Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

Nothing is so convenient that I'd ever pay an ongoing subscription. Those always feel like scams or ripoffs, and life in 2023 is so overfilled with subscriptions that they can't possibly be affordable to even you guys who make x3 what I do. Can they?

Probably not, but given that I spent until the end of the CD age to collect music I do have enough to last me for several lifetimes. I'm a bit strange in that I will listen to music over and over again until I have it internalized, and even after that. I don't need something new every day.

I don’t want to fuck over later me, so I’m still buying music. Probably not saving money, but I also get some music not on streaming services.

I like having new music when walking, or as a background when working. For this, the Spotify playlists are great. I wouldn't want to have to sift through hundreds of records, through multiple stores, multiple times a year, then rip those, all to set up a playlist with tracks that I'll listen to maybe a few times. This is music I do enjoy listening, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have any "deep value" or whatever to me. If it disappeared tomorrow, I really wouldn't care. The "issue for later me" would be to find an equivalent service of "disposable / background music", not to get my hands on the exact same tracks again.

But then, there are many albums, or even standalone tracks or custom playlists, which I would absolutely hate to lose. For those, I'm fine with going through the trouble of buying them and figuring long-term storage.

Statistically, yes!

This was covered on a recent episode of 'Search Engine' (rising from the ashes of 'Reply All'): https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-am-i-supposed-to-find-new-...

It sounds like you want new music all the time. If you don't listen to "old" music often and only listen to new music from time to time, what do you listen to? So technically, 25+ years is considered classic. What is the definition of "new"? 1 year, 5 years, 10 years? What is newer than classic, but not new, modern? Is a song 15 years old modern? To me, good music is timeless. I enjoy stuff from the 1920s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the good stuff from the 80s, all the way through today.

Wholehearted support for the efforts by the WGA, SAG, and the related unions, to stop “big corporate media” fucking over everyone in the arts even if it won’t help the average Spotify streamer today or tomorrow, but perhaps eventually it will further into the future…

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Also, showing a graph without the last 10 years is making the data lying: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database

The music industry earnings has never been that high than today.

Also, actual studies shows piracy helped sales, not hindered earnings: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...

Before that CDs sold for twice the amount that the original records cost when they came out ('they will last forever, and they're as good as the original masters').

You seem to have a strong conviction that piracy killed the music industry but they didn't need our help to do so, the quality on offer went down, the back catalog is large enough to sustain you for a lifetime (or even longer) and given the choice between something modern and something old I find myself picking 'something old' more and more frequently. There are some exceptions, but these are happening with lower frequency every year. It's probably a function of getting older but I'd just as soon listen to an old record by Kate Bush, 10CC, or a classical recording from the 1950's or 60's than that I will listen to something new that doesn't register with me. I can't remember when I last had the radio on, the only one I have is in the car and I probably didn't even bother plugging in the antenna.

Piracy had absolutely nothing to do with it - for me. I spent a small fortune on music and would have been happy to continue to do so. But the innovators dilemma is harsh and the music industry was too caught up in combating piracy to see that installing root kits on people's computers (Sony) or suing your artists (everybody else) is bad policy for a middle man. And so they faded. A bit late, perhaps, but I think it was inevitable. The ones (labels, not artists) that survive into the streaming era are doing well enough financially, but the music they put out just isn't compelling to me.

To this day there is a levy on any storage medium that goes to the local equivalent of the RIAA.

Lyrics are dumb in popular music.

I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century. Recorded music hasn't been around long enough to think that platitudes like this actually have any meaningful content.

I'm here whining about how you're using a Beatles example because your argument is literally a teenage Baby Boomer argument. I've got board games older than your eternal generational war over the consumption of recorded music.

Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1], another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use of auto-tune (both the software itself as well as the general principle after which it was named). Artists and especially producers love that shit because similar to standardization in fast-food it provides a "consistent" performance even in live productions - which is seen as "cheating" in music by older people, and I think for good reason.

On top of that there's an increasing tendency of producers to push for "bland" personalities as well instead of also taking risks, and it's not just music - it's movies as well: most movies aren't original productions any more, a lot of them is based off of prior IP (Harry Potter, MCU) or endless continuations (Star Wars, Star Trek) to recoup ever growing production and marketing costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

For an actual semi-objective measure, think about how often you hear songs from the 60s and 70s, and from the 90s (and early 2000s for hip hop). And then think of all the crap that's gone by that has no staying power. I'm sure it's partially my bubble, but there were bands in the decades I mention that are going to be widely listened to for a long time, while in between there's a ton of throwaway. Basically you get original, defining music as new genres emerge then runs of derivative crap between them, it's not constant.

