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Are the days of independent CD releases over?


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It seems like more and more people are moving to streaming for their listening, and fewer CDs are being sold, and fewer CD players are being made - they're becoming the new floppy disks - lots of computers don't even come with an optical drive anymore. So where does that leave independent artists? What's the best avenue to take to get your music out to fans - streaming services like Spotify? Upload to YouTube? Does it still make sense to made CDs and offer them for sale at gigs in this day and age? Are you offering your music for sale at gigs in other ways, such as on thumb drives or as free, instant downloads?

 

Is the CD dead? How, as an independent musician, are you dealing with the changing landscape?

 

 

 

 

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That's probably the case for musicians who dabble on their own and don't play out or tour, but for independent touring musicians, CD sales at gigs, even house concerts, are often what makes the gig profitable.

 

Oh, and there are other ways to play a CD than in a computer. Like, maybe, you like to sit on the living room couch, put the CD in the player, relax and listen to the music without the distraction of checking your e-mail or Twitter feed every other song.

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When I gigged on the cruise ships in the late 1980s we sold cassette tapes. It was not officially allowed but since we broke all-time attendance and liquor sales records in the lounge we gigged in, the cruise directors hinted that we could and turned a blind eye.

 

After I got off the ships in 1989 we've played the same 4 county area. We work steady, gig like crazy in the tourist season, and thin but steady in the off season. I haven't bothered to record anything figuring our market it so small, it would be saturated fairly quickly. Add the recording costs, mechanical royalties, manufacturing costs and so on, I would make more profit in a couple of gigs.

 

Since 1964 when I went on the road in a rock and roll band, with two short exceptions, I've made most of my money doing music and nothing but music, and most of that has been live in front of an audience. It's in fact my bliss spot. When I'm there I'm in that place where there is no space, no time, no me, just the music flowing through me.

 

I've done some recording, mostly sax-for-hire at $50/hour at a local studio, but since they hired me (until they closed) as a one-take-jake I rarely made more than $50 per shot. Even the cassette sales on the ship paled in comparison to what we got paid playing live. I identify myself as a live performing musician/entertainer.

 

Today the only recording I do MIDI recording making aftermarket style disks for Band-in-a-Box through my http://www.nortonmusic.com business (shameless plug). And even though I still call them "disks" they are all direct download now with no physical medium. (There I got the shameless plug on topic).

 

I still call them 'disks' because I started writing them on 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks back in the DOS/Atari/MacOS6 days and when I went direct download some years ago, the habit of calling them disks just stuck. I suppose it's like dialing a phone when dials went out in the dark ages.

 

If I was still on the cruise ships or on tour with a new, fresh audience (untapped market) every week, I would invest the time and money for a CD, pay the royalties, and do it legit. I could see where that might be profitable, but for my limited market, I don't think it's worth the time and/or money.

 

But there is more than one right way to do this.

 

After saying all that, I still buy CDs, and if I can't find a physical CD of what I want, I'll buy the download and burn a CD. Why? I want to own the music that I buy so I can listen to it whenever and wherever I want.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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Always looking for new sounds, solo players, new bands. that have a grassroots and novel approach to their recording and writing.

 

There is such a multitude of talent out there of young/old people who buck the current trend(s).

So easy to find and listen to live bands in my area, ..also a plethora of great stuff on youtube etc.

 

Just have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

I buy maybe 10-20 CDs a month of new /old artists.

 

I love to hold and handle something tangible and physical in my grimy little paws...put it in/on my many Turntables/cassette players/CD players..kick back and listen.

 

I have a large collection of Rock 45s dating back to the early Fifties that I inherited from my Dad and my older brother, I have almost every LP I ever bought or stole( thanks Columbia House Record Club) 👍 from the 60's -70's

boxes of cassettes, even the ones that self destructed, and hundreds of CDs...

 

Lucky for me that I have a large space at my disposal @ Luke Manor as well as a understanding wife.

