There Is No CD Revival(dadadrummer.substack.com)

dadadrummer.substack.com

https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/there-is-no-cd-revival

200 comments

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry.

However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any time soon.

All my CDs (over 1,000 of popular/rock/metal and about 400 of classical, at the last count) are ripped in a lossless format, and on my file server, to be enjoyed in a modern way. I do dislike jewel cases, and all my CDs (and inlays etc.) have been re-homed into archival bags, which take up a lot less space. I think while CDs (and DVDs, and Blu-rays) are still being sold, they should 100% shift to carboard packaging instead of plastic.

I know I'm showing my age, but there's just something enjoyably tangible about physical media, as opposed ephemeral files stored in a cloud.

greggman34년 전

I had ~1100 CDs in 2000. Now I have close to 0. I don't even own a device I could play a CD in nor rip it. None of my 4 PCs (3 Macs, one Gaming Windows Box) have a CD (nor DVD nor Bluray) player.

Instead I have about 9000 mp3 files.

I find streaming services frustrating because their recommendation algorithm suck. I tried playing "Swing" and it gave me "Volare" by Dean Martin. (that's not Swing), I pick Prince Radio and it plays rap (Prince has no relation to rap). My mom's into Tuba Skinny so I pick Tuba Skinny radio, every song it choose was nothing like Tuba Skinny (Dixieland Jazz). And on and on. It get music similar to the artists less than 1 out of 6 times.

karmelapple4년 전

> (Prince has no relation to rap)

Prince certainly created some songs that would qualify as rap, and they were some fairly big hits:

My Name is Prince: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0g9Qkrc8nE

Sexy MF, including the rap section here: https://youtu.be/bfHsF6FKgb4?t=324

A compilation of some Prince raps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ez4iEHtAuw

browningstreet4년 전

Same... literally. About 1200 CDs in 2000, I ripped them at some point and sold them when I became a digital nomad. I have no idea where those rips are; I think I may have just liked them all on Spotify and kept a folder of obscure albums I wasn't likely to find online. But I'm not sure where that folder is.

I bounce between Spotify and Youtube Music and Apple Music. I recently got into Apple Music library curation but then I got a Tesla which supports Spotify (and Tidal, but...). So I'm back on Spotify. But Apple Music has one really nifty thing -- highlighting major tracks on albums so that album exploration can be enhanced a bit.

But honestly, my appetite for keeping up with and curating albums is waning. I wish there was a nice "cd changer" like interface to one of these services -- load up 6 albums and randomize. Queueing isn't the same.

(I'll repeat a desire I've had a long time -- playlists of albums, not tracks, with album-shuffle. So simple, yet nobody supports it).

I have a few online streaming radio stations I love -- Radio Paradise in particular. Someday I can see chucking all the "streaming service album" management and just going other-peoples-radio.

Slacker (in the Tesla) is also good enough.

nine_k4년 전

Did you notice how tracks and whole albums sometimes disappear from Spotify?

If not yet, you're in for a unpleasant surprise.

throwaway6753094년 전

As annoying as this is, at least it shows you the name of the original track but it's grayed out, as opposed to when YouTube would remove a video you wouldn't even realize it had been deleted from your playlist.

browningstreet4년 전

Yeah, I’ve noticed. I get that licensing issues drift over time, but it just means it’s not in my best interest to care a whole lot.

aidenn04년 전

FWIW you can get a USB dvd drive for under $30.

kevin_thibedeau4년 전

You can't control the quality of purchased music files. More significantly, you can't be sure that gapless playback has been encoded correctly into anything sold by the track. I continue to purchase music on CDs but they get used once while being ripped then go into storage.

Melatonic4년 전

There are places where you can buy very high quality music files without needing a physical CD.

Elidrake424년 전

> You can't control the quality of purchased music files

Sure you can, hdtracks has been around for nearly 15 years now, and even offers the same redbook data you'd find on a CD if you don't trust their FLAC encoding.

txsoftwaredev4년 전

If you can organize and manage 9k mp3 files could you not just as easily setup your own playlists on spotify?

Nadya4년 전

1. This presumes Spotify will still be in business in the next 10, 30, 50+ years.

2. This presumes 100% of the music collection is on Spotify. Personally speaking, 60%~ of the music I listen to ISN'T on Spotify.

3. This presumes music is only desired to be listened to when an available internet connection is available.

Having to shuffle my media collections around whenever a third party went out of business or pivoted was such a massive headache that it was the inspiration for just managing my own media collections locally.

justsomehnguy4년 전

Despite iTunes fans bashing me since iTunes inception the simple file structure

    Artist
        Album
    Artist
        Album
    Game OST
        Game Name
    Film OST
        Film Name

works just fine.

With WinAmp's quick jump it was a blast to navigate.

(just checked - my mp3 folder has 6231 files)

LinuxBender4년 전

This is just my own personal perspective on the matter but one could do that until the Spotify domain is gone. The mp3's will remain provided they have a habit of keeping their software backed up. I have CD's, DVD's and music files going back as far as such things existed and no internet connection is required for any of it.

whoisthemachine4년 전

There are a few good providers of lossless audio files, so you can get still get a lossless, DRM free version of your music to own forever without having to have a printed CD. The two that I frequent are:

- bandcamp.com - mostly indie, but I've actually purchased a few more "mainstream" artists from here in the last couple years. - hdtracks.com - have a wide selection, but tend to be pretty pricey.

thisisjasononhn4년 전

I'm worried about bandcamp.com after being purchased by Epic Games. BC's terms of service and privacy policy were updated to reflect this change, mostly legal ownership and related stuff, but I feel they're going to do the regular acquisition process: wait a year or so, make a detrimental change to the service, piss off a lot of people.

musicale4년 전

"Thanks for accompanying bandcamp on this incredible journey..."

cliffwarden4년 전

I was pleasantly surprised recently with Merge Records. I bought a few lps and they came with digital downloads of mp3 and flac!

prepend4년 전

I like this trend with LPs. You get a physical totem and lossless digital copies.

I bought some Peter Gabriel records and they came with a code for downloading multiple formats including huge, lossless. And the site for one wasn’t working because it was too old and I had to email someone. But an actual human responded and send me a code to the new site.

Not sure if that’s just for RealWorld or for all Geffen LPs.

I think this is a good model where you get some limited release physical world thing and then the digital version to go along.

dhosek4년 전

I think it might be just for RealWorld. They’re quite amazing when it comes to having a human being actually read emails and respond to them.

Macha4년 전

Yeah, I've moved back from being full on Spotify in the last 2-3 years, largely because of music being taken away. But I never cared much for the physical aspect of physical media, so it's drm free music from itunes/qobuz for me.

Doing similar with movies/tv but more slowly. Partly because the only legal option is ripping blurays/uhds (Need to clarify I'm not in the US), which is more hassle and also they're bulkier to store and finally there's less tv/movie content I'm inclined to rewatch. But movies/tv have the plaftform fragmentation/content going away problem even worse, and the streaming services love to try serve low bitrate content, or even refuse higher resolutions altogether if you're not using a locked down enough setup, so that's been picking up steam for me

masklinn4년 전

> - bandcamp.com - mostly indie, but I've actually purchased a few more "mainstream" artists from here in the last couple years

Sadly bandcamp has been bought by Epic, so it's unlikely to live long :(

srean4년 전

> I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me.

Precisely. The same reason I am wary of digital money. Its just too easy for the powers that be to flip a bit to make it all inaccessible. I do not trust them enough to give them that much power. They can still make things inaccessible, but they would have to put up with some inconveniences.

Mark me old school, but I like the physical cover designs, art work and well done liner notes too.

lc9er4년 전

I’m right there with you. When possible, I still buy a band’s CD. I absolutely love having a CD in hand, being able to appreciate that bands still think about album artwork.

