psu_13

I got the Rivers today. It looks almost new to me. Thanks!

Here is a relevant quote from the Byrne book, fwiw: “What is called the music business today, however, is nothing like what I researched before signing that first contract. In fact, the music business is hardly even in the business of producing music anymore. At some point, it became primarily the business of selling objects—LPs, cassettes, CDs in plastic cases—and that business will soon be over.” The chapter then goes on to discuss the nature of music and music retailing in a social and historical context. Recommended.

I won't address the larger philosophical questions relating to common culture because I'm not really qualified to do so. I do have a certain amount of ambivalence about the current state of music retailing. This is one reason I won't use streaming as the sole way listen to music that interests me. I'll stream it once or twice, and if I'm going to do more than that I'll buy the disk or at least the download. I feel for people who are trying to make a living in "content creation" in the modern age, since the content is the first thing that is made into a cheap commodity that can no longer pay a living wage except to the very lucky. On the other hand, I don't feel a lot of sympathy (necessarily) to the large media companies. I can't count the number of times I would have liked to buy record A, B or C only to have it be out of print, or only available as an expensive import, or even only available for download in (say) France but not the U.S., all for seemingly arbitrary reasons. I wonder what the real overhead is to the companies that own the content to make the digital masters (and pdfs of the liners) available at the various download services. They don't even have to host the files or the network bandwidth. They just need to allow me to pay to download them. And yet things still go "out of print". This confuses me, but I figure I just must not understand something about how the industry works.

I still have most of my physical media around, but I never use it. I play things primarily out of iTunes after ripping the stuff there. I'm also mixing in some Spotify to try things I'm not sure about. The only physical media I really feel like I need to keep are the Mosaics, but only because of the booklets. I've had multiple old Mosaic CDs actually bit-rot, one to the point where it became un-rippable. This tells me that CDs are not meant to last more than around 20 years, so if you really care about your music, you will rip all of it to a hard disk that you can make copies of every year. I also don't really hear much of a difference between 256K AAC and lossless rips. I do lossless rips sometimes though just for the sake of keeping irreplaceable media in their "original form" (i.e. CDs from Mosaic sets ). I should set the turntable up or the vinyl though. Vinyl is at least fun.

Sent a PM about the Rivers. One can only hold out so long.

In theory CD-R should be much much less permanent than pressed CDs because while normal CDs store the bits physically in the disk itself, the data on a CD-R is encoded in a dye layer that fades over time. OTOH, the permanence of even actual CDs is somewhat suspect. I've had at least one disk in a 20 year old Mosaic set (Art Blakey, RIP) become unreadable, and many of my older CDs show strange discolorations and other effects, although the data still seems readable. I would say that if you are concerned about permanence you should rip every CD you buy and back up the files in at least 2 or 3 places.