Face it, popular music exists for teenagers to claim their spot. Their unique identity from previous generations. The new and fresh - it’s about today and they are today.

But we dont have revolutionary music such as led zepplin, pink floyd, etc in the current crop.

none of the above sought facade public images as much as every single 'influencing' pop-stars today.

Their influence was organic. Today's music trends are forced.

Aside from some EDM style folks, such as ZHU - great music but hes not out there trying to push 'lifestyle' bs, as much as others.

There are still tons of great musicians and bands making new music today, but the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years ago.

Among other things is that popular attention, once focused by a handful of local radio stations and three national broadcast networks (in the US), has been atomized by a billion channels. The stuff that gets shoved down the big expensive earball-rich pipes is pablum for broad but weak appeal, processed by self-affirming accountants and algorithms, to a degree it simply was not a generation or two ago. It's simply not the same.

It's not a matter of getting old per se. It's a matter of having more context, more perspective. Yes, there's a lot of good music today. However, so much of it relies on what we've heard before, it rarely qualifies as great. Or, at best, great is relative to the current, which often is average at best.

Do I want to listen to (e.g.) New Order, or a knock-off of New Order?

Agree.

Today, it's mostly true that everything is available. The music that reaches the masses, though, is defined by production over musical quality.

Would we even see or hear from Cass Elliot, Janis Joplin, or Patsy Cline today? Producers would choose someone other than Patsy Cline for Crazy and twist Willie Nelson's arm to make him a ghostwriter on the song so the hot, autotuned, woman could claim she wrote it herself.

There is more to it than just getting older.

Objectively, it seems like less sophisticated music, in part because there isn't the same kind of money there once was in the system to pay for studio musicians, producers, etc.

Is it possible to create great songs despite that? Yes, but it involves a lot of "skating uphill".

You can see that older music is still getting a LOT of plays -- I think too many to make sense, unless we accept that the current industry is not healthy.

Here's an example: "The Ballad Of The Green Berets" by SSG Barry Sadler was number one for five weeks in 1966, tied with "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas And The Papas. That song is effectively gone now. It's no longer remembered. It didn't make the canon, because The Winnowing got to it, so now it isn't part of The Sixties as a consensus mass memory. "California Dreamin'" which was objectively just as popular by the metric of the charts, however, is pretty well remembered and is, therefore, part of the canon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_the_Green_Berets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kj9qv6rmG8

Newer music hasn't gone through The Winnowing. More of the chaff is still remembered. Therefore, it all looks worse.

With a few exceptions, modern music is autotuned-to-death, boring, indistinguishable crap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uMW2XsMx8Q

There’s more amazing music being made than ever, and the stuff with big money behind it is worse than ever.

Juvenoia: "The fear or hostility directed by an older generation toward a younger one, or toward youth culture in general."

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0x7ho_IYc

My teenage kid strongly feels that modern pop music is trash quality compared to previous decades, thinks that new “underground” music is poorly mimicking previous decades, and bemoans the lack of current scenes that she can participate in. It’s a bit sad watching her sift through 90s/00s music rather than dig into new music of her generation, but I can hear the problem when she plays me both the underground and pop stuff her friends are listening to. It’s tame.

There have been profound infrastructural changes to cultural production and distribution, lead by SV and VCs. These have served to massively boost stock valuations of centralising digital platforms. The music they produce is affected by these changes. The faux meta genre “hyperpop” even exploits this (boringly imo). It’s reassuring to believe the kids are alright but the problem is not the kids.

Digital audio from the listener end had its piece, but two other trends also converged:

- Digital audio from the producer end continued to advance and become cheaper. You can make pretty good recordings on a laptop with the appropriate sound interfaces now, if you have a decent soundproofed room. That is assuming your music isn't digital synth based. Studios are a thing of the past or what a person who likes to produce music calls their bedroom or basement.

- People started caring about the portability of music much more than the quality of it. That trend goes as far back as the Walkman. Regarding the quality, now no one cares if the SNR of your "recording studio" can accurately record all 20-20KHz band of a pindrop from 5 miles away at delta-sigma modulated 192Kbps. If it sounds good with headphones or a car stereo it's fine. This is why MP3 was successful despite its audio quality issues.

There is one thing i learned from Warez: If you like the game, buy it.

As someone that jumped on the Napster and, to a lesser extent, Limewire and Kazaa bandwagon, their value for me wasn't so much that I could get something for free that cost money at the local record store, but it was stuff that couldn't get at all at my local record store.

That said, and much later on, the ability to legitimately listen to music on-demand via Spotify and its ilk pretty much ended my trips to the store.