I also find that when I commit to listening to physical media, I’m more likely to listen to the whole thing through, rather than cherry picking songs.

warner254년 전

Nobody can take them away, but the problem that I've found with with physical DVDs (I can't comment so much on CDs) is that they deteriorate after just a few years. For a while in 2010, my wife and I routinely borrowed DVDs from a library, but we gave up when it seemed like half of them were unplayable; sometimes from the beginning, sometimes freezing an hour into the movie. Over the next five years, we found that our own small collection of DVDs was becoming unplayable even though we rarely handled them. Now we have only a few DVDs left for our kids to watch in our minivan's DVD player, and I've ripped them so that I can burn new copies every year or two when the previous copies wear out. Replacing our favorites from our old collection with Amazon video purchases seemed like the best option.

goosedragons4년 전

That's weird. Are you sure wherever or however you're storing them isn't damaging them somehow? Or maybe your player is on the way out? I've played some very old discs that work just fine. I haven't had any issues with DVDs despite having a few from the early 2000s.

Library discs are another story. Those are abused to hell and back.

warner254년 전

It's a fair question, and I don't have a good answer. My best guess is the effects of heat while the discs were in moving boxes for several cross-country and overseas moves. Some of our discs looked like they were delaminated.

autoexec4년 전

writable DVDs degrade, but a typical DVD won't on its own for a long time in reasonable conditions. I suspect that over the years those library disks have been scratched to hell several times over and ave had to be buffed down to the point where it's causing problems even though they now look clean.

TacticalCoder4년 전

> Nobody can take them away, but the problem that I've found with with physical DVDs (I can't comment so much on CDs)

I do exactly like GP: I rip everything to bitperfect (and it's verifiably bitperfect, using online DBs of other people who ripped the same CDs) FLAC files but I still keep my audio CDs.

We do not care if they're unreadable: we've got the bitperfect digital files on our SSDs / servers / USB stick and whatnots.

Now of course it's not convenient if you're always on the road.

But yeah: moved to another country a few weeks ago. My trusty old CDs were in a big cardboard box!

ZetaZero4년 전

I ditched all 400+ CDs and 300+ DVDs (and some 50 LPs). They just took up space, and never got used. I've just recently paired down my book collection to 20 from 250. I just don't need all this physical stuff that I rarely use.

thisisjasononhn4년 전

The thing about CDs and LPs is that they're a store of value, similar to older books. I sold my old LPs but definitely got less than I could have, and I'm not gonna make that mistake with my CD and tape collection. Right now there's at least 10 CDs I bought that have gone up in value in the past year alone.

ryanmcbride4년 전

I do something similar. When I'm actively listening to an album I'll put on a record, if I'm driving or putting on some background music while I do chores or work, I use apple music. I know records are bulky and finicky but I like the ritual, the bigger album art, and little things like reading the liner notes and dead wax markings. I'm not really an audiophile or anything, my setup is pretty middle of the road, I just really like the ritual and the closes I've come digitally was discovering new music in the soulseek chatrooms and organizing my mp3 collection and foobar skin.

Gerito4년 전

I'm really not sure if I follow you.

Why exactly do you buy a physical medium?

Because you don't think you are able to store 1000 audio CDs loss less for the rest of your life?

I mean that's not that much of space.

You probably have other similar critical things like pictures or videos so you have to have a backup strategy for that anyway.

And what music would you have which would be so unique that in the worst case scenario you are happy that you still have those 1000 music CDs but no longer your pictures etc?

eredengrin4년 전

Just curious what are these archival bags you're talking about? I just got rid of all my jewel cases and was looking for storage for the CDs themselves, ended up just cutting my own custom dimension cardboard box but if there's good economic alternatives I'm all ears.

throwaway8943454년 전

On the one hand, you seem to (understandably) take great pride in the legal ownership of your CDs, but on the other hand, you're almost certainly breaking the law by ripping them. How do you feel about that?

I have the same conflict with DVDs/BluRay. I want to play by the rules and pay for the media I enjoy, but it's absurd that it's illegal for me to rip the content that I've lawfully purchased for my own consumption.

andjd4년 전

Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal.

With DVDs and Blu-Rays, the situation is less clear because there is a specific law against breaking DRM. However, to my knowledge, there has never been a lawsuit against a _user_ of software that lets you rip a DVD or BD, that law has only been used against companies that make or distribute the software itself. Either because of the fair-use right or plausible deniability, it's unclear whether enforcement of this provision against an individual end-user would be permissible.

bluGill4년 전

Even if it wouldn't fall under fair use because it broke DRM, I don't think the big labels want to risk a case against someone ripping for personal use only. There is too much risk that the story of the big giant trampling on the honest little guy making a backup will go viral (or anything else that would be fair use except for DRM laws). They know there are a lot of us who don't like DRM, but we don't quite have the power to change things, a few viral stories and the laws will change. (the treaties that require DRM can be renegotiated fast if there is political reason to do so)

masklinn4년 전

> Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal.

Title 17 certainly does not say that. The closest it comes to talking about the subject is by saying that copies are only allowed if consented to by the copyright owner. Space shifting and other forms of personal copies are at best a gray area with little case law to work off of.

layer84년 전

Ripping CDs for your own personal use is not illegal, as CDs have no copy protection mechanism that you would be circumventing.

Jaruzel4년 전

Unfortunately here in the UK that isn't true. It's technically illegal. See my other comment in the thread about it.

layer84년 전

Ah, I didn’t know, that’s really mental.

throwaway8943454년 전

Oh, I didn't realize CDs didn't have copy protection? Why would they not? From the RIAA's perspective, isn't that just a way to double charge customers like the MPAA does?

i80and4년 전

There were attempts, but audio CDs were specced in 1980, and nobody was ever able to sell breaking compatibility with the existing (substantial) CD player ecosystem.

There's a summary of the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_and_DVD_copy_prot...

simondotau4년 전

It seems counter-intuitive, but a red book audio CD really is more akin to a vinyl record than a CD-ROM. The laser locks onto a groove and throws bits directly at a few chips that perform error correction and convert the signal to analog with an absolutely minuscule amount of buffering. Obfuscation isn’t even on the table, let alone encryption.

andjd4년 전

CDs are older than DVDs, and when they were released there would have been no digital way to copy them. It makes sense that the DRM wouldn't have occurred to the developers of the format.

sumtechguy4년 전

Also at the time they came out 640MB?! Who has that much money to keep on hard drive let alone the size of said drive. Remember when this was spec'd out 64k was considered a huge amount of memory. A box of floppies would cost 30-40+ dollars. That same box might hold 0.5 to 2 MP3s depending on format size and the song. That obviously dropped off over the years. But just ripping them was not even really feasible. Never mind a robust enough CPU to play something like a MP3. People would copy CD's over to tape. But that was considered acceptable as the gen loss was enough for the owners to not like it much but accept it.

digisign4년 전

I remember asking the HS computing teacher in the late 80s if CDs could be copied to a computer, since they were both digital. He said... hmm, it should be theoretically possible. Drives for PCs would not come out affordably until the early/mid 90s.

throwaway8943454년 전

CDs are just digital storage media. You could just layer DRM on top of it, but you'd have to get the whole ecosystem to move. And I have to think they probably would if the RIAA insisted.

tshaddox4년 전

In the United States there are a number of exceptions to the ban on circumventing DRM:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...

[deleted]4년 전

kevin_thibedeau4년 전

CDs do have a copy protection mechanism in the form of flags in the subcode metadata that permit 0, 1, or unlimited copies to be made. It is used by standalone audio CD recorders to implement SCMS and prevent multi-generational copies. Everything else ignores it.