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I haven't created a CD/DVD in years, not even for backup purposes. Like you pointed out Phil, my main computer, which is a late 2013 MBP, doesn't even have an optical drive. There was a time back in the 90's when I spent lots of time designing inserts/covers and burning CD's of the music I'd recorded but I can't even imagine doing that today, in fact, I just recently tossed a couple boxes of jewel cases into the dumpster because they were taking up space and would never be used.

 

I was fairly prolific in the mid/late 90's and early 00's when using a computer for recording was beginning to come of age for typical DIY guys like me. It combined two of my great passions at the time and I really enjoyed it.

Since then my recording output has been sporadic at best and I've been ungodly busy with other things. I am beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel now and I'm really looking forward to getting back into some recording. It's going to be even more fun than before because my wife also shares my passion for music making!

 

At this point I really can't imagine spending anytime to create an "official" release of a CD. I'm fully aware that the number of people who would be interested in them (or any music I create for that matter) will be extremely trivial and I'd prefer to spend my time working with video and animation programs to make videos that could accompany my music on outlets such as youtube on a song by song basis.

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I do any of you subscribe to a streaming service like Spotify?

 

 

I've heard of it is about all I know about Spotify. I do have Sirius radio in the car and I'd like to have it on the Ultra Limited but it's a $400 add on, screw that! So, on the bike I just use a flash drive packed with hard rocking songs (soft rock/easy listening doesn't work well flying down the highway) and, of course, there's always regular FM/AM radio. There's also a flash drive in the car if the radio annoys me.

 

For a couple different reasons I've moved three times in the last six years and I've not gotten around to unpacking my CD's. That hasn't been much of a problem because most of what I have was already converted into mp3 and stored on a HD. I may be unpacking CD's in the near future though when I start doing a lot of work in the garage and there's just an "old fashioned" CD player stereo out there.

 

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I released a CD in May of last year, and put it on Spotify as well. Total Spotify income: 0.59

Total CD income: Around 500.00 (I wasn't real strict about accounting...)

Most of these were sold at gigs and festivals I played at. The music is all-original (no cover tines), and that may be a factor. I can't imagine paying money to a bar band for a CD of their cover songs; it just does not compute...

I sent about 30 CDs to area college NPR stations and got airplay on all of them. I'm not sure how much traffic this drove to my pages (streaming site, youtube, & facebook musician page) but I did notice an uptick in 'likes' and streams, so I guess it helps a little at least.

 

[Edit]

I think next time I'll try one of those sites that sell preloaded thumb drives with my logo. It appears significantly less expensive and allows including artwork, videos, and a surround mix in addition to stereo Wav and MP3 versions. Memory is MUCH cheaper than plastic.

 

[Edit 2]

I don't subcribe to streaming services either. The Satellite radio that came with our car sounded pretty terrible, like a 128k mp3, so when the trial period ran out I gave up on it.

 

I've got enough music to last beyond the rest of my life on my hard drive, and frankly, very little new stuff I hear even approaches being interesting, being formulaic and at best derivative. An exception is special genres like jazz and blues that I hear on our excellent area public stations.

 

Once a year or so I load about 10 GB from my collection onto my phone, and use that primarily via blue tooth, when travelling.

 

Every great once in a while I'll put on Pandora or Youtube to listen to something, but I bail at the first commercial.

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I released a CD in May of last year, and put it on Spotify as well. Total Spotify income: 0.59

Total CD income: Around 500.00 (I wasn't real strict about accounting...)

Most of these were sold at gigs and festivals I played at.

 

I realize this might be an irrelevant question, but how much do you figure it cost you to make those CDs? If your accounting method lets you say 30 cents each for the cost of the blank disk and case, because all of your labor is free and you had all the gear to record it yourself is free, then you're making money.

 

I can't imagine paying money to a bar band for a CD of their cover songs; it just does not compute.

 

I see buying merch from a live performer at a gig to be a way to support the performer and keep him in business. Personally, I'd rather drop a few bucks in a tip jar and not bother with a CD that I'd probably never listen to. But the band probably wanted to have some CDs anyway, to give away to radio stations (like you did). That might bring more people into the bar on nights when that band plays, which means they might be able to get a raise. So they might as well sell as many of the leftovers as they can.

