Be Excellent To Each Other

I suspect that's not true - I'd imagine that lots of people with a subscription to a streaming service are paying more than they used to, because they used to pay fuck all.

Right, but that's because demand has fallen off a cliff.

Maybe I'm the exception then. I used to buy a lot of music. Both physical and digital.

Buying a CD in the early 90s used to feel really special. They were expensive and after i bought one, i barely heard anything else in the weeks after.

Now i rarely buy CDs. Both because i have so much more expenses and bills, but also because music has been devalued so much that i feel buying a cd is a waste of money. While it pains me to say, Radiohead were right.

Let’s compare that to CD sales to add some context. Random link barfed up by that site I work for, but this article suggests something like $0.50 to the band for a CD sale. Divided by, say, ten tracks is $0.05 per track; you’d have to listen to it 75 times on Spotify premium to equal the revenue-per-listen of the CD. That doesn’t seem wildly out of whack, actually. I have plenty of albums I’ve listened to that much. So that Spotify figure isn’t as shockingly low as it sound.

I think movies, TV shows, and books are counter examples. Those industries all digitised while having “tiers” of offering. A movie starts expensive in cinemas, then is available to buy on streaming or physical formats, then is available to PPV, then is available via bundled streaming services like Amazon Video or (decreasingly) Netflix. Music never managed that trick of having multiple availability and price points. Bundled streaming ate the world. Why was it different? Was it because it went first, and everyone else learned from the mistake? Is it because a movie is more of a one-off thing (how many DVDs have you owned you’ve never watched twice?) so a fragmented library isn’t an issue, whereas having two music libraries — an app for music you bought and another for music you rented — would suck? I’m not sure.

Of course, the band still gets the money if you listen to the album zero times.

The industry also assumed you'd buy the same album on mono 33.3, then upgrade to stereo, eight track, cassette, and CD, buying the same music each time.

I'm the rarest of retro peeps: I buy CDs rather than vinyl. I like having something physical.

Vinyl being ethereal somehow?

You are the smartest kind. Vynil is nice and all but gets damaged over time and to take full advantage of the analogue medium you need a pretty expensive setup.

Sure, it's close to impossible to play it with causing microscopic and accumulating damage.

Sometimes I have a hankering to listen to my favourite songs on vinyl.

So I just listen on headphones and eat a bag of popping candy. A flawless recreation.

I don't like having to faff with the player every 20 minutes.

There is something magical about how a needle moving through a series of grooves can produce sound.

On which point, I once did a tour of the Mechanical Music Museum in the Cotswolds and to see a 100 year old wax cylinder be placed into a device and produce surprisingly good sound was amazing.

More magical than shooting a chunk of metal with a laser?

Yes, in the same way that a steam locomotive is more magical than a TGV. You can look at it in operation and grasp how it does its thing.

And it’s not only the medium on which the music is provided, it’s the packaging and additional information. It was bad enough when the 12” album cover was replaced with the 5” CD cover, but now there is no packaging if you’re just downloading. Not only was the 12” cover ideal for doing justice to the cover art, but you got additional items like lyric sheets, details of exactly who played on each track, who were the engineers, producers, tape operators and even the tea boys. Yes, this info was/is often included on CD covers but it was too fucking small to read without a magnifying glass. If you download, you get fuck all except the music.

That’s not an inherent limitation of digital music formats. They could very easily come with all the extra content you want; iTunes LP was a format for exactly that. It’s just artists can’t be bothered / people don’t actually care (delete as appropriate.)

Absolutely. It’s just old farts like me who like to know which albums were cut by Porky Peckham. Kids today don’t know they’re missing that info, because they’ve never had it.

Obviously, everything were much better when I were nobbut a nipper.

But I DO like to be able to plug my iPod into the USB port in my van (I know this is old tech already, but it’s still a great innovation for someone who can remember when the first vynil 7” single players were installed in cars and cassette players hadn’t been invented) and have my whole music collection available as I careen around the country at someone else’s expense, so there is an upside.

It's old tech but still better than Bluetooth. Two years ago i had a job with a nice company car, and an USB port was also a novelty for me. After a while i started using the car's Bluetooth for convenience instead of the USB port and was appalled of how terrible the music sounded, specially compared to what comes from the speakers of my '98 ford focus.

