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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Something I don't think anyone has thought of.

The conventional idea is a band makes a CD of their songs, mastered to perfection, stamps out CDs and streams, and that's it. The exact same audio, let's call it the "radio edit". I hear the song on the radio, it's exactly the same. I can tell when a performer is lip syncing, because no singer sings a song the same way twice, and I know the radio edit. It's burned in my brain.

But, I discovered that when real bands, like Fleetwood Mac, play a concert, they play their old standards, but in a different way every time. I bought their concert CDs, because hearing different versions of the same song makes it fresh and fun again.

So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.

I suppose they think they are doing that with the "remastered" edits, but those all stink. Sing it again, Sam!

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First you are wrong from the very start. Although the original source is usually the same many cases the radio-edit was not the same audio as the album version. It was usually much shorter. There is a reason it was called radio edit.

> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.

In no particular order:

- because concert recordings already achieve this purpose.

- because time in the studio is costly, and you are not touring or composing while you are doing it.

- because every single person will have her favorite studio version, the same way they may have their favorite concert radio and most would not buy n versions of the same song and would dislike the slightly modified one. Some have already produced n version, uncensored and censored versions. Usually you like the one you heard first the most.

- Producing many different SKUs does not magically equal to making significantly more sales and can reduce revenues if stock of the less popular ones do not sell.

Also, if they're not the same recording, they're not the same album, which means that the popularity of any individual album is split. Contracts get better the better an album does on the charts, but if you release the same album three times, you're competing against yourself.

Release the variations under the same SKU. It's not like you're manufacturing rocket engine parts. Have some fun with it! This whole thread of "it can't work because that isn't the way we've always done it" is comical to me.

"Have some fun with it"... For most bands, each album they put out is a year's worth of effort and a year of income. You don't want to get de-listed from the charts because it looks like you're gaming the system. If your album charts, it's guaranteed radio and playlist placements, leading to more exposure.

Most bands are funded similar to VC.. there's an investment, then payoff then profit. If you don't payoff the investment because you "had fun with it", your band will be dropped and you are searching for a label while working your day job.

> First you are wrong from the very start.

LOL

> because concert recordings already achieve this purpose

They are quite different, not subtly different.

> because time in the studio is costly

When they do 20 takes and pick the "best", there's always a second "best". It's not like you're starting over.

> and you are not touring or composing while you are doing it

C'mon, a big chunk of the composing is done in the studio. I watched "Get Back" and saw the many variations before the Beatles picked one.

> most would not buy n versions of the same song

Sure, but some would, and that number is greater than epsilon. I'd buy Led Zeppelin variants.

> Producing many different SKUs

Make the small variations the same SKU. Slight variations does not imply that either is better than the other.

> When they do 20 takes and pick the "best", there's always a second "best". It's not like you're starting over.

For modern pop music... as i understand it, the 'best' is a compilation of the 20 takes. There isn't necessarily a 'second best' take to choose. You could comp the takes differently, but i don't know anyone in any field who likes intentionally doing a job less than what they think is the 'best'.

Music fandom is diverse. Some listeners are casual, but others are collectors who love digging into the nuances of an artist’s work

There used to be a few sites (what.cd? waffles?) that, while officially pirate / torrent sites, were treasure troves of rare music; unpublished stuff, limited issue tapes from music markets, bootlegs / live recordings, FLAC versions of vinyls (which, at least for a while, had improved dynamic range compared to CDs, think music without the loudness war stuff), etc.

Of course, the music industry went after them once it was discovered they weren't actually a waffle recipe website, and the sites were taken down. I hope the copies and archives continue to live on on data hoarders' systems.

All your arguments fall by the fact that even great artists record and put out a large amount of sub-par and even bad songs.

Oddly enough your user name points to a great artist whose songs were mostly great -- at least the ones I know about.

I didn't even think about that when writing the comment. But even the great Jobim had some duds. More importantly, I think the career of Jobim proves the original user's point. He was without any challengers the best composer of the 20th century, and he released different versions of many of his songs. Something which was not uncommon in the past. So why don't modern stars for example invite another popular singer to sing their song and release such a version?

From the 'Save the Archive' site: "But when their Great 78 Project rescued over 400,000 recordings, major labels responded with a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for research library streams of old vinyl records.... Artists and labels alike should partner with valuable cultural stewards like the Internet Archive—not sue them. It’s time to support nonprofit music preservation to ensure that our music and our stories aren’t lost to history."

