'improving' their CD sourced systems trying to get relatively REAL sound.  My guess that this garbage being sold was the start of larger scale real extremism in the audio technology upgrades.  As an engineer, I knew that no system that I could purchase would ever be able to get the 'normal' sound like what could be gotten with the old tick/pop laden vinyl.  (Just before CDs, I was also starting to imagine that one of the major constituents of vinyl in the US was sandpaper -- some was really bad sounding -- using steel belted radials for vinyl source material really hurt the sound on US vinyl also :-)).   So, we had the choice of sandpaper in the vinyl or an unexplicably damaged sound coming from CDs.

 

Now, it seems that everyone's hearing is polluted with the 'woody' vocals, swishy highs, etc of DolbyA compression --  and that is the GOOD stuff, let alone the loudness wars stuff that pushes compression well into actual severe forms of modulation/intermoduation distortions.  I frankly have real problems listening to the Judy Collins stuff coming from a friend of mine -- her voice was NEVER that woody -- thank you for aggressive EQ against DolbyA...  Whoever came up with that travesty didn't do the audio listener ANY good.   I'll bet you that even many jazz lovers have heard very few recordings that don't have swishy highs from from an 'impossible' set of high-hats -- sound like they have been brushed by a very fine paint brush -- because the sound is so soft, swishy.

 

Even now, with my much older ears, I can hear these distortions caused by this very evil scheme perpetrated on the listening public since CDs came out. 


The decoder that I put together as a side-effect of the DolbyA project -- the music can be heard closer to the way that it was mixed.   Recordings NEVER sound as good as live, even the best.  However, now the album sound can be had -- but who in the h*ll wants to use a slow, unpleasant-to-use piece of software, when the distributor should have done the clean-ups themselves.   Hi-res nowadays really means, the twisted sound that used to come from CDs is now available in slightly more accurate, but still twisted sound.

 

I feel SO bad when someone has spent perhaps $2k->10k+ on their audio systems, yet feeding that 'beautiful' system with the nonsense that has been foisted on them since the middle 1980s'.  Sure, there are a few MFSL releases, some are REALLY properly prepared for listening, but the vast majority, including HI-RES downloads are NOT good enough for a system that costs more than $500...  You cannot hear how good your system is when you are using the cr*p mastered material.  After hearing material with a bit less compression, more balanced vcoals, and a bit more normal percussion -- the raw sound coming from normal digital distributions of today becomes that 'ugly digital sound' from the '80s again.   THAT misuguided cheap errsatz decoding that could be done much faster than realtime is the culprit of that 'digital sound', and only a small percentage of the damage came from 'digital'.

 

Loud is sometimes better, but a lot of compression is seldom needed at home or for home listening.  Headphone listening, except for physically active situations can also benefit from better dynamic range.   No matter about dynamic range -- those terrible false-WOODY vocals and swishy highs really should get on the nerves of any audiophile in the normal quiet home listening situation, let alone moderately good headphones...

 

Sorry about this rant, but I really do believe that there is a market for proper quality material -- woody, sometimes almost nasal, vocals will never be sufficient for me  until I go deaf, then I won't care anyway.

 

John

 

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4 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Well, the issue of quality has been real since CDs came out.  Remember, when they came out -- those who had ears at all -- I mean, cared about sound quality either complained about that 'digital sound' or stood silent.  I was one of the silent ones, because the usual explanation about 'digital' being naturally inferior or immature technology was mostly wrong-headed about defects that I was hearing.  Being a moderately competent EE at the time, I knew that the problems with the 'digital sound' had little to do with 'digital technology' itself...

 

...Sorry about this rant, but I really do believe that there is a market for proper quality material -- woody, sometimes almost nasal, vocals will never be sufficient for me  until I go deaf, then I won't care anyway.

 

John, I don't question for a second the sincerity of your passion and beliefs. Perhaps your ears are very sensitive. However, IMO you exaggerate the situation considerably when you suggest that virtually all CD's today sound terrible. When you write that "...the vast majority, including HI-RES downloads are NOT good enough for a system that costs more than $500", IMO you lose your credibility. Of note, in your "rants" you rarely talk about the performance of an artist or musician.

 

I agree that the first CDs sounded terrible; the mastering was terrible. At the same time, most of the initial CD players on the market were incapable of producing good sound with ANY recording. Digital technology has advanced and the quality of CD playback equipment has improved tremendously over the years. To take just one example, the negative effect of jitter was virtually an unknown quantity for years. With better playback capability, many producers have created recordings that are mastered to provide vastly superior sound quality to those initially foisted on the public.

 

Every serious listener knows that the sound of live music cannot be reproduced in a home stereo system. But there are many recordings that get satisfyingly close. And there are many more that provide true musical enjoyment because they capture the essence of both the musical performance and the unique talent of the artist. One must nevertheless be selective, especially with remastered "hi res" releases.

 

I don't doubt that recordings can be improved and I admire your efforts regarding Dolby A compression. However, the "loudness wars" aside, IMO things are not nearly as bad as you proclaim. I sincerely doubt that this site would attract so many members if they shared your gloomy outlook. I also doubt that there is more than a niche market for recreating the catalogues of the major labels.

 

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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