Realty
Bytes – November 2015
Acetate cylinders (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder)
__ 78 RPM Records
__ 33 1/3 PRM Records
__ 45 RPM Records
__ Cabinet Radio
__ Portable (Transistor) Radio
__ Car Radio
__ Closed Circuit (Carrier Current)
Radio
__ Cassettes tapes
__ Compact Discs
__ MP3 Files
__ A Walkman or other portable
cassette player
__ An iPod or other portable MP3
player
__ Streaming broadcast on the
Internet.
__ Sirius FM
__ Spotify or Pandora or similar
music service
__ Concerts/Performances
__ Pono
__ Tidal
With the exception of the first and
last two, I have lived long enough to have experienced all of these. I
personally have some recordings in at least three different formats. I
once had a standing cabinet radio with vacuum tubes that played records,
including 78 rpm records with a steel needle. It had been my
grandfather's entertainment center.
The New York Times reported that 2014 represented a sea change in the way we listen to
music:
"The American market for recorded music was flat in
2014, but income from streaming services like Spotify and Pandora has
quickly grown to become a major part of the business, eclipsing CD sales for
the first time, according to a report released
Wednesday by the Recording Industry Association of America."
Several observations can be made
here.
It is self-evident that we want to
listen music on the go. Since broadcast radio went mobile with the car
radio and the transistor radio, we have not stopped the progression
of wanting to take music with us where we go. On a clear night in central
New York in the 1960s, I could listen to WCLF-AM (The Voice of Labor)
from Chicago. In college, the airwaves were filled the new progressive FM radio ("no static at all"). I spent time as a DJ on a carrier current station in
a college dormitory, where you could ask listeners to call with requests, put
on "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and be assured that no one would call.
The trans-formative social impact
of wireless communications has been noted by writers far more eloquent than
this scribe:
But it was
not only the earth that shook for us: the air around and above us was alive and
signaling too. When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial
wire attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept, in
through a hole bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right on into the
innards of our wireless set where a little pandemonium of burbles and squeaks
would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC newsreader speaking out of the
unexpected like a deus ex
machina. And that voice too we could hear in our bedroom,
transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults in the kitchen;
just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every voice, the frantic,
piercing signaling of Morse code.
Soon Moore's Law
began to take hold. Transistors became smaller and smaller and became
computer chips. We moved from portable cassette and CD players to iPods
and Zunes. The Internet changed everything again, slowly at first, then ever
faster. Streaming radio came along. Worldwide broadcasting became a
reality over the Internet. Bands and musicians at first found a way to
reach large audiences online.
Streaming music followed, with
iTunes and Amazon selling music files. Social media sites like
MySpace gave new artists exposure. YouTube brought music videos.
Now, we have streaming music
services -- Spotify and Pandora -- that have changed things again. It is
fair to say that there never has been so much music available so easily to so
many people from so many sources.
There have been compromises and
short-comings along this pilgrimage, however. If you remember long playing
phonograph records, you will recall the annoyances of scratches and analog
hiss. Compact discs seemingly offered a better solution. They were
more durable and did not have to be handled with as much care. Streaming
music seems even better. You can take it practically everywhere and only have
to keep the player dry and in one piece (and have a connection!).
Unfortunately, along the way, in the
shift from analog music to digital music, the quality of the music suffered.
The dynamics of digital music are not nearly as rich as the old analog
recordings. The convenience of compact disks and digitized music online
lured us away from our records by offering convenience, but quality arguably
diminished. We seemed content to accept the convenience
and sacrifice the quality.
When was the last time that you
listened to an analog recording on a record? How about your transistor
radio? Have you been out for a stroll with your Walkman recently?
Technological change has made earlier formats obsolete (with the
exception of audiophiles who still maintain turntables and other earlier play-back
devices). This change has relegated the music that we purchased in those
formats obsolete. I have hundreds of
records and two turntables and have not played any records in several
years. I also have hundreds of CDs and
only play them occasionally now in my car CD player (when I do not have my iPod
plugged in).
As we adopt the next wave of
technology, we end up having to acquire the music in that new format. We
may be buying new music, but we also may be buying (again) old favorites that
we still want to play.
One alternative might be
"streaming" music services, like Pandora or Spotify.
I have both on my mobile devices (ancient iPod and iPhone 6). I
like both, but prefer Spotify. Both provide streaming music if you are
connected via Wi-Fi or the Internet. There are "free" options,
with premium upgrade for a fee. I pay for the premium Spotify service,
which makes the streaming available pretty much anywhere you can connect and
allows you to download tracks so that they are available on your device when
you do not have a connection. These services allow you to create
playlists and provide a degree of background information on the artists and
different "channels" that simulate themed radio broadcasts.
Remember Hearts of Space? It's still
around and available for different devices. Pandora and Spotify are like
big box stores for themed programming.
As we are flooded with so much
digital music so "freely" available, do we care about the quality of
what we are hearing? Many do not seem to know that better quality is
possible. If you have taken the time to actually listen to digital
recordings, however, you understand that such recordings vary widely in
quality. Some of this comes from the time and care taken in producing the
original recording and its translation into digital format. An artist or
a producer may have insisted on better quality. (Examples that come to me
immediately -- music recordings produced by T. Bone Burnett and the Radiohead
catalog.) As consumers, we need to be wary of digital reissues that
promise to be better than the original analog recordings we knew and loved (and
still may own). Often, it is just a carnival huckster's sales pitch to
get you to buy the music all over again.
Through all of this, some artists
have not gone quietly down the path of mediocrity. Two examples are Neil
Young and Jay-Z. Neil Young has long spoken out about the inferior
quality of digital sound. Finally, he did more than talk about it.
He created a new digital music device with superior sound quality.
It is called Pono and you can find more information about it online. You can buy the Ponoplayer and digital music at the
Pono (or pono) store. "Cousin" Neil starts his explanation
this way:
Pono means righteous. It is a Hawaiian word, the one, the
pureness. On behalf of Pono, we thank you for helping us give music a voice.
You have helped to set the stage for a revolution in music listening. Finally,
quality enters the listening space so that we can all hear and feel what the
artists created, the way they heard and felt it.
The PonoPlayer only comes in yellow
and black and costs $399 and you still have to buy the music (again). The
Best of Kiss runs $16.49. Elvis Costello & The Attractions - This
Year's Model runs $20.99 for the entire album. R.E.M. - Document is
$14.29 for the entire album. Individual tracks from any of these are
$2.29 each. Once again, you are buying the music in a new format.
Meanwhile, Jay-Z (the artist
otherwise known as Mr. Beyonce) has launched Tidal. It is a digital streaming service attempting to
offer superior sound quality and equitable compensation of artists. It
has attracted an interesting alignment of artists. Prince can still be
found on Tidal. So can such seemingly different artists as Lana Del Rey
and David Gilmour. Tidal appears to be targeting Spotify in the
competition for world dominance. It is a subscription service that comes
with featured artists, videos, suggested playlists, and functions that allow
you to create your own playlists and stable of artists and recordings.
Tidal's pricing in the US is $9.99 per month for "Hi-Fi" and
$19.99 per month for "Premium".
These are steps in a direction to
bring improved quality to listeners and perhaps reclaim a market lulled
into acquiescence by abundant availability.