Most of the hundreds of old 78 labels (Brunswick, Federal, Odeon, Okeh, to name a few) [0] are long gone, as are their masters (if any) and their artists. IA recovered those recordings from existing copies made long, long ago... preserving a cultural heritage directly from collections of music available -only- on 78s. Many of the recordings were made with fragile shellac.

That is apparently the focus of these invidious lawsuits.

[0] http://78discography.com/

(Warning: gross simplification ahead)

Because they don’t make (practically) any money on CD sales, streaming, or radio plays, the record labels do. That one performance is recorded, and they get paid for that performance and the record label owns it. Any time that recording is played, it’s seen as a marketing to sell the album.

The artist makes their money through each live performance, so it makes sense for them to change things up so concert goers have an incentive to see something new.

> they don’t make (practically) any money on CD sales

No, not any more, because Napster and the other IP-theft networks that followed in its wake destroyed that revenue model, both for the musicians and the record companies. But before that, many popular musicians made very large fortunes purely from record sales. So much so that some of them, most famously the Beatles, were able to give up live performance altogether.

Also, I would suggest that what draws typical audiences to live performance is not the hope of hearing the lead guitarist bust out hot new variations on his solos. What they enjoy is the communal experience and the thrill of seeing famous people in the flesh.

May I introduce you to literally all of Classical and Jazz Music?

Hell, tons of other genres are recorded piles of times with each being different. Even in the pop world, covers exist, a long tradition of different artists doing the same song.

Beat'cha to it, I have maybe 6 versions of Holst's "The Planets". And I love them all.

But they're each done by different musicians. They're not different takes from the same studio sessions.

Young vs old Glen Gould playing the same Bach, for example.

In jazz it's more common to see multiple recordings of the same song by the same artist. Bill Evans recordings of Autumn Leaves opened up my mind for exploring this.

> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs?

I had that exact same thought today when listening to Snarky Puppy’s re-release of We Like It Here. I have become so familiar with the original release that all of the differences in the remixes sound like mistakes, and the alternative takes sound like the musician forgot to read the music.

Yes, I realise they’re improvised. Which is the point. Because they only published one canonical improvisation (until now) my conception of their music was made rigid in a way that probably wasn’t intended by the artists.

(It also makes me appreciate the work that Giles Martin did on The Beatles’ remixes, that any deviation would be seen as heresy, and yet he’s managed to avoid any substantive controversy.)

I happen to like the Herb Alpert remixes of the Beatles' songs even better than the originals.

That’s a great example of how a fresh take can sometimes resonate even more than the original

Remixes or covers? I can find the latter but not the former.

Maybe in the future, recordings could have an AI component to them, such that every time you play it, you get a subtly different performance.

Some artists may choose to lean in the technology more than others, with one extreme being soloists and improvisations published in the form of a bespoke model, trained on the entire history of jazz and refined by the artist to suit their tastes and the particular piece of music.

> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.

They do though; more and more I'm seeing artists publish alternative edits, remasters, live versions, demos, songs-that-didn't-make-it, basically more of their back catalog onto streaming platforms. These "rare" tracks aren't going to sell albums so the investment to publish a new album won't be worth it, but uploading more stuff to streaming platforms is relatively cheap and easy in comparison. It's long tail stuff, but streaming platforms earn big on long tail.

> more and more

That is absolutely nothing new. Artists have known what OP is saying, and have been doing exactly that, since we started putting music on tin foil in 1877.

thats like the entire jamband scene which been around since the 60s... the grateful dead, phish, kind gizzard and the lizard wizard...

one could also mention the electronic scene in there. aphex twin released ventolin in 1995 which was the same track remixed multiples times with different edits.

This has been done, and wow, does it not work...

A while back, Scorpions decided to re-record all their hits and release them on an album. The result was so close in production and performance that Apple Music went ahead and swapped the new version in place of the original.

You'd dial up Rock You Like a Hurricane, and it'd play this thing that sounded just like the version you had burned into your head, but subtly different. It was like watching a car chase scene in a straight-to-Netflix movie where they thought they could get away with doing the whole thing in CGI. Straight down the middle of Uncanny Valley, to the point where you can't enjoy the song at all, and just spend your 4 minutes cataloging the tiny differences that don't live up to the Real Thing.

