I recently had a conversation with someone who proudly announced he had 40,000 tracks on his hard drives, a not uncommon amount in this day and age, the kind of quantity it might have taken an old school vinyl collector a lifetime to accrue. However the vinyl buyer would have spent considerable time and money, if not blood, sweat and tears to gather that music into one place, whereas for the digital age music lover this can be achieved easily, painlessly and often with little regard for what he's collecting. The first question I usually ask someone like that is what format they have that music in, and the answer is invariably as mp3s, and often of the lowest quality. It seems that quantity not quality is the order of the day for many. So we all have a ton of music, which we listen to on our modern systems, be they computers with external speakers or surround sound systems for our multi-media, whatever, as long as it sounds loud and big we tend not to notice the difference and the fact that our listening experience has been enormously degraded by the source and means of reproduction of those sounds is something that is rarely questioned by the majority. In an age when even cd releases are deliberately mastered in a way that eliminates the natural dynamics of the music, it begs the question why anyone would bother to make and record music of real hi-fidelity.
Let's face it though, who is bothering to make music in that way? Even major record companies are quite happy for their artists to record in a digital home studio, not surprising when you consider how they'll master the cd and how the vast majority will listen to that music. And in a world where music is free and we all have lots of it, which we'll probably listening to with the wonderful dj shuffle at the controls, where does that leave the place of music in our lives? Unloved and taken for granted are two expressions that immediately come to mind. Another experience I had recently, and again doubtless very common, was at someone's house where indeed their laptop (through some meaty speakers with a hefty sub) was spilling out a reckless selection of tunes in the background. During a lull in the conversation I heard something unfamiliar which really caught my ear, when I asked my host what it was he of course had to go and consult his i-tunes for the artist and title. We live in an age of excess, and music is now definitely another commodity that's suffering from over-consumption, podcasts galore, file sharing, whole digital collections passed from one to another, and even in the death throes of the music industry there's no shortage of new releases.
The fall-out? Well already the enormous changes in the music industry have taken their toll. Rewind back a decade or more and there were still healthy sales possible for a welter of less mainstream artists, which in turn supported a gamut of independent labels and distributors, and lots of djs were still playing vinyl so the twelve inch market was thriving. Remixers were paid healthy fees, major labels craved the kudos of having hip dance producers remixing their artists and even for independents it made economic sense to pay the right remixer a healthy fee to give their release more legs. People still owned cd players and turntables and listened to their music in an entirely different way from today's i-pod, i-tunes, mp3 modus operandi. With the economic state of play today the fact of the matter is that a whole strata of the music industry has been obliterated. Musicians hustle to pay the rent, studios close down or lie idle, and worst of all there's all the music which just isn't even getting made. Of course for those who are happy to make tracks entirely digitally, or have the facility to play and record everything themselves there's still some leeway, but in age where independent labels continue to struggle, and sales of cds continue to decline whilst downloads both legit and illegal represent the bulk of the market, it's tough to make any money from releasing music, and that's an understatement.
The album, the long playing record, the wonder product of the late twentieth century for music is dying alongside the changes in patterns of consumption. It never ceased to amaze me when I bought my Sunday Observer and once a month the music supplement would tail it's album reviews with the pithy recommendation to "download this", with the implied notion that you might even not have to pay for it. An artist strives to amass a body of work that binds together in some kind of cohesive way, running orders are stressed about, some tracks never make the grade, artwork is considered, credits compiled, sleeve notes may be written. Historically the album format has been the yardstick whereby an artist's progress, their intentions, their direction, their soul and their value has been measured, only for someone to download the essential cuts to sit anonymously in a list of thousands of others. Of course the history of music making is riddled with examples where this might be considered a healthy response, an album might be a bunch of fillers and just one killer. Where does that leave the true classics? Maybe those records just aren't getting made, but I never read a review that said download the whole album, in the age of shuffle who's going to listen from to bottom even if it is Kind Of Blue or Astral Weeks? Our short attention spans, our overloaded ears just aren't up to that kind of absorption in the music, and anyway the chances are we're not really hearing it properly anyway.
I grew up in Ipswich and my teenage years were often spent listening to vinyl albums sitting on someone's floor whilst the music came tumbling out of big old speakers, invariably these were Celestion Ditton 22s or 44s, as the factory was in town and everybody seemed to have a route to a cheap or knocked-off pair. That was how I remember music sounding, big old Japanese amplifiers, turntables that were either Dual if you were on a budget, or Thorens or something even more esoteric if you weren't. The music sounded warm and was full of depth and colour. A few years ago I realised that my life as dj had taken my listening experience down to a level where that magic I remembered was no longer what I was hearing, the speakers were big and rugged, there was a budget power amplifier doing the driving and my Technics were routed through a Pioneer mixer that had all the toys, but where was the sound? So off I went on a quest to rediscover the joys of my youth, and the best speakers I'd ever heard were made by Rogers. I'd passed an amazing looking hi-fi shop ( http://www.audiogold.co.uk/ ) in North London many times and noticed it seemed to sell alot of vintage gear, so when I went in with a bundle of cash (cos inevitably these things don't come cheap) , and I was introduced to the joys of the Rogers LS3/5A, a pint sized speaker originally designed for the BBC's outside broadcast vans but now the stuff of hi-fi legend. http://www.ls35a.com/ On that day I took as my sample cd a Japanese issue of one of my favourite recordings Donald Byrd's Places And Spaces, coming out of the Rogers I heard a whole new dimension to that familiar Mizell Brothers sound that had never blessed my ears before! A long winded way of getting back to my point about the way we listen to (and the way we consume) our music. You may think that the sound emanating from your modern system is big and fat, there may well be a sub that makes even the weediest mp3 sound like it's got balls, but depth and detail it won't have. Musicality? Funny word I know, but when you hear a great analogue recording through the right equipment there's no other word that is more appropriate.
I really don't mind setting myself up as grumpy old man/boring old fart if this is how you want to read it, but something is dying and if you're really a music lover, think about it. How you acquire and how you listen to the music you love is crucial to the future survival of great sound and great music being made. Don't get me wrong I'm a big fan of alot of new school sounds that are mashed together in home studios, creativity is ultimately the true key, but even that kind of music sounds a whole lot better on a good system and whoever made it stands a much better chance of carrying on doing so if you've paid for it.
