'Piracy is the new radio' says Neil Young

[cosmiccow]

Neil Young came to the stage of D: Dive into Media to talk with Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka about the current distribution and quality of digital music. Young is primarily concerned about whether the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint. He says that your average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording and he says Apple Lossless only offers "10.3 percent." The concern is twofold, which Young called the "front and back end" of the donkey. The back end is the devices we're using to listening to audio, and Young hopes that we'll get better devices than what's currently available. For example, on Beats Audio, he says "I think they make it look better, and I think they make it have more bass." Young also wants to see better music recording and high resolution recording, but we're not anywhere near that yet. He hopes that "some rich guy" will solve the problem of creating and distributing "100 percent" of the sound in music.

One rich guy Young knew was Steve Jobs and on that subject, Young had this to say:

Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. [...] But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.​

Young is calling for a new digital ecosystem of high quality music files and he believes that Jobs would have gotten there had he lived long enough. On the distribution side, Young isn't particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists, he's more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality:

It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. [...] That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.​

Despite that attitude, Young is still on the side of record labels because they care about music and about supporting artists — but somehow we doubt those studios take the same attitude towards piracy that Young does.

http://www.theverge....s-the-new-radio

This is exactly how I see it myself - sans the concerns about quality. MP3 V0 or FLAC is enough.
Also I do discover so many artists that I wouldn't get on the radio.

 

[DSGamer64]

Yup, very few people in the business seem to get it, but at least some people make it clear that digital audio has it's flaws and that there are improvements to be made. However having a lossless audio format would call for an increase in storage capacities of portable audio players due to the considerably larger file sizes in order to store more music. I know some albums in FLAC are easily 1.5GB.

 

[gloweyjoey]

OMG I LOVE NEIL YOUNG! THEY SHOW HIM WHEN HE IS AT ALL THE SHARKS GAMES!!!!!11!1!1ONE(sucks about that fire that burnt his stuff though =C)

 

[KingdomBlade]

I think that Youtube might be more appropriately described as the new radio in the sense that it doesn't propagate albums and instead songs, most primarily singles. (and it's legal)

 

[notmeanymore]

Yup, very few people in the business seem to get it, but at least some people make it clear that digital audio has it's flaws and that there are improvements to be made. However having a lossless audio format would call for an increase in storage capacities of portable audio players due to the considerably larger file sizes in order to store more music. I know some albums in FLAC are easily 1.5GB.

He's talking about something even bigger than FLAC. Apple Lossless, which he berates in the interview, sounds exactly the same as FLAC, because it's lossless. What Neil Young was getting at, is that 89.7% (idk where he got that number) of the music is lost in the digital conversion process. How true that is, I don't know. I don't own a vinyl player, but I intend to at some point.

 

[nando]

i don't thinks Beats look good at all and moar bass does not = more accurate.

 

[shakirmoledina]

to my understanding, there are far more legal ways for promoting than this. its like saying being rebellious drops the govt and puts the one whom u like in charge. or cheating makes u pass. there are better ways to change a govt and to pass.

 

[Ace Overclocked]

peter kefka?
sorry had to say it, i LOVE ff6

 

[frogboy]

I still use the radio... *shot*

 

[Densetsu]

Piracy...killed the radio star?

 

[gloweyjoey]

LONG LIVE VYNIL!

 

[Langin]

What comes after piracy?(Yes I am serious)

 

[AlanJohn]

So can I pirate on-the-go in my car or something?

 

[DS1]

What comes after piracy?(Yes I am serious)

Kidnapping artists and making them sing in your living room.

 

[Veho]

What comes after piracy?(Yes I am serious)

As a means of spreading and promoting music? Ad-filled websites that let you download music for free and give (most of) the ad money to the authors. Also, they would sell merchandise and concert tickets.

 

[xist]

Does he realise that Digital Radio is awful quality when he has those concerns about quality? In the UK at least Digital Radio is only 128Kbps Mono, which is worse than 99% of most "pirated" encodes.

Also....Radio is the old piracy...

 

[FAST6191]

UK digital radio is a running joke although it does have planet rock (pours beer for AM band arrow rock radio) so I will forgive it a bit but I should also mention that the 128kbps is MP2 rather than MP3 or something better still which is worse.

I am just trying to puzzle out the high percentage- standard Nyquist theorem says to encode a signal you need a sample rate at least twice the highest frequency which in humans is about 22kHz (more like 17kHz for me on a very good day but hey) hence the 44kHz of CD to say nothing of how the ability to hear the higher frequencies drops off. If you losslessly encode that I fail to see where loss a human can discern ( http://www.lsu.edu/deafness/HearingRange.html has a nice table of various animals) creeps in- if I had to guess I would suggest it is something related to a decibel calculation.

If however he wants to bemoan the tendency to amplify to the point of clipping (normalising) most modern mixing/mastering studios seem to favour I am in.

As for the matter at hand did I hallucinate tape swapping?

 

[Fat D]

The problem with digital audio is often said to be quantization. Keep in mind that digitalization not only samples, but also quantizes, meaning there is a limited number of "levels" the sound can have at a certain point. CDs are 16 bit per sample, but that is impractical for regular use. Hearing the quantization noise on CDs would largely boil down to the placebo effect though, I would say.

 

[Veho]

As for the matter at hand did I hallucinate tape swapping?

No, it was real and it bankrupt and destroyed the music industry and left the artists starving huh, turns out it didn't do that much damage after all.

 

[ferofax]

I think that Youtube might be more appropriately described as the new radio in the sense that it doesn't propagate albums and instead songs, most primarily singles. (and it's legal)

i think Neil's referring to the scale and scope of radio and the internet. in radio's heyday, you can hear it everywhere. now that there's internet almost everywhere (thanks mostly to 3G and 4G), it's pretty much on the same relative scale. saying that YT is the new radio is like picking a single frequency channel.

propagation is a bit different, but when tape recorders came into existence, a new method of piracy was born similar to ripping streaming media.

oh yeah, Ashley Riot and Callo Merlose FTW! Riskbreakers are awesome shit.