Ask HN: Have you noticed your songs being swapped out with inferior versions?
Without my having made any change to my playlists or library I'm noticing songs I've had in my library for years are being swapped out with re-recorded or remastered versions and they're are almost universally WORSE than the originals. The artists are older, their voices are no longer at their peak and the accompanying band sounds different and somehow weaker. It's like I'm getting the off-brand version of the original song.
15 comments
My understanding is artists rerecord their songs so that they own the master.
When a song is played royalties are split between the songwriter(s) and the owner of the recording. There may also be producers, engineers, etc. getting points and other music industry players taking a cut. Rerecording means the artist gets a bigger cut from streaming. That income replaces the absence of physical media sales and other changes in the music industry.
Outside pop-music the streaming services are building their own catalogs of classical, jazz, and similar recordings in order to avoid paying royalties on “legacy” recordings. My understanding is that Apple’s Classical app leverages this (but for clarity, I dont use it and am not heavily invested in classical music).
The short lifespan of digital formats also play a role. Music recorded on ADAT, DAT, and less common digital media a few decades ago is hard to recover at best and long lost to the bit bucket at worst. This means even if the artist owns the master, it may be unplayable so it cant be remastered for modern playback expectations.
Finally, artists are likely to focus on their core fans…the Rolling Stones are probably making music for the people who are buying tickets to their shows, not people who last saw them in 1982.
When a song is played royalties are split between the songwriter(s) and the owner of the recording. There may also be producers, engineers, etc. getting points and other music industry players taking a cut. Rerecording means the artist gets a bigger cut from streaming. That income replaces the absence of physical media sales and other changes in the music industry.
Outside pop-music the streaming services are building their own catalogs of classical, jazz, and similar recordings in order to avoid paying royalties on “legacy” recordings. My understanding is that Apple’s Classical app leverages this (but for clarity, I dont use it and am not heavily invested in classical music).
The short lifespan of digital formats also play a role. Music recorded on ADAT, DAT, and less common digital media a few decades ago is hard to recover at best and long lost to the bit bucket at worst. This means even if the artist owns the master, it may be unplayable so it cant be remastered for modern playback expectations.
Finally, artists are likely to focus on their core fans…the Rolling Stones are probably making music for the people who are buying tickets to their shows, not people who last saw them in 1982.
You gotta provide platform + examples for something like this.
I encountered this with Apple Music / Musicmatch. Tracks I'd ripped from original CDs were replaced with different recordings. Some were actually better, but most weren't, and I kept running into region blocking on tracks I theoretically had ripped and held in my library (ie, I have CDs I bought when traveling to country AA, ripped them in the US, added them to iTunes, but when I turned on Apple Music and allowed my library to be "uploaded" or matched to the cloud I lost access to these tracks). I no longer subscribe to Apple Music and reverted to manually managing an mp3 library, or using Spotify (which definitely swaps tracks in and out of playlists).
If someone has the ability to swap songs out from underneath you, or remove them, or block your access to them, then you don't have a library at all. You have a list of pointers into someone else's library.
It's definitely a streaming thing, I'm using Apple Music. I get that it's the trade-off I'm making with streaming as you have no real control over the library, I've just noticed this occurring a lot within the last year. Perhaps artists are now more often taking the initiative to re-record their library so they get a larger cut.
haven't noticed anything like that.
du -bhs Music/
86G Music/Seriously, why do people stream music?
Just put mp3's on a hard drive somewhere and you're done.
Just put mp3's on a hard drive somewhere and you're done.
I've given up with that, I have 3 or more computers at any time, I don't have a NAS. My MP3 collection is now 10 years old, I have MP3s I've bought littered all over different computers and online services and hard drives. Streaming is just easy when it works. I can do it in my car, at a friends house, on top of a mountain. Remastered albums can be annoying, because of the extra tracks which you don't really care about or a different sound spoiling the experience. Often there are multiple versions available on Spotify/Apple so you can find what you want if you take the time.
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I have noticed this for years... my recordings from vinyl (separated into tracks) would be replaced with someone else's needle-drop but theirs had a skip in it... then the skip would disappear. sheesh.
I have wondered, when I find an obscure recording that is clearly a needle drop... and I have no problem with that, how many miles of master tapes have been trashed, lost or destroyed ... I wonder if the original artists are collecting their tiny bits of royalty. Where do those fractions of a penny goand are those destinations legitimate?
I have wondered, when I find an obscure recording that is clearly a needle drop... and I have no problem with that, how many miles of master tapes have been trashed, lost or destroyed ... I wonder if the original artists are collecting their tiny bits of royalty. Where do those fractions of a penny goand are those destinations legitimate?
Stuff like this is why I really dislike music streaming services, or anything that tries to match songs in a library an upgrade them with “higher quality” versions. It’s very jarring, and going back isn’t always easy.
People are high jacking songs on my Spotify when I ask using voice. For example I ask for "Shotgun by George Ezra" and some cover or remix plays. Super annoying may have to try YouTube Music
As a YTMusic user, it's not much better, (probably worse with multiple uploads of the same song by regular people) but it doesn't happen often enough to be annoying to me.
There was this one time I converted all my mp3 to 64k AAC, and I was so happy with how much space I saved. Until I bought better headphones. Then I noticed.
That sounds incredibly frustrating! It's disappointing when the versions of songs you love are swapped out without your consent, especially when the new versions don't hold up to the originals. Unfortunately, this seems to happen more often with streaming services as artists re-record their music. If you haven't already, it might be worth checking the settings to see if there's an option to prefer original versions or maybe even switch to a service that respects your library choices more. Hopefully, you can get those classic versions back!