 

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Oh, it's been a net loss, no doubt about it. But I'm not stupid or naive enough to try to produce any usable income from music.... Making CDs was mostly to get the music out there, as was streaming. It cost me 860 bucks for 300 CDs, all streaming registrations, UPC code, registering at musicexchange.com, registering to issue ISRC codes, ASCAP membership, copyrights and the rest. I do have about 100 CDs left, so there is potential to break even, though I'm not too worried about penny counting at this stage of the game.

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That's why I never bothered. I've done session work on a dozen or more self-produced, self-released albums, and I don't know of any that made money.

 

I don't listen to much new music. I have a collection of over 300 LPs and 700 CDs. That's enough to last me for a few years.

 

I listen to things my audience requests, some of which is new. crossover tunes that reach the adult market and some new country. If requested enough, or by a loyal customer, and if we can cover it well, I'll learn it. Some of the suggestions are good, and if I were younger and didn't have as many tunes in my head, I'd probably like them a lot. But I've played so many songs throughout my career so far, that they are too predictable so while they may be fun to play, they aren't going on my walkman.

 

For new music it's some jazz, although a lot of that is getting stale, and mostly symphonies -- especially from the Romantic era to the Contemporary with leaning to the dark and brooding ones (Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Shastakovitch, Suk, Dvorak, etc.). I can listen to a good symphony hundreds of times and still hear something new.

 

For example, I played Dvorak's #9 in school and had a few recordings of it (until I found one I liked a lot). One day, after hearing it hundreds of times, I'm listening to the 4th movement and I realize in this part, probably about a minute long he mixed the themes from all 4 movements together. Spliced parts of two for the melody, snippets of another for the counter melody, and part of a third theme for the bass line. Genius! Especially since it was done so melodically that I just enjoyed it so many times before realizing what was going on.

 

On the other hand, my Walkman also has Muddy Waters, Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Elvis, Sinatra, Andrews Sisters, Tony Bennett, Johnny Winter, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and thousands of other non-classical songs. It's the soundtrack of my life.

 

Notes

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Notes -

Interesting that you bring up classical & jazz. After adding some room treatment and moving my monitors, I needed to listen to a lot of music to reacclimate myself to the changed sound in my room.

 

So I found a 4 LP set of Duke Ellington and a 3 LP set of John Williams concertos for classical guitar and orchestra in my to-do pile, and digitized them for my collection. It was quite a change to recalibrate my musical sensibilties to these; and I loved it!

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My collection includes quite a variety, in addition to the pop/jazz/rock/country/blues that has fed me all my life, I also have Salsa, Merengue, and other Latin American, plus Calypso, Soca, Reggae, Cape Verde, Klezmer, Tuvan Throat Singing, Raga, Chinese Classical, Brazil, Fado, Guinea-Bissau, Afro-Pop, Csardas, Tango (Argentine), Roma (from India to Spain), Bedouin, and dozens of others.

 

I find listening to other forms of music enriches all the music I play.

 

In school, I played classical and loved it, but when I got home I played Rock n Roll. As I went on the road and made my living doing music and nothing but music, I left the classics behind. Not that I didn't like them anymore, but I just didn't have the time for them.

 

Then as the years went by and I started playing different kinds of music, I went to Jazz as my escape from the predictable pop music I was playing. The pop was still tons of fun to play, but for listening I wanted something else.

 

As time went by much of the jazz got predictable to me, and other forms just got too 'outside' to hold my interest. I like melody, harmony and rhythm. So I went back to symphonies.

 

I've always had a soft spot in my brain for Blues and anything else with minor thirds and occasional flatted fifths so as I got back into Symphonies, I gravitated to the Romantic era to the contemporary. Mozart and Haydn were geniuses and pushed the music of the day forward, but it's also to predictable to me. Music for me starts with Beethovan's third symphony. Plus I prefer things in minor keys, dark and brooding is good, the blues of the classics.