Well, i went to read online what it's about and yes. Bluetooth is shit and compresses the music. Don't use it.

Can't make me.

BEEX MONEY SPINNING PLAN : New, zero-compression bluetooth-like protocol for Audiophiles.

Bluetooth is by design low bandwidth, so that it can be low power and your headphones etc last longer than 20 minutes.

If they care about audio quality, they'll accept having to be constantly plugged into the mains in order to experience the wonder of our lossless wireless audio protocols!

The power cable also carries hi-fi audio!

You don't need to be an audiophile to notice that Bluetooth sounds terrible. I'm certainly not an audiophile and FLAC files can go die in a fire. Give me LAME v0 mp3 any day.

But every time i see someone using bluetooth headphones on the street i get the urge to brutally roundhouse kick them. Even if it's an old man or a child.

Why?

I have bluetooth headphones that can be cabled if needed, and I really don't notice any difference when listening to them. I also have a bluetooth speaker bar (with added bluetooth subwoofer) and I don't notice any difference there either.

Maybe I have shit ears or something, but I imagine that if most people could tell the difference the various headphone manufacturers would not be so profitable.

You pretty much do. Audio over Bluetooth sounds perfectly fine to me. Wouldn't be convinced I could tell you the difference.

Bluetooth: I've not noticed the difference in various cars. Of quality, anyway - volume, yes, and battery life, boom. Enough so of the latter that I bought an AUX cable for the last rental car (which also let me use my iPod shuffle, so saving phone battery totally).

I saw a bloke walking down the street the other day with one of those bluetooth speakers that look like a pringles can on a strap around his neck, playing shitty hip-hop out loud. I really, really wanted to kick him.

Now that is roundhouse-worthy.

Also, I'm still bewildered by the new Apple wireless headphones that just hang on the wearer's head, looking like there's a tiny white robot trying to pull itself out of their skull. Bud earphones are forever falling out of my ears. With nothing attaching those to my person beyond my own ear wax, I can't imagine going any longer than a week without losing one down a drain.

I use a bluetooth dongle to stream music to my stereo from various devices. Sounds fine to me.

They have a much bigger digital blueprint without any serious improvement. Audiophiles swear by them, but maybe unless you have equipment worth of 10000€ or something, i'm not sure there's any difference.

As for bluetooth, i didn't know beforehand there was a compression issue with the technology, so i hadn't any bias. It just sounded wrong right away. Obviously some music is more affected than others. Over-compressed modern pop rock will sound equally shit anyway.

If i listen to some busy, overlayered, black-metal or post-metal or something, there's so escape that it will sound a mess over bluetooth. I do remember trying the latest Primordial album over my friends house on one of those bluetooth logitech speakers and the noise was unintelligible. It sounded like what people who don't know black metal think black metal sounds like. Even if primordial isn't that much black metal anyway.

It's also probable that some bluetooth adapters sound much worse than others, they're having to output an analog signal so I there are bound to be some differences.

Well, yeah, all of that's true, but it's horses for courses innit? If you want to make a full quality digital back-up then it's the way to go; or if you're a full on audiophile as you say. There's nothing wrong with FLAC per se, you just need to use it appropriately like anything else.

Sure, but just like RAW or TIF, people swear by them because they're lossless. I'm not going to edit the mp3 anyway, so i don't care they're lossy. I'd rather have smaller files.

Besides, some time ago i noticed there are some people that think JPG's degrade over time, even if they're not edited, as if they're a physical thing. I have the impression some people think the same about mp3.

Morons and idiots think a lot things; there's no reason to let that effect your own opinions.

I use a WiFi one, but same really.

WiFi has a far higher bandwidth.

That's why I chose it over Bluetooth. It's got a better range too.

Sure, but that would explain why you think it sounds the same.

Fair point. I have Bluetooth in the car and that sounds fine though.

Yeah, same

Then again car speakers are comparatively shit.

Having shit ears and eyes saves you a fortune on AV tech. Everything looks and sounds brilliant!

Also, really low standards for entertainment in general!

Wanna buy some cheap HDMI cables?

I say that about wine. I used to buy 2€ bottles when i was a teenager and it tasted beautifully. Lesson: Have low standards for everything.

Ah. Chateau Industriale. I have a friend who is a big adherer to that philosophy.