Those hit songs all captured Magic in some way that just can't be recreated. Plenty have tried what you're talking about (Great White did the same trick, redoing their early stuff with their new singer), but all it does is create bland copies that don't live up to the original. They actually make you wonder why you liked the original in the first place, since (in GW's case) the replacement is just a cookie-cutter blues rock song that anybody could have done.

It's hard to believe until you hear it, since yeah, it seems like a good idea.

I hear you, and am as baffled as you are.

Why, then, do I love all the various Fleetwood Mac concert versions of their songs better than the radio edits?

Because live, not studio.

Did Han sSlo shoot first?

On topic, I like studio and live versions but some artists are better better at one than the other.

They are much more raw and less polished so you can't mistake the concert radio for a studio one and vice-versa and it doesn't catch you completely off guard when there are differences.

Same with unplugged versions.

> catch you completely off guard

And what's the problem with that? Wow. I didn't know the music business was so stodgy :-)

Novelty, it's not that hard to understand.

Bands do what you described the Scorpions doing so the band will own the master.

Owning the master means when Carnival Cruise Lines wants to license “Virgin Killer” the band gets the money.

> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.

Because, to a first approximation, you and I don't result in any real revenue no matter what an artist does.

If you're a mid-tier artist, you want to fully extract money from your 100 rabid fans who will show up every single time you appear in that area and everybody else can go hang.

> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.

When was the last time you heard anything off of Blackstar by Bowie? Or any of Johnny Marr's latest stuff?

The issue isn't creating music. It's getting any of your music played anywhere.

> let's call it the

Call it the "studio version".

A "radio edit" is a cut for quick consumption.

Relatively quick, ~3 minutes wasn't it? For quick consumption you'll now get the "tiktok edit" of ~10-30 seconds. I wonder how much the artists of popular short-video music earn though, given the samplers of their songs can get tens of millions of views / listens.

Pop music is kind of doing this, serially recording variations that prompt critics to ask "why are all songs the same?"

I've worked in a number of recording sessions. There are seldom actually multiple takes -- those cost money. There is usually one publishable take. When you've got that one in the can, you move on to the next song. But naturally I can't speak for major acts like Fleetwood Mac. Historically, bands varied a lot in terms of how much editing they wanted to do. Many hits were recorded in one take by hired studio musicians.

I agree that something like this would help bring back the authenticity to music, it would almost be like the equivalent of how DVDs have director commentary, outtakes, etc.

The movie business does things like "directors cut", "restored cut", etc. I'm sure it would be expensive to have more alternate cuts of the same scene. But when a studio does 20 takes of a song to get the perfect version, it would be cheap to release a bunch of them.

Have you ever seen a TV commercial played to death, to the point where you hate the commercial, the product, and the company behind it? I bet that would be less of a problem if the same commercial had several different takes, and then mix them up when broadcasting them. (Yes, I know some are deliberately different, and yes, it helps.) Even a version now and then where they flub their lines, or trip over something, etc.

Wouldn't it be more fun if Star Wars had two versions, one where Han shoots first, one where Greedo does, and you never knew which one you'd see when going to the theater? There are still a couple flubs in the released version, like when Luke yells "Carrie", there could be different reels released at the same time. The fans would then be impelled to keep going to the theater hoping to see all the different versions.

New masters and new takes absolutely show up. But only on the most successful songs, and mostly only after some time.

And, of course, there's always the unplugged variants and the performance CDs.

Right, and they're done to juice the declining sales of the original. My idea was to release slightly different versions at the same time. Have two albums, identical cover, identical catalog number, same songlist, just the songs are different takes, maybe a different arrangement. The fans will be impelled to keep buying the album until they get both.

Some albums are published (also on streaming) with a commentary track, or a podcast series and making-of video series alongside it by the musician. Or n=1, I know Devin Townsend has taken to doing it. Ultimately they're all promotion for their albums and concerts, of course, but they're great for their "personal branding" as well.

Taylor Swift did exactly this, though for different reasons.

I would have a great time selecting the edit which best fits the mood of the playlist I'm making.

I also like the imperfections in the live versions. They're more human and less plastic that way.

A live album sort of is that.

I wonder if the real obstacle here is the music industry’s obsession with efficiency

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