 

The thing about symphonies is the themes (motifs), variations of those themes, and the development of both the themes and the music as the piece goes towards the end. I can listen to a simple piece of music that I like hundreds of times, have every note memorized in my brain, and still enjoy it. On the other hand, there is no way I can memorize all the parts of every instrument of a great symphony, and even after hundreds of listenings find something new. (I never realized that was the first theme, inverted, expanded, and played as the accompaniment to the fourth theme). It's truly the most complex and advanced music ever composed. Not that I like all of it, I still have my personal tastes, and I haven't digested or even heard all the symphonies by my favorite composers and the new people.

 

In fact, the only concerts I attend now are symphony orchestras and only when it's the kind of music I want to pay $ to hear live.

 

So while I still have a blast enjoying playing songs as simple as 3 chord blues tunes or multi-chord jazz things, when it comes to recreational listening at home, I go for symphonies and I want to own the CD so I can listen again and again and again and be surprised of something I didn't get the first hundred times I heard it.

 

In the car I use my digital walkman that has over 10,000 songs on it of which perhaps a dozen are short classical pieces. The rest are everything from blues to rock to salsa to tuvan to soca to raga to whatever. It's culled from my >1000 LP/CD collection.

 

Streaming won't do for anything serious, any more than the radio.

 

OK, so I'm weird. I like being weird.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

 

 

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Notes -

Interesting that you bring up classical & jazz. After adding some room treatment and moving my monitors, I needed to listen to a lot of music to reacclimate myself to the changed sound in my room.

 

So I found a 4 LP set of Duke Ellington and a 3 LP set of John Williams concertos for classical guitar and orchestra in my to-do pile, and digitized them for my collection. It was quite a change to recalibrate my musical sensibilties to these; and I loved it!

 

I might have that same 3 LP set of John Williams Concertos...from the 1970’s?

I was gifted with them by a then girlfriend’s younger sister who I was teaching basic guitar to at the time.

Edit:

naw, my bad...mine is a 5 record set...Andres Segovia, Laurindo Almeda, John Williams, Carlos Montoya, Manitas de Plata, Alirio Diaz and Narsisco Yepes.

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This is my current dilemma as well. I'm on the fence still. My record is done. I've spent the last 11 years working on it on and off here and there and I want something to show for it. I feel like the record is complete when I can hold a hard copy of it. With that said, I hardly buy CDs anymore. The last 10 or so records I have purchased were all classical and the reason I purchased the CDs was to replace the ones that were lost in Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The liner notes on those records were so informative, I loved it.

 

The record I am finishing up is 90% there. I'm finishing up the last tune. The other 9 songs are mixed and ready to roll. The CD booklet is done. I am looking to release a 10 song CD with liner notes with full lyrics and full color photos. I just feel this is the only way I will feel the project is officially done so I'm still leaning heavily towards a CD release fully knowing most people are streaming.

 

Just for full disclosure, I have the iTunes family plan. Its $14.99 a month which allows up to 6(?) family members to listen on their own devices at the same time. Its fantastic. I listen to some much more music now. I really do love having access to so much. If there is a record that I find myself listening to a lot of, I actually do buy it because the artist deserves it but thats an old school mindset... My son has his own Spotify account and he streams all of his music. Kids today are not interested in CDs or liner notes as far as I can tell.

 

With all that said, I will most likely continue to release music on CD or vinyl just for my own sanity. A record is not complete until I can hold the physical copy. The problem with streaming is, I would go back and tweak a mix and I`d eventually have 3-4 versions of the same song with slightly different mixes. (Of course, I would be the only one who actually cares about those minute changes but thats the thing), I want to be done with a record and putting it into a physical format would close the loop; at least from my perspective.

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I'm in both worlds - streaming and CDs. The advantages of streaming are obvious. But there's usually a sound quality penalty with streaming. And it's not just mp3-style compression with alI that grit and graininess and loss of high-end that's bad - the stereo image is very often unstable in streamed material, too. And at least with our crappy internet service, things hang or crash or blip out with enough frequency to be an issue.