I was a teenager limited to summer job money, but I was happy to buy music on the iTunes store when it launched. I bought CDs as well, but my primary motivation for piracy was that record stores had a limited selection and often exorbitant prices (because the industry was engaged in price fixing^), and the record labels seemed to care more about stopping online music consumption and forcing people to buy CDs than actually providing a worthwhile paid service–their official channels were godawful, see PressPlay.

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_price_fixing

You had absolutely the choice to buy CDs and not pirate anything from the Web. And the "hole" never nearly got filled with legal online services anyway even when they existed. 1999 CD sales are still the peak of music revenue.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing the likes of Clear Channel/iHeartRadio to take over all the stations, shows to be the real culprit.

At the time we joked, due to the steep decline in radio variety, that CD sales would crater because people would only get to know a small handful of artists, leaving few CDs to buy, and the numbers here confirm it was more than just a joke.

Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12 EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry worked hard to make enemies for life.

I'm happy with streaming but I'm also happy to buy a vinyl to additionally support my favourite artists, even when it costs 30-40€.

A market economy determines the value of goods by what people are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays, legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy, which is free and only a little inconvenient, so the streaming price is forced to a very low level. Musicians can hardly make money from music sales anymore. If you make a type of music that isn't well suited for concerts, and you aren't massively popular, you are screwed.

The web is just TV3.0, reserved for acceptable political and commercial content now. Eh I’m done with that; switching off to all of it. Will stick to internet for job and not use it on my personal desktop, just phone.

Copyright rent seekers can do something useful for humanity or stick to making it about “the art” and perform local theatre

You don't mention any of these possible causes though.

> interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good

Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But cassettes weren't much worse overall than records. The audio quality wasn't as good as vinyl (though that came mostly from cheaper tapes, good tapes has fairly competitive audio) and aged more quickly, but they were much smaller, which was a big advantage. So overall, cassette piracy was competitive with vinyl sales, but not with CD sales.

Everyone bought CDs when they got popular because:

- They sounded better

- They didn't wear out from playing them

- Small/Portable/Durable

- Easy to move between tracks

- No need to flip them to go to the other side (some cassette players eventually figured out how to do this without a flip)

That's pretty much always been the case, no matter how art was distributed, though - yet people still love creating it enough to take the gamble.

Assuming an average tenure of 20 years in the limelight, that's 32000 over the course of a 80 year lifespan, which is probably more than anyone will bother to listen to in a lifetime.

Not to mention the tens of thousands of historic and famous artists.

When put in that perspective it actually makes total sense why no one will bother paying to listen to the 50 000th most popular artist, the chances of any given person being more interested in the other 49 999 at any given time is approaching 100%.

Because of how many more people want to be professional artists than have the capability to competitively operate at a professional level (inclusive of both raw artistic and second order marketing talent), there will never be enough demand to support anything but the very best of the artists who would like to make a living off of their product.

But I also think that conflicts with the idea you just mentioned, that of being able to get a personal AI to make everything for you. AI has shown the ability to make a mediocre product that one can tolerate, but not a great product for personal consumption that would lead you to become a loyal fan.

If anything, I think AI will take the grunt work out of all the tasks a great work an artist has to do, and let them focus on the parts that cannot be outsourced -- coming up with and distributing a great, differentiated product.

I know a lot of artists, musicians, actors and even a painter or two who actually make a living from what they love. You know what none of them do? Make their living from people buying recordings or reproductions of their work. They all make money by playing gigs, performing and doing commissions. Some of them do really well, too.

Oh, and AI is not going to replace the band on the patio, or the actress in a local production of "Crazy for You" any time soon.

I used to love exploring friends' music collections, seeing where tastes overlap. "Everyone has everything via Spotify" completely eliminates this. And I don't see us going back in any substantially wider sense, the genie's out of the bottle. Ah the march of progress, eh...

The record companies and the top 10 or so of the artists.

It is probably not "list occupation as drummer on your tax return and get a 25 euro buck credit"

It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.

They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse, distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be ruined.

In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film dolefully flapping about in the breeze.

This is not a format to be overly nostalgic for.

There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism.

Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed.

And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.

If you stay away from the cheap consumer printers that are designed to sell ink cartridges, printers are not so bad. We have a Brother multifunction office inkjet printer that's been great, ink is reasonably priced (cheaper than the laser printer that we replaced with it), and it reliably prints around 5 - 10,000 pages/year as well as scanning almost as many pages. (Wife works in a state regulated industry and they require a lot of paper documentation, every year they promise to release the system that will reduce the need for so much paper, and it's always 6 months away)