TacticalCoder4년 전

> On the one hand, you seem to (understandably) take great pride in the legal ownership of your CDs, but on the other hand, you're almost certainly breaking the law by ripping them. How do you feel about that?

It's totally legal both in the US and the EU (apparently not in the UK though).

Now I do very probably, without knowing it, break some law(s) every single freaking day because "the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws". And I feel exactly zero guilt about that.

usefulcat4년 전

If you're ripping CDs that you purchased and only for your own personal use (i.e. not distributing the ripped files), then IMO the far more relevant question is an ethical one: does what you're doing in any way harm the artists or the copyright holders of the works you are copying?

throwaway8943454년 전

No, no one is harmed when one uses content for which one has an appropriate license. Of course, some people might make less money, but that doesn't constitute "harm" in any meaningful way (they also make less money than if I donated my entire disposable income, but no one would argue that this is "harm" [although I don't want to give the RIAA any ideas...]) and indeed they should be pricing that into the sales of any given media (it's already insane that we give copyrights for 70 years after the lifetime of the artist).

On the other hand, the DMCA harms me by limiting my right to use content for which I legally hold the appropriate license.

thisisjasononhn4년 전

>I think while CDs (and DVDs, and Blu-rays) are still being sold, they should 100% shift to carboard packaging instead of plastic.

Hard disagree.

I sold my large collection of records recently, for 2 reasons.

1. Because I realized I hadn't listened to effectively any of them in the past 5 years, across 2 house moves. I'm leaving on travel soon and may work abroad in the future, so better to liquidate now than later.

2. My entire collection had that "vintage" stink, aka mold/mildew/etc. I had mixed old and new records together, which effectively tainted the outer cardboard of the records. This caused me a serious amount of stress and anxiety (which is a separate problem to resolve) to the extent that I rushed selling the records to a record store (which I have minor regrets about, blog write-up to come on this all).

This all to say, while I really do dislike how plastic dependent we've become in society, from everything like fruits and plastic bags, I LOVE that CDs come in jewelcases for 3 distinct reasons

1. The plastic CD case protects the CD, and the inner paper booklet, from damage and other external factors, if stored properly. Also, cardboard cases for CDs often don't include inner booklet notes, which is disappointing. Cardboard CD cases are less resilient to damage as well.

I personally need some plastic archival bags (and if you can recommend some, please do), because I want to avoid my CDs coming to a similar fate as my vinyl. I found a few that caught a bit of a stink recently, and hurriedly cleaned the exterior cases (another benefit).

2. The plastic cases help with management and organization of the physical collection very easily, as every case is effectively the same size. While there are some slimline CD releases, and of course cardboard or double/deluxe CD releases, for single CD releases they all conform to the same size, making require space estimates and stacking very convenient to do.

3. Extremely easy to replace if damaged, dirty, smelly, etc. You can buy new blank CD cases so easily, and if you can't find an exact replacement, similar cases could be found. This is one reason I dislike vinyl cardboard covers: if the cover is damaged or stinky/moldy/etc enough, you're screwed. Throw it out, but good luck finding just a cover replacement. Whereas with a CD, you can get a digital copy of the inner booklet and CD one way or another, and remake a new physical copy if desired. Obviously, that's done for personal consumption only.

By extension of that last note, I want to say I love CDs for the fact that they're robust, reliable, DRM-free (excluding previous cases), high quality, and identical every play.

/end my input /start personal rant

Having the power to own your media physically and digitally is another benefit (by ripping the CD). I also love that many CDs come with the inner booklet which often contains interviews, lyrics, bonus photos, or other fun content that wouldn't be found in a vinyl release. I do admit that vinyl releases are beautiful with the large print 12" covers, but how many records do you realistically prop up on a shelf somewhere?

We moved off VHS tapes to DVD, and Blu-Ray has been around for years now, and yet despite that DVDs are still produced. I don't forsee any kind of death of CD or DVD in the near future, especially as more streaming services pull back or move media in and out of their catalogues; increasing costs don't help either.

Also separate side note, the case for a vinyl record being an involved process I agree with. I would say that limiting CD purchases per month could be viewed in a similar fashion, buying 1-3 a month and listening to each through.

Keep on collecting!

epakai4년 전

I've been using these 6x9 inch clear poly bags with adhesive seal: https://amazon.com/gp/product/B07X8C58BK Amazon ID: B07X8C58BK

I still use the paper sleeve with window for individual discs. Then bag those + paper inserts. I like those particular bags because they're consistently thin unlike zip-lock style bags so they pack nicely, and they fit most DVD paper inserts/cardboard sleeves except some multi-disc sets.

eredengrin4년 전

I'm currently in the process of getting rid of all my plastic jewel cases and agree with op, it should not be the default, there's better ways. If there's a market for plastic they could just sell collector's editions or package it in such a way that it's easy to use your own jewel cases, but I'd prefer a less wasteful default. Steelbook blu rays are on the right track in the collectables regard although they still use more plastic on the inside than I'd like.

thisisjasononhn4년 전

What are you using instead of plastic jewel cases? I just really can't see any alternative that's as safe, reliable, and easy to replace.

coldtea4년 전

>I don’t think any of the writers or outlets publishing these headlines are out to mislead. But none of them seem to have consulted anyone actually trying to sell CDs, either

Nobody even bothered to read the original source report, much less make sense of it, or even gave the article they wrote a minute's thought. They saw the story somewhere else (perhaps got it from a wire service too), and rewrote it just enough to appear as an original article.

They could not care less about the content of the article, or what they were reporting. It's just another thing to post within a day to make the meagre salary they're paid, or to boost one's BS blog.

Eric_WVGG4년 전

You're being a little harsh, but essentially correct.

I worked at a newspaper for about five years, even wrote a weekly column for a couple. Lemme tell you, coming up with something interesting to say every week is really hard.

"CD sales are up a tick? Oh, something to write about, which incidentally is my job, thank god." That's it.

iamdbtoo4년 전

This is something that frustrates me about large news/content sites. So much of it reads like it was written because someone needed to write something and not because this particular thing needed to be said.

Crabber4년 전

I realized a while ago that a good 90%+ of news stories are about a) things that affect my life in 0 way whatsoever and b) things that I have absolutely no control over.

I thought, if something fits these two criteria then what exactly is the point in me spending time reading about it? So I no longer read the news.

dusted4년 전

Many times, buying the CD and ripping it to FLAC* is the only way to legally acquire* music for use with your computer.

* It must be lossless and high quality.

* It must work offline.

oofabz4년 전

That used to be true, but these days there are many sites selling legal FLAC downloads, like HDtracks, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Bleep.

bigiain4년 전

While that's true, those don't come close too having the range of music I'd like to own.

spacexsucks4년 전

With streaming, you own nothing

slothtrop4년 전

Chances are he isn't streaming it either if he can't find legal downloads.

_Algernon_4년 전

Only having experience with HDtracks, they don't really have much. Sure they have the most popular stuff for the most part but I often find that albums are missing for an artist or entire artists are missing. Not sure if it is a geographic restriction or if its like that everywhere.

Semaphor4년 전

> Sure they have the most popular stuff

That sounds like you need to try bandcamp, because they are missing the most popular stuff ;)

Cockbrand4년 전

Bandcamp really is a treasure trove for finding releases of established and new independent artists. It seems that their business model is quite fair towards artists as well. It also seems that their acquisition by Epic games hasn't negatively affected them so far.

[Edit]: And they offer all downloads I've encountered so far in several lossy and lossless formats, including FLAC and WAV

Semaphor4년 전

Pretty much every metal band I discover, nowadays, is on bandcamp. I’m at 75 albums* and growing :) I really hope Epic won’t ruin it.