 

Now I don't always need, or even want, top sound quality, 'tho. I'm from the generation that screamed along to Born On The Bayou or All Right Now along with the car radio like the kids on That 70's Show. Max sound quality is not always the point. I like listening to lo-fi playback for background or chill factor music. I think the midrange is beautiful :)

 

But like Notes said - it's CDs for me for serious listening. With CDs (or ripped lossless files from CDs) I've got all the control, the sound quality is tops, and, especially for classical and jazz, the liner notes can be really helpful.

 

Also, the streaming services have no idea how to deal with categorizing and optimizing search routines for classical music. They just dump the material into their servers and leave it to the public to figure out how to find the material. It might or might not come up on the conductor - or the orchestra - or the composer - or an unofficial name like "Moonlight Sonata" - or the soloist - or the exact long name like "tocatta and fugue in D minor BWV 565" - or the name of a group of works such as "Brandenburg Concertos" or "Six Pieces for Orchestra" or whatever. Or it might not come up at all until you find the magic search term. Like how I could not find what I wanted in the way of Debussy Songs until I added "French Melodie" to the search terms.

 

It's extremely interesting to me how both my "kids" (29 and 31 years old) are big into vinyl. They buy vinyl for their most beloved, special albums. Vinyl was pretty much gone around here by the time they were in first grade - so it's not like there's a nostalgia thing going on for them. But they love the bigger experience of the vinyl album, the big artwork, the careful handling of the disc, the slow-pour set-down of the needle, and the "submission" to the music that vinyl seems to impose. Listening becomes an Event, and the music becomes a Specifically Collected Thing.

 

They also want to feel like they are supporting the artists they particularly love. So they go to Waterloo Music (the most well-known iconic music store in Austin) and peruse the vinyl section where there are probably a hundred of my old vinyl albums up for sale in the bins. It's a strange world :)

 

nat

 

 

 

 

 

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I'm in both worlds - streaming and CDs. The advantages of streaming are obvious.

 

Are they, really? When was the last time someone paid you $15 for a CD's worth of streaming music? Streaming is advantageous for major artists because it's a measurable part of their income, but for small time independent artists, particularly those who are self-contained productions and don't gig much, all that does is puts your name in a huge pile of other just like you, and maybe pays you enough to buy a Snickers bar a couple of times a year. But leave show business? ;)

 

But there's usually a sound quality penalty with streaming. And it's not just mp3-style compression with alI that grit and graininess and loss of high-end that's bad - the stereo image is very often unstable in streamed material, too. And at least with our crappy internet service, things hang or crash or blip out with enough frequency to be an issue.

 

There's no reason these days for the sound quality of an audio stream not to be as good as a CD, but it rarely is. But the listener's setup is usually where things fall apart. Part is the integrity and speed of the Internet service, some is on the limited quality earphones, driven by a mediocre amplifier, through which most listening takes place. A 256 KBps MP3, or better, a FLAC of a 44.1 kHz 16-, or 24-bit if you insist, when played back in the "mastering" studio sounds darn near indistinguishable from the source.

 

But like Notes said - it's CDs for me for serious listening. With CDs (or ripped lossless files from CDs) I've got all the control, the sound quality is tops, and, especially for classical and jazz, the liner notes can be really helpful.

 

Right - and largely because, like with phonograph records, listening to a CD is a listening experience, not just background music. Who can really concentrate on music played from a phone through earbuds while running on the treadmill at the gym, or at the office? I'm told that college kids still get together in someone's dorm room now and then to listen to a new release (which might be via a stream) but that's not all that common when everybody has his own stereo system wherever they are.

 

Also, the streaming services have no idea how to deal with categorizing and optimizing search routines for classical music.

