Dear Moses,

Nice article. You raise a lot of good points. I feel that you missed the essential point, however. So it seemed prudent to comment about it.

The essential factor that has undermined the impact of recorded music is Digital recording and reproduction. Why ? It’s simple really. All Digital recording and reproducing formats to date... do not provide a full fidelity reproduction of the sound source. And Digital is ‘tricksy’. It sounds great at first. But over time, our brains ‘learn past’ the ‘tricksy’ digital algorithms that cover the fact that the full fidelity sound isn’t all there. So what happens is that Music, as a ‘sound art’ experience has been sonically abbreviated to such a point that it loses its impact.

AND... just about everything is Digital now. So the jig is up, totally !

When the sonic/emotional impact of music and recorded music playback systems is reduced, due to Digital reproduction and recording systems and their limitations... music is no longer an overwhelming experience. Instead, it becomes a very tidy ‘product’... just like a designer bag of organic potato chips is.

Isn’t that a horrible fate ? Now people get to muse: “Will I get those rosemary/garlic organic potato chips... or the next ‘White Stripes’ single ?” And more often than not... the answer will be: “I’ll take the chips please !”

Why ?

Could it be that since the chips are a true full fledged ‘real’ experience (no digital potato chips yet, matey !)... so that real the potato chip experience TRUMPS the Digital music experience ?

Could be.

What has to happen is that ARTISTS have to call a stop to this nonsense. Someone with balls has to say “Enough... I will only record and release my stuff in the highest fidelity format, and f#ck the rest !”

At this point... what fomat would that be I wonder ? I’ll bet that Walter Sear, of Sear Sound Recording Studios, in New York City, has the answer.

I guess all I can say at this point is ‘straight ahead... and strive for tone !’.

I agree with many of your thought but I disagree that the digitalization of music has contributed to the industry's downfall. A cheap MP3 player today still sounds light years better than a "good" transistor radio of yesterday.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of music consumers have never listened to music in any way or on any gear that most of us would consider anything other than crap: 78's; LPs with worn needles long in need of replacing; tiny, tinny, crappy portable record players; transistor radios; 8-track tapes; cheap cassette players; and cheap generic Best Buy-esque dorm boom boxes have always been the norm. Even the industry standard for breaking new acts--OTA broadcast radio--is highly compressed and poor sounding.

The Beatles (just to name one example) reached such soaring heights of popularity from the quality of the music they were creating and not from the quality of the devices their music was played on. I suspect the issue is that as it's become easier for more independent acts to enter into the fray, the once locked-up playing field is quickly being diluted. The major labels have competition in their own yard that they never had before. Add to that all the myriad other ways for the consumer to spend their dollars (home theatre, video games, etc.) and things seem a bit clearer. I suspect that the same amount of money is being spent by the same number of people, it's just being spent in more areas.

Dear Moses,
As a culture we are debasing the art form of music. Whether through overexposing music until it becomes merely the backtrack for activities, or the ever sillier ways we exploit the works of artists, as a society we are losing the ability to express ourselves creatively through music either as listeners or as composers/performers.

I disagree that record companies are trying to preserve music's ability to play an important role in our culture. Record companies operate on the profit motive, and any lip service they give to artistic or cultural concerns is a diversionary tactic. That is not to say that the people within those companies completely disregard music as an art form or a cultural force. Companies consist of people doing their jobs, and employees must work to earn a living. In that role they often must choose to promote the company over making something beautiful. Still I do not put the blame on record companies for the decline in attitudes towards music, nor on the digitization of music, or on the proliferation of music technology.

The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the patrons, listeners, and buyers of music. If the audience demands quality music, performed by skilled and talented artists, using the best instruments and technology available, the record companies would rush to provide it. Instead they have pursued a policy of neglect of artists. They don't develop talent; they categorize and pigeonhole the music; they regard the music as product. And the audience buys it anyway. Even as these companies complain about declining sales, there is more music sold now than ever before.

If they're not reaping as much filthy lucre as they'd like it's because many artists don't trust record companies to treat them and their art kindly. It's because there are entrepeneurs outside the industry seeking opportunites. It's because the record companies cultivated different buying habits and then didn't react quickly enough to take advantage. So they lose a few bucks. Lots of companies fail if they don't respond to market changes.

But these commercial aspects of music don't lead to culture changing art. That comes from great artists, and from an audience that appreciates their greatness. In fairness I should point out that there has been an incredible amount of culture change associated with the debased art of untrained musicians that prevails in the market today. Unfortunately bad art leads to crass culture.

So the real enemy of music's future is intellectual apathy. It's people who don't want to take the time to listen to anything challenging, artists who don't want to learn their craft, schools that drop music education from the curriculum, coroporate executives that shelve good work because it can't be pigeonholed, magazines that promote hacks and ignore masters, and the list goes on.

It is the individual drive for expression that is at stake here. Surely we have more to express than how fun it is to dance, or how much we want to hook up with a hottie, or how sorry we feel for ourselves because we can't bathe in a tub filled with Cristal. There will always be different levels of appreciation; some people have more refined tastes than others, but I think we could play the percentages and return to the day when popular music included innovative musicians (like Hendrix and the Beatles), masterful virtuosos (like Wes Montgomery and John Coltrane), along with the pretty people who dole out meaningless tripe.