*: Mostly albums, some few are EPs or single tracks

slothtrop4년 전

The acquisition is still quite fresh. I'm not looking forward to the policy changes once they do roll out.

chrisseaton4년 전

Apple Music and iTunes are lossless, high quality (often higher than a CD as they have multi-channel masters) and work offline, for example.

iggldiggl4년 전

> iTunes [is] lossless

Is it? As far as I know, lossless is only offered for the Apple Music streaming service, but not for downloads from the iTunes store, which remain as 256K AAC files.

pwthornton4년 전

This may be semantics, and I am not sure what counts as Apple Music versus iTunes these days, but you can download all files for offline listening in Apple Music. I assume if you can download a lossless file from Apple Music that you can also buy that same file in the iTunes store and then download it.

They both use the same app for playback, so this is a tad confusing.

iggldiggl4년 전

Yes, but AFAIK things you download via your Apple Music subscription are still DRM-protected and can only be listened to as long as your subscription remains active.

Whereas the iTunes store downloads are a one time-purchase and have no DRM, so they're yours to keep.

z3c04년 전

Do you retain ownership of the files upon cancelling your membership? If not, I wouldn't consider that "acquiring" so much as "borrowing".

zekica4년 전

You do. They have some kind of a watermark or metadata specific to your copy but don't have DRM.

ubercow134년 전

Only for iTunes ones, not Apple Music.

z3c04년 전

Nice! It's about time. Too bad they spent almost two decades doing the opposite, or I'd still have my account.

pwdisswordfish04년 전

iTunes music has been DRM free since 2009 (with some exceptions, probably).

z3c04년 전

Was that retroactively applied? Because my music from pre-2009 remained DRM'd, but maybe I just needed to re-download them. On top of that, it was all AAC, and I regularly had to convert the files to be usable anywhere but Apple's products. It became such a chore, that I gave up on the Apple music ecosystem entirely, and I don't really have any regrets about it.

mschuster914년 전

VLC has supported AAC from at least 2006 onwards [1]. Yeah conversion has always been a pain in the butt but back in the time you had to convert between everything all the time anyway (the nastiest example being wma-based devices like the Zune).

[1] https://wiki.videolan.org/index.php?title=Advanced_Audio_Cod...

leveraction4년 전

Same here. I had 2 or 3 ipods back in the day and loved it although they had a tendency to fail on me. Eventually, I decided to remove my paid-for downloads off of my ipod. That is when I discovered Apple's DRM and the fact that iTunes was a totally closed universe. I had to abandon all my tunes and I was very mad. That was maybe 2007ish? I have not owned another Apple product of any kind since. They lost me for life not that it seems to have hurt them any.

moffkalast4년 전

Look at that subtle off-white metadata. Oh my god, it even has a watermark.

crossroadsguy4년 전

Just the right amount of restriction. It just works.

prvc4년 전

The problem is the available library, and also, the need to convert to FLAC and re-tag for proper archival is no improvement over CDs.

pbhjpbhj4년 전

FYI not this format shifting was legal in the UK but was made illegal again (a few years back), seemingly at the request of media companies.

Programmes like iTunes appear to be unlawful as they enable and encourage this infringement.

UK copyright law isn't fit for it's alleged purpose.

kwhitefoot4년 전

> UK copyright law isn't fit for it's alleged purpose.

This is true of copyright law everywhere.

andjd4년 전

Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one? At that bitrate, the AAC file is lossy in the sense that you can't recreate a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the original, but most humans shouldn't hear any difference.

A decent proxy to know that this is true is that at those bitrates, a FLAC file is often smaller than the AAC one. Yes, this makes you wonder why you'd want to use an lossy format instead of the lossless one if you have the choice ... but the point is that you'll probably have just as good an experience with a high-bitrate lossy-encoded file.

dmonitor4년 전

That's also dependent on your headphones. I might have shitty earbuds today, but in the future when I might have 3D "puts the sound directly into your brain" phones, I might tell the difference

masklinn4년 전

> That's also dependent on your headphones.

It's not.

Melatonic4년 전

The advantage of storing in FLAC though is that if you do want to encode to a more lossy format later you are not going to make the file worse than if you were to originally go from say .wav to mp3. Or if you wanted to manipulate the file later for use in a movie or something. Given that tons of players do FLAC these days and storage is relatively cheap I don't really see any advantage to using AAC.

masklinn4년 전

> storage is relatively cheap

Server storage is relatively cheap, mobile storage is a different kettle of fish, and even with a lot of storage, if you have a large music collection it's much easier to blow way past with FLAC as it's at least an order of magnitude larger than even high-quality lossy tracks. I can't put my entire collection on my phone even after having converted it to a lossy format, putting the lossless masters is plain not an option.

And since conversion is easy to do, and to automate, really the only reason to put lossless tracks on a device other than the storage server where they live is sheer laziness.

Melatonic4년 전

Thats sort of exactly what I was talking about - keep your FLAC files on a desktop at home and then compress as needed for a phone

masklinn4년 전

> Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one?

That's irrelevant, FLAC is an archival format. If you rip a CD, it makes perfect sense to rip it to flac in order to have no data loss whatsoever, and be able to fork it off to whatever lossy format is de rigueur for your new device. If you rip to a lossy format, then each copies will accumulate approximations from the different codec's perceptual models, especially if you keep deleting the previous copy and only keep the new one.

I don't put FLAC files on my phone, it takes way too much space, and the phone doesn't support it anyway. The phone gets AAC conversions of the "master" FLAC files.

toastedwedge4년 전

I know thit is about personal entertainment value, but to hopefully add a different perspective: FLAC means being able to use it for mixing/mastering in DJ sets or compilations due to losslessness.

Besides, the quality of 256 VBR won't be the same as 256 CBR, but with FLAC, there's only different compression sizes.

danjc4년 전

Came here to make this observation. Is this what the ethical DJ would do?

Adjacent question: what’s the legally correct way to license music for public use (e.g. DJ set)

Sebb7674년 전

You'd probably buy the music as a download file from an official store (like Beatport). In fact, a lot of good electronic stuff on there never saw a physical release, so ripping CDs is not even an option.

Licensing probably depends on your country. In Germany, you need to register with GEMA and pay a fee depending on the size of your audience.

dhosek4년 전

>Licensing probably depends on your country.

Yep. In the US, it’s the venue that is responsible for the license. Technically, even playing a radio station in a public space requires that license, which is why most stores that have background music pay for Muzak or some similar service which bundles all the licensing costs along with the music stream itself. The license covers not just pre-recorded music but live music. I remember reading an account of a cover band which switched to playing originals because their venue didn’t have the licensing for them to play covers.

CrlNvl4년 전

Qobuz allows you to download High Fidelity music without any DRM

omnicognate4년 전

Yeah, there are lots of places selling DRM free, lossless music. However, between the lot of them they fall far short of comprehensive coverage and I frequently have to buy and rip CDs to get the music I want.

iggldiggl4년 전

And occasionally you run into weird issues like where all online offerings are missing the pre-gap material from the CD, i.e. the bits between the tracks that are shown with a negative timestamp and which are only played when you play the disc straight through without hopping between different tracks.

Plus liner notes are often omitted online, and occasionally that, too, is a little bit of a shame, even if the main thing is of course the music itself.

charcircuit4년 전

Making a COPY from the CD to your computer is not legal us unless you have a license that allows you to do so.

rob744년 전

IANAL, but ripping a CD that you own and then using that digital music yourself is legal - providing the songs to someone else (who hasn't paid for the album) isn't.

webmaven4년 전

> IANAL, but ripping a CD that you own and then using that digital music yourself is legal - providing the songs to someone else (who hasn't paid for the album) isn't.

I am also not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that providing files you ripped to someone else ISN'T legal, even if they"ve paid for the album:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.....

needle04년 전

Of relevance: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

webmaven4년 전

Oh my. Fruit of the Poisoned Tree gone amok.