 

That's not just a problem with classical music. I think that the concept of embedded metadata has a long way to go at this point, but there's some progress toward a standard format XML file that can be linked to an audio file that provides a means for identifying what's in the audio. With the proper system, you could search the data base (it would probably be "in the cloud") for what you're looking for and pull out files that are a good, or exact match.

 

It's extremely interesting to me how both my "kids" (29 and 31 years old) are big into vinyl. They buy vinyl for their most beloved, special albums. Vinyl was pretty much gone around here by the time they were in first grade - so it's not like there's a nostalgia thing going on for them. But they love the bigger experience of the vinyl album, the big artwork, the careful handling of the disc, the slow-pour set-down of the needle, and the "submission" to the music that vinyl seems to impose. Listening becomes an Event, and the music becomes a Specifically Collected Thing.

 

To them, the experience of listening to that music is special, and that's a good thing.

 

They also want to feel like they are supporting the artists they particularly love. So they go to Waterloo Music (the most well-known iconic music store in Austin) and peruse the vinyl section where there are probably a hundred of my old vinyl albums up for sale in the bins. It's a strange world :)

 

When a friend of mine decided that it was time to start digitizing his record collection (which includes CDs) to audio files, his kids were about 10 and 12 years old. They just made it a family thing that one day a week, they'd listen together while playing a couple of records into the computer. The kids learned what they liked and what they didn't and made up their own song collections from the material that they knew they liked.

 

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I'm in both worlds - streaming and CDs.

 

It's extremely interesting to me how both my "kids" (29 and 31 years old) are big into vinyl. They buy vinyl for their most beloved, special albums. Vinyl was pretty much gone around here by the time they were in first grade - so it's not like there's a nostalgia thing going on for them. But they love the bigger experience of the vinyl album, the big artwork, the careful handling of the disc, the slow-pour set-down of the needle, and the "submission" to the music that vinyl seems to impose. Listening becomes an Event, and the music becomes a Specifically Collected Thing.

 

They also want to feel like they are supporting the artists they particularly love. So they go to Waterloo Music (the most well-known iconic music store in Austin) and peruse the vinyl section where there are probably a hundred of my old vinyl albums up for sale in the bins. It's a strange world :)

 

nat

 

 

 

 

 

I like to think vinyl is a minor rebellion against digital convenience and the expedience of give- it- to- me- now by a younger generation.

 

 

Perhaps it is a passing fad. Even so it isn't hard to sense the subconscious desire to slow down the digital onslaught. (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-sax-analog-nostalgia-20160103-story.html )

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I don't do streaming, but I have problems with the way the radio and other services categorize things as well.

 

Since classical was mentioned, I'll go with this. When I tried out satellite radio I went to the classical station. I had two options, Classical and Opera.

 

Well lumping Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, Saint-Saens,Tchaikovsky, Shastakovitch and Prokofiev together is like mixing Bubble Gum, Do Wop, Psychedelia, Metal, Disco, Punk, and Emo together.

 

So I'd be listening to perhaps Marche Slav by Tchaikovsky and next they will play the Minuet movement from one of Haydn's symphonies.

 

I wrote to them, and suggested that they had a light classics station for Mozart, Bach and the like, and a heavy classics for Suk, Dvorak, Prokofiev and so on. They told me my tastes were too sophisticated and they didn't have the bandwidth. What? You have the Jimmy Buffet channel? Oh well. Their "please renew" letters go straight into the trash bin.

 

So I went to classic rock. I had the opposite problem, my tastes in pop span 4 decades, and I had to choose only one. Then I got the DJs talking over the intros and endings or fade outs of the songs, asking some truck driver how the weather is in Oklahoma.

 

Sorry, no satellite for me.

 

I doubt that streaming will work. Radio Bob (>10,000 tunes on my digital walkman) has everything I need but the classics, and my CD/LP has tons of classics, and I like every cut.

 

Oh, I'll listen to the radio and explore links on YouTube and other Internet spots to be exposed to new music, but I don't think streaming would be right for me.