Thanks for sharing that.

boomboomsubban4년 전

It depends. If the CD has DRM, bypassing that DRM for a personal copy is a crime. If there's no DRM, I believe creating a personal copy is acceptable.

ChrisLomont4년 전

The CD format doesn't support DRM. Extremely few CDs tried to fiddle to add it by adding errors, but modern readers aren't stopped from reading the audio.

CDs are pure audio data with error correction.

boomboomsubban4년 전

There's the whole Sony rootkit fiasco that shows that record labels have tried to put DRM on CD's. I have no idea how many continued to try, but if they did bypassing it is a crime, even if it's trivial to bypass. The DMCA is dumb.

layer84년 전

You can always play back the CD in a CD player with digital audio out and record the digital signal using an appropriate 44.1 kHz capable sound card, resulting in more or less a bit-perfect copy. That’s not bypassing DRM, because you’re just using regular consumer audio devices for their intended purpose.

ChrisLomont4년 전

That was adding an executable for a PC, it had nothing to do with the audio, which was and is still perfectly copyable.

kevin_thibedeau4년 전

CDs do have copy protection flags. This is unrelated to the intentionally corrupt pressed discs meant to subvert CD-R recorders.

ChrisLomont4년 전

And it's so difficult to find any hardware anywhere that respects that flag that hacker forums are filled with questions asking if anyone ever saw such a device.

Every modern copy or backup program ignores it, and it looks like none ever used it.

kevin_thibedeau4년 전

It was used on standalone audio recorders.

ChrisLomont4년 전

Yep, very few, and likely nothing anyone is using now to copy/backup CDs with.

In forums where people look for such things out of curiosity people mention they existed, but I've not yet found someone that owns one to play with.

And zero of them stopped the analog hole on those old devices.

Now, as to the actual bit(s). There were two bits, one said copyrighted work, one said is this a copy. Almost all CDs shipped with the copyright bit set and the "is a copy" bit set to 0. This meant you can make one copy of the CD (by law). The copy should have the "is a copy" bit set, meaning no more copies of the copied disc.

This means you can actually copy the original CD as many times as you want, since it always looked like an original, hence copyable.

Remember Sony hardware sold an order of magnitude more in value than Sony music :)

Again, a non-issue. To recap:

1. Very few CDs even bothered to set the bits. 2. None (?) set both bits, meaning you can copy any original CD, even with bit respecting hardware. 3. The bit(s) in no way changed the audio. 4. No copy software on PC I have ever heard of even looked at the bit. 5. Very few pieces of hardware respected the bit.

Did I miss anything?

pbhjpbhj4년 전

Depends on your jurisdiction.

bloak4년 전

You say that, but other people say the opposite. I have no idea who's right. If you happen to have a link to a detailed legal analysis, with references, feel free to post it. I don't promise to read it myself but probably someone reading this is sufficiently interested in copyright law to read further.

Beltalowda4년 전

It depends on the jurisdiction.

I don't know what the status is in the US, but copies for personal use are legal in the Netherlands. In fact, you actually pay a "private copying levy" for most devices capable of storing media (blank CDs, hard drives, phones, etc.)

Looks like there's something similar in a number of other European countries, but I don't know the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

Jaruzel4년 전

Here in the UK, it's currently illegal - the High Court ruled in favour of the Musicians Union back 2015, and it's yet to be overturned (again).

The distinction is, that while it's NOT illegal to copy a CD to another format, it IS illegal to make a copy of something that has someone else's copyright on it, be it music, spoken word, written documents, videos or photos etc.

judysjacket4년 전

>it IS illegal to make a copy of something that has someone else's copyright on it

That can't be true.

It would mean doing backups are effectively illegal (can only backup your own files, not programs or the OS or any other files not created by oneself)

Jaruzel4년 전

Unfortunately it is true.

Explained in the last paragraph of this section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping#United_Kingdom

michaelmrose4년 전

For practical purposes the legality of ripping ones one own legally acquired cds is meaningless because it is impossible that one should face enforcement regardless of legality. A good argument could be had that in the US it is fair use however its hard to establish the legality given that in nearly 40 years in the US nobody has ever insofar as I'm able to discern ever had action taken against them solely for copying CDs to a computer or device for personal use.

DVDs are more complicated as tools to remove DRM are illegal under the DMCA.

There are 100 different jurisdictions and while the law is different the practical situation is the same. Who is exactly going to police you copying your own cds in your own home? How is bob from bob's records to discover you have copied it? One should have to convince congress to require Operating systems to rat you out to bob then convince users to use such systems.

throwaway0x7E64년 전

they wouldn't go after nobodies, that's true. but if you're an inconvenient person for the powers that be, you may very well have the book get thrown at you.

michaelmrose4년 전

Why hasn't this happened in decades?

pbhjpbhj4년 전

In the UK under RIPA some authority could get records from your ISP of accesses to a CD info download system. Then they can ask that service for the list of track titles. As copyright is tort, the balance of probabilities is then that you infringed copyright.

Doesn't quite make sense, as copyright is tort, but there are police departments devoted to court enforcement. I'd be wary.

Not saying it will happen, but seems easy to catch a lot of people with the draconian powers and laws of UK.

michaelmrose4년 전

So we start with a wronged party like a copyright owner. They ask a service that is likely in a different country for all the info on the people who looked up metadata of ip they own and don't get laughed out of court.

Then they demand that isps all over the country give names and addresses of people all over the UK that broke no law and did no wrong in hopes of conducting a fishing expedition and don't get laughed out of court.

Now they know who pays the bill for each home network but have no idea who actually downloaded the perfectly legal metadata and no way whatsoever to correlate the data of unknown users of the data with potentially unnamed buyers who legally purchased mp3s from multiple channels like Apple but you think a judge is going to let you paw through every computer in someone's home because you think they probably ripped a cd instead of downloading it on itunes 6 years ago on a different computer at a different address.

Does this sound real?

nybble414년 전

> So we start with a wronged party like a copyright owner.

"Wronged" implies that they were harmed in some way. A better term would be "offended". They discovered, indirectly, that someone else was doing something they don't approve of—which otherwise doesn't affect them at all—and they want it stopped by any means necessary, even though this will just make the other person worse off without materially improving their own situation.

daveoc644년 전

Or you could have just put the CD into your PC to listen to the music, and it downloaded the metadata for on-screen use only?

matheusmoreira4년 전

My country has a law that says I have the right to make backups for personal use.

brazzy4년 전

That depends very much on where you live. It is legal in Canada and most of Europe.

mtts4년 전

  The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income

Why? That ship has sailed. In 2022, as in 1922, 1822, 1722 etc musicians will have to earn their income by playing live.

marginalia_nu4년 전

The thing with CDs today is that they are merchandise, as with cassettes or vinyl or whatever. You don't buy them to listen to them, but to have them.

I think this understanding is crucially necessary for musicians hopping on this "trend". Like they could make action figures or mood rings or whatever. What the fans want are buying is a tangible thing, a keepsake.

So first they need an actual fan-base that may be interested in a keepsake, and the keepsake should be worthwhile, feel luxurious. Like it doesn't need to actually be expensive, but it shouldn't feel cheap.

l724년 전

Agreed. I think this is why vinyl has taken off. It is much more physical then a CD. The artwork is larger and it just feels more personable. You have to be much more careful with it, and listening to it is a bigger investment. And a collection of vinyl looks great.

I think a similar trend has happened with books. Certainly, e-readers are awesome. But for some things, you really want to have a physical copy. And in that case, a hardback is way better than a paperback. It is a long term keepsake and looks nice on your shelf.

I think for many people, their collection of music, books, or other items allows them to show off their personality to their guests. When I go to someone's house, if they have a large bookshelf, I love to look through it to get an idea of their interests. It can be great conversation starters. You can't do that with purely digital media.

RajT884년 전

The technical merits of vinyl are dubious.

But it is undeniably the coolest way to listen to music. It takes effort, it is an event, a ritual executed with great care.

kevin_thibedeau4년 전

May as well get your coolness with cylinder recordings.

RajT884년 전

That is a thing you can do too:

https://tmbw.net/wiki/Wax_Cylinder_Recordings

dfxm124년 전

CDs (and tapes and records) have some Hollywood accounting [0] around them, just as movies do. I'm sure the band would much rather you buy their t-shirt or poster or something else that their label had nothing to do with. All this depends on the band and their deal, of course, but just as well, they'll probably make the most profit off a t-shirt anyway.

0 - https://www.techdirt.com/2010/07/13/riaa-accounting-why-even...

slothtrop4년 전

I think what people take for granted is this was true even before digital piracy. Most exposure to music was through radio play, and cassette copying was fairly popular from 80s onward. Rock wasn't dead yet (or at any rate, it was far more alive) and concert-going was (I think?) bigger among youth in general. Owning records was always an expensive thing and the majority of music fans didn't try to go broke buying every little thing they enjoyed.

Which brings to mind, I always wonder how pop artists are reaching platinum sales today, because their physical media has zero prestige to most collectors. Is it from radio stations and DJs or something? The figures just don't make sense to me. Pop music fans use Spotify or the radio, by and large.

l724년 전

But there are plenty of genres and artists (1-person bands recording in their basement) that don't make sense live or aren't able to perform live.

There is a big difference between a musician and a performer. The bands that are both certainly have the biggest advantage, but we shouldn't discredit people who are just making music.

matheusmoreira4년 전

Why can't they make a patreon?

makeitdouble4년 전

As a general trend, I’d expect people to not return to mass events (theaters, concerts etc.) in the same numbers as before.

It started before covid, so I think live events won’t be much of a revenue source in the future, except for a select few artists who will attract those still enjoying the crowd experience.

I kinda hope memberships programs and other direct artist/fan settings come to fill that gap at a larger scale.

matheusmoreira4년 전

> musicians will have to earn their income by playing live

Yes!! This is how it's supposed to be. The music itself is not scarce, it's the artists who are scarce. Society doesn't need this copyright rent seeking system. If artists want to make money, they should need to actually perform.

marcodiego4년 전

I think the last recent time musicians had to play live often to get income was during the peak of file sharing networks. Now that everybody is willing to pay for services like spotify to listen to their music, live concerts are becoming rare again.

chha4년 전

Musicians need to play live now more than ever to make an income; the sale of physical records are going downwards and have been doing so for the past 20 years. [1]

Unless you happen to be amongst the absolute minority of people having a hit single on your hand or a popular back catalogue, you can't expect to make a lot of money from online streams. Several sources [2][3] report that Spotify pays around 0.003 USD per stream on average. Supposedly your musics share of everything streamed in a given month will also impact the actual payout.

[1] - https://gloriousnoise.com/2022/data-2021-total-music-sales-a... [2] - https://subjekt.no/2020/08/09/som-musiker-er-det-nesten-umul... (Norwegian) [3] - https://www.orpheusaudioacademy.com/spotify-pay/

xeromal4년 전

Covid has shown that is now always possible for those artists.

InfiniteRand4년 전

This is sort of like how Disney makes more profits from theme parks than from its media, but the media serves as advertisement for the theme parks

z3c04년 전

This take seems very slanted towards new CD sales.

I listen to a lot of underground music (namely black metal, hip-hop, and the like), and not only are CD's selling out regularly, so are cassettes. Once they've sold out, they hit Discogs and Ebay at severe markups that people are happy to pay. Several CD's that I've bought in the past few years have compounded many times over in value, as the supply can be very limited but the demand isn't diminishing. The spread on my collection per Discogs ranges from $800-$2500. That lower bound has been continuous, but I saw the upper bound increase by $1000 in just the past two years.

It's also not uncommon for me to go hunting for CD's that originally sold in the 80/90/00's, so as to get around "re-masters" that undo the lo-fi sound underground music fans enjoy so much. I doubt my copy of The Cramps' first compilation* is going to reflect in last year's CD sales.

I'm aware that this is a niche interest, but it's a growing niche. There are a few subreddits that I've followed in the past (/r/CDCollectors and /r/CDKvlt), and in my time there, I saw those groups grow considerably.

There IS a CD Revival, if you look in the right place.

aidenn04년 전

> It's also not uncommon for me to go hunting for CD's that originally sold in the 80/90/00's, so as to get around "re-masters" that undo the lo-fi sound underground music fans enjoy so much. I doubt my copy of The Cramps' first compilation* is going to reflect in last year's CD sales.

I'm into pop and rock, but it's not uncommon for me to go hunting for CD's that originally sold before 1996 or so to get around "re-masters" that compress the life out of the music and undo the hi-fi sound that I enjoy so much.

softwarebeware4년 전

> This take seems very slanted towards new CD sales.

Yeah, because the articles that it's commenting on are about the supposed "increase in sales" of CDs this past year. Which only includes releases in 2021.

Tao3324년 전

> Once they've sold out, they hit Discogs and Ebay at severe markups that people are happy to pay.

No one is happy to pay a scalper.

thisisjasononhn4년 전

I'm not happy paying scalpers, but I WILL pay a Discogs merchant to sell me specific region-locked media (for example, Japan-only releases which often feature special remasters, or often bonus tracks and extra media). The cost of buying from them is often the same or slightly above paying through the real site (plus translation headaches), and cost of a reshipper.

softwarebeware4년 전

There's two separate things:

1. The "music industry" which is a carefully controlled mafia of an elite few, yet which consumes as much oxygen as possible in popular media.

2. Every other musician and artist.

The best thing you can do is go around the corner and hear a local band. Go to their merch table at the show and buy the cassette or vinyl they have for sale.

ufmace4년 전

Aside from CDs themselves, has anyone noticed a severe lack of CD players these days?

I might be off-base, but as far as I can tell, basically no laptop computer and rather few desktops come with any type of optical media drives these days. Haven't shopped for a car in a while, but I don't think I've seen one with a CD player either. Most music seems to be consumed on phones and tablets, where it's basically impossible to have a CD drive. I would expect you can still buy standalone home theater-style CD players, but I bet the sales of them are pretty low these days.

The only reason I have a optical media reader at all is that I homebuild my PC. I bought an optical drive for I think like $20 or something like a decade ago on my first build, and just kept the drive and case through multiple upgrades. If I did a new build from scratch tomorrow, I'm not sure I'd bother. My current drive, the door doesn't open half the time, and I haven't bothered to try and fix or replace it, since I basically never use it.

TacticalCoder4년 전

> Haven't shopped for a car in a while, but I don't think I've seen one with a CD player either.

They're still somehow around (don't know for how long). A friend of mine bought a MY2020 BMW and the original owner specc'ed a CD player.

My car also still has one (MY2013).

I care about my physical CD collection but I don't care about actually putting them in a CD player: as long as I can rip them to FLAC, I'm happy. Virtually any el cheapo ($20 USD or so) desktop DVD reader/writer will work to rip CDs. And these are still selling everywhere.

antifa4년 전

> I care about my physical CD collection but I don't care about actually putting them in a CD player:

Indeed, get into an accident or hit a rare bump and now your CD is scratched.

Not sure if this would still happen in 2022, but at the least back in the day an entire music collection of original CDs was worth stealing in a car break in.