 

I've downloaded a few things from Amazon and others, sometimes the compression is a slight bother but if I can't get it any other way it's a compromise. Then I burn a CD so I can listen whenever I want and it's fairly permanent (more so than magnetic media anyway).

 

But there is more than one right way to listen to music.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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It's extremely interesting to me how both my "kids" (29 and 31 years old) are big into vinyl. They buy vinyl for their most beloved, special albums. Vinyl was pretty much gone around here by the time they were in first grade - so it's not like there's a nostalgia thing going on for them. But they love the bigger experience of the vinyl album, the big artwork, the careful handling of the disc, the slow-pour set-down of the needle, and the "submission" to the music that vinyl seems to impose. Listening becomes an Event, and the music becomes a Specifically Collected Thing.

 

They also want to feel like they are supporting the artists they particularly love. So they go to Waterloo Music (the most well-known iconic music store in Austin) and peruse the vinyl section where there are probably a hundred of my old vinyl albums up for sale in the bins. It's a strange world :)

 

nat

 

Yes, its a strange world for sure. My kids are going on 16 and 13 and neither one has any interest in collecting music. They listen to it a lot but they could care less how its delivered. My 13 year old listens to a lot on YT. My 16 year old is a bit more musical so he has his own Spotify account but the compression doesn't seem to bother him.

 

Recently I sat him down in my studio, right between my Focals and put on one of his favorite albums. Once he heard and felt that bass, he smiled and says to me, "Now thats what its supposed to sound like!"

 

So he gets it but he still prefers to listen to music on his headphones. To me it still seems like music is such a transient experience these days with youngsters. The iPhone and the constant bombardment of "information" coming in must have something to do with the short attention spans and the desire for convenience over quality.

 

The other thing that I wonder about is the fact that when I was 16 my room was covered with posters of my favorite bands. That no longer seems to be rite of passage. Part of me wonders if I would need all the posters on my bedroom walls if my heroes were already on my iPhone?

 

Like you, I find the vinyl comeback very interesting but I'm not sure it has staying power. Part of me thinks it has something to do with the millennial generation growing up towards the tail end of the CDs popularity but another part of me thinks its an image thing.

 

Millennials found it cool to own older furniture, rotary phones, typewriters, used clothing, etc... and vinyl records.

 

Is it possible that they'll eventually seek to recapture their youth by purchasing CDs once they get into their late 30s and 40s? It'll be interesting to watch how they mature.

 

E

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You have a point. Music just doesn't seem to be as popular as it once was.

 

Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Michael Jackson and so on and so on were icons of their generations. They were the glue that held the generation together, and nothing other than 'romance' was more important than the music of the day.

 

Those days are gone now. I guess the Internet replaced the music.

 

Notes

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Interesting viewpoints. It's funny how life experience shapes musical taste. I was in Aruba one spring during Carnivale and the nonstop Salsa music was really getting on my nerves after 5 or 6 days.... But other people hook into it and develop a lifetime love of it.

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You have a point. Music just doesn't seem to be as popular as it once was.

 

Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Michael Jackson and so on and so on were icons of their generations. They were the glue that held the generation together, and nothing other than 'romance' was more important than the music of the day.

 

Those days are gone now. I guess the Internet replaced the music.

 

Notes

 

The dark science of economics is at play here: supply and demand

We used to track bands and await their new LP releases. A chance to actually see a band live was an extreme rarity.

Now there is music (sometimes decent music!) attached to everything. Baseball games. TV shows. Every TV and radio commercial (except for those local car dealer ads that consist of the car lot owner screaming incoherent syllables at the top of their lungs for 30 seconds. But I digress...).

 

I remember staying up late on a school night because they announced "Johnny Winters" was going to be on the Tonite Show. It turned out to be comedian Jonathan Winters....

​​​​​​These are just personal histories of how the scarcity of music drove me to treasure it.

 

The point of my meandering: Excessive and uncontrolled supply always lowers the value of the product, regardless of product quality. The old communist ideal of "workers controlling the means of production" has come to reality in music, more than any other industry I can think of. For better or worse.

 

That's the world we're in....

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