Only put easily replacable copies in your car.

bombcar4년 전

The baseline radio in many cars is an AM/FM with Bluetooth or Audio in. CD is usually still provided with the upgraded package, but many people don’t have stereos at all anymore - let alone one with a CD player.

throw0101a4년 전

The author, Damon Krukowski, recently did an interesting interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots about streaming music services and basically how they screw over small time musicians:

> Earlier this year, there was a growing movement among some musicians (lead by Neil Young) to remove music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. And it has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Damon Krukowsky, the former drummer of the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and one half of the duo Damon and Naomi. He gives us his perception of industry economics, and explains his frustration as an independent musician with how the service works.

* https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski

pipeline_peak4년 전

I think journalists are forgetting that vinyl has a distinct sound, also to millennials, they are simply cool as fuck. They come in giant sleeves you can hang in your wall, bookshelf. CDs are just burned digital data. Maybe someday they’ll gain a retro appeal, but for now they have this ugly recursive consumer status. They’re reminiscent of the dial up era where you had no choice but to compress to MP3 to fit on your 2gb SanDisc player.

To me, CDs were always a burden. We’ve just been fortunate enough to have larger bandwidths and more storage to do away with them.

I get the appeal of box art, photos, and lyric sheets, but who wants to put up with changing discs and physical conditions like scratches and finger prints?

>They can’t take ‘em away from me!

Same applies to local storage

dehrmann4년 전

> vinyl has a distinct sound

Aside from the cracks and pops, it's because it's mastered that way because of limitations of vinyl. But I agree that vinyl makes sense as the last physical medium because the playback technology is so simple and the covers make them large enough to be statement pieces.

NoSorryCannot4년 전

And jewel cases were and are garbage.

pipeline_peak4년 전

Useless cracked cases, mechanically shrunk plastic wrap. It truly must've felt like the dead end of physical media.

theshrike794년 전

If I'm buying physical media in 2022 that I actually need to find from a shelf and put into a player it either needs to be of higher quality than the digital option or have something else going for it.

Thus, it's LP's for music in my case. The cover art alone is worth it.

For movies and TV, I have the cream of the crop on physical Bluray or DVD, the ones that I want to see even if there is a license pissing contest between streaming services and rights holders going on.

The rest I just either stream or buy digitally. 3.99€ for a digital movie is worth it for me so I don't have to drive to my storage unit and dig through 20 boxes of old DVDs to find my copy of Stardust to show my kids =)

rob744년 전

Ok, I guess the "something else going for it" differs from person to person. I grew up with LPs too, but I don't have a lot of nostalgia for them. All the ceremony of carefully taking a record out of its sleeve, checking for dust, putting it on the record player etc. is too much hassle for me. A CD I can just pop in the good old stereo I have sitting on my desk and listen to it, or rip it and copy the files to my phone. With LPs, you're stuck with the format. I guess the music industry is happy with that, but for the consumer it's not the best deal. Ok, you get a digital download code with some LPs, but I'm not sure how common that is...

theshrike794년 전

There are only about a few dozen records in the world worthy of the ceremony to me, to be honest.

They're the ones you can listen from start to beginning in order every time. The ones you never get bored of and if you do, you have a need to listen to them again pretty soon.

The chance of me grabbing an LP off the shelf and listening to 6 Underground by the Sneaker Pimps from their Becoming X album is exactly is zero. It's a banger yes, but the rest of the album is decidedly not worthy of the ceremony.

skyfaller4년 전

My favorite band is Queen, so only counting their studio albums, that already gives me more than a dozen LPs I will listen to all the way through over and over again. Then there's their live albums, the band members' solo albums, singles/45s...

I also think listening to one side of an LP and then switching to a different one isn't that much more work than flipping it over, so it's OK if only one side is flawless. I will listen to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" anytime, even though the songs on the other side are not as iconic/necessary.

Finally, I think you may not know ahead of time which albums become beloved and worthy of the ceremony upon repeated listening. I bought my partner "songs" by Adrianne Lenker (of Big Thief) because she loved "anything" from that album, and now that double album is one of our favorite albums that we're currently wearing out. I think it's worth taking a risk sometimes, and if you don't love it, you could sell it to a used record shop for someone else to love.

theshrike794년 전

I do have stuff I like, but don't love. I just mostly listen to those on digital, as they're not worthy of the Ritual - yet at least =)

bengale4년 전

> All the ceremony of carefully taking a record out of its sleeve, checking for dust, putting it on the record player etc. is too much hassle for me.

This is what I like about it really. It's quite a deliberate focussed thing. For most of my music listening when I just want noise in the background I stream it because it doesn't matter. But sometimes when you just want to sit down and enjoy something special, the ceremony seems to add something.

kevin_thibedeau4년 전

LPs are not higher quality.

theshrike794년 전

"it either needs to be of higher quality than the digital option or have something else going for it"

LPs have the "something else", which is gorgeous cover art and the ritual of listening - for me at least.

uuyi4년 전

I moved house with 3000 CDs once. I bought an iPod the month after and sold them all. Eventually this turned into Apple Music. I hope there isn’t a CD revival because the cost, logistics, transport and storage for the things was abhorrent.

There are literally only 5 tracks from my entire collection that weren’t on Apple Music in the end and more than one member of my family can listen to the same CD at the same time. That’s a pretty big admin and versatility win.

rob744년 전

My strategy against this is listening to music on Spotify first, but if I really like an album or an artist and keep returning to them, I'll buy the CD.

xeromal4년 전

That's a reasonable strategy. I do the same thing with movies. I collect 4k UHD discs for my favorite movies, rent movies I want to see in the highest quality, and stream the rest.

Melatonic4년 전

I'm waiting for 8K to become more mainstream before I do that

Kaibeezy4년 전

I do that with books. I read mostly on my phone, but I'll search for a hardcover 1st edition of favorites and try to get them signed by the author. That's worked pretty well with Stephenson, less so with Dostoevsky.

Melatonic4년 전

Same here. Or more likely I just buy digital FLAC downloads

Guthur4년 전

And yet the author uses figures to also generate a false dichotomy. Just because a gap in income might be wider does not mean everyone is worse off, it is not a zero sum game.

There is now far more music variety available than ever before, and I'm sure it's more and more difficult to stand out.

What has probably been lost is some word of mouth for music, the algorithms have taken much of that over for better or worse.

throw0101a4년 전

> And yet the author uses figures to also generate a false dichotomy. Just because a gap in income might be wider does not mean everyone is worse off, it is not a zero sum game.

It is, in fact, zero sum. Spotify puts the money for music streaming into a pot and payouts out proportionally to how much time a particular artists is listened to. Given there (a) a finite amount of money in the pot, and (b) a finite amount of time that people can listen to Spotify (per person, and cumulatively), it stands to reasons there's only so much 'pie' that can be sliced. Listening more to one artist means listening less to another, thus one artist gets paid more than another

Add to this that Spotify is creating/contracting music itself, such that is is both distributor and "artist", thus paying money out of the pot to itself.[1] Further Spotify controls the recommendation system, so it can send people to its own music, thus increasing the money it pays itself.

[1] https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/spotify-denies-creating-fa...

The author of the linked HN article, Damon Krukowski, recently did an interesting interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots about streaming music services and basically how they screw over small time musicians:

> Earlier this year, there was a growing movement among some musicians (lead by Neil Young) to remove music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. And it has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Damon Krukowsky, the former drummer of the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and one half of the duo Damon and Naomi. He gives us his perception of industry economics, and explains his frustration as an independent musician with how the service works.

* https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski

Guthur4년 전

I don't use Spotify at all so not sure your point. I've listen to google play, amazon music, random guy on YouTube, random busker on the street.

I hazard that more people are making money from music than ever before, maybe not mainstream but it's there.

robonerd4년 전

> a finite amount of time that people can listen to Spotify (per person, and cumulatively)

The amount of time people can spend listening is finite. But the amount of time that people do spend listening is decidedly elastic.

mechE3214년 전

There is a finite but variable amount of money in the pot.

It is not a zero sum game.

taylodl4년 전

I've been buying albums off of iTunes for 10 years now. I've verified I can playback the AAC file on a machine not having my Apple ID setup. Apple claims you "own" the music you purchase from iTunes and this test verifies the claim. I have all those files backed up.

I typically buy an album every two weeks, so I've been buying 26 or so albums per year. I'm old-school - I still like to own my music. I used to have a large CD collection but now that's all been ripped and imported into my digital music library.

I typically use my iPhone for playback. I've now taken to playing back through BT speakers at home, BT headphones while mowing, and my BT sound system in my car. It's highly convenient and I've been listening to more music than ever.

I don't understand the infatuation with physical media, or analog for that matter, but if the medium helps you better connect to the music then that's cool. Different people enjoy music in different ways.

I grew up with vinyl but I really enjoy going to my uncle's house and listening to his reel-to-reel tapes of classic 70's rock. I really wish those clamoring for analog skipped vinyl and created a resurgence in reel-to-reel. They sound better than anything. BUT - I can't really listen to a reel-to-reel while mowing the lawn, can I? But boy it'd be nice to have for a few special albums!

But CD's? What's the point?

elbasti4년 전

> And streaming is not returning enough to musicians for them to survive; it is only serving to increase income inequality in our industry. The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income - and that revival is not coming from silver discs.

The fundamental problem is that streaming income is distributed as a percentage of total (worldwide) plays, instead of being normalized as a percentage of plays per listener.

Let's say that Olivia Rodrigo accounts for 2% of all plays on Spotify this month. Even though I have never heard one of her songs, she's going to get 2% of whatever percentage of my subscription goes to royalties (75% I think, or $7.50). So even though I have never heard her music, she's getting my money. By the same logic, even if I spent 100% of my time play Obscure Band, they are getting basically nothing.

Instead, Spotify should pay artists as a percent of plays per listener. So if 10 indie artists this month account for most of my streams, they would each get ~0.75 each. Which is starting to look reasonable.

ectopod4년 전

If everybody did the same amount of listening the two schemes would be the same. Since they don't, your proposed scheme gives an outsize vote to people who listen less. The current scheme gives a bigger vote to those who listen more. Spend more time than average listening and your preferred bands will get more money from the royalty pool than you put in.

elbasti4년 전

That math is incorrect. Imagine a simplified world with 100 listeners. They are all average listeners and listen to 10 songs per day, for a total of 1000 plays per day.

99 are pop fans and listen entirely to top 20. 1 is an outlier and listens entirely to jazz.

Royalty payments are $10/mo per user. ie every month there's $1,000 to be split between artists.

Under Spotify's current scheme, top 20 artists receive ($1,000 * (999/1000)) = $999 dollars. Jazz artists get $1.

Under my proposed scheme, top 20 artists would receive 99*10 = $990, while jazz artists would receive $10.

In other words, multiplying the income of "smaller" artists by 10x. Artists shouldn't get money from people that don't listen to them.

nybble414년 전

> Under Spotify's current scheme, top 20 artists receive ($1,000 * (999/1000)) = $999 dollars. Jazz artists get $1.

There are 1000 plays per day (total) and 990 of those are pop—not 999. Pop artists receive ($1,000 * (990/1000)) = $990 dollars. Jazz artists get ($1,000 * (10/1000)) = $10. Which is the same as your proposed scheme, because everyone listens to the same amount of music.

If the jazz fan listened to five songs per day, all else being equal, then the current scheme would allocate ($1,000 * (5/995)) = $5.025 to jazz and ($1,000 * (990/995)) = $994.975 to pop. Which is clearly a bit unfair since the service is being paid $10 for the jazz and $990 for the pop.

However, if the jazz fan listened to 20 songs per day then under the current scheme jazz would get ($1,000 * (20/1010)) = $19.80 and pop would get ($1,000 * (990/1010)) = $980.20. Which is also a bit unfair, but in the other direction. The current scheme isn't necessarily biased against small artists, but rather against subscribers who don't listen to much music, and the artists they prefer.

9887474년 전

>> top 20 artists receive ($1,000 * (999/1000)) = $999 dollars

This is where your math seems wrong, how come there are 999 plays of pop songs from 99 fans? should be 990, right?

However, if the pop fans listen to 10 songs per day, and jazz fan only listens to 1 or 2, then yes, some of jazz fan's money would go to pop artits.

nybble414년 전

If everyone listened to the same amount of music in proportion to the amount they're paying it wouldn't matter which way the royalties were calculated, as the artists would get the same amount either way. Money is fungible, so it doesn't matter whether they get your subscription fee or a much smaller slice of all the subscriptions as long as you listening to their music leads to them getting at least $7.50 extra that month.

The discrepancy is in the fact that those who listen to less music on a flat-rate plan pay more per track, which is not accounted for in the "percentage of worldwide plays" metric. If there are, say, an average of 100 tracks played per subscriber per month, and you play 1000 tracks from your favorite indie artist (even non-exclusively), they're actually doing better with this "worldwide plays" metric than they would otherwise—each play is worth about 7.5¢ ($7.50 for 100 plays), so they'd get $75 based on your activity. You contribute more plays but not more money compared to other subscribers, which means other subscribers are subsidizing your music preferences. However, if you only listen to 10 tracks per month, even if they're all from the same artist, the situation is more like what you described, with most of your subscription going to support artists you don't listen to. In this case they'd only get 75¢ of your $7.50.

So to optimize the royalties to your favorite artists, the real question is: Do you (and other fans of indie music) listen to more music than the average subscriber, or less?

pjmlp4년 전

Revival or not, I keep buying CDs from all artists I care about.

I own a copy of the music, and can put it in any device I own capable of reproducing it.

spacexsucks4년 전

A CD is hand is worth more than a stream that expires every 3 days or so without internet

Kaibeezy4년 전

OP pointing out the author is Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500, Magic Hour, and Damon and Naomi.

Kaibeezy4년 전

Here’s “Passing Words” by Magic Hour, 1995.

https://magic-hour.bandcamp.com/track/passing-words

donatj4년 전

I was buying CDs to rip lossless right up until Apple Music added lossless. Now I am down to just very special releases/extremely loved albums I wouldn’t mind being my “car cd” when I don’t want to listen to the radio or fiddle with my phone

The crazy part of my brain, every time I add a cloud album to my Apple Music library wants to set away $15 for when this all comes crashing down and I have to actually buy it.

tonetheman4년 전

I am actively looking to purchase on CD still and have gotten even more so as I have gotten older. Renting music from online services sucks. So I want to own the CD and I can rip and do what I please with it.

This is especially true for musicians. I want to be able to slow the music down or manipulate it which cannot be done with online music.

So for me CDs are a better choice and getting better.

em3rgent0rdr4년 전

Good article except for this part of the conclusion: "The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income"

For centuries before recording, regular musicians made income without it. And even when regular musicians made money recording, only a few survived solely on recording.

I think we need to dispell the presumption that musicians must make money recording.

softwarebeware4년 전

> "For centuries before recording ..."

Yeah but today there's no live music income without recorded music though. Try putting a tour together without anything released. Try telling people, "We only play live."

The only time that works is if you're playing covers. Which works because the music is circulating in recorded format.

TrispusAttucks4년 전

Purely anecdotal but I bought around 8 CDs this year. The first time buying any in many years.

I just want to listen to an album and not fuck with playlists on my phone.

I want to hear what message an artist has to actually say not just slap corporate approved pop hits on the way home.

I don't want my listening to be a point in some dataset to be later sold.

jmrm4년 전

Have you ever thought that most brand new cars does not have any CD/DVD player to listen to music? But hey, all of them have USB connections and have Spotify. I think that this is a big deal because a lot of people only listen to music while driving.