Is There Big Trouble Brewing?

Lokie: You, too, are suffering from selective memory loss. No fabricated bands in the 60s? Remember the Monkees? And what about Motown--talk about the suits meddling with the art, Motownpractically invented the form.

The way you people chatter on, you'd think the last people who had any decent new music to listen to were Adam and Eve. (Or maybe Abel and Cain, since the industry always catered to the youth market!)

T bone, I have to agree with you fully from a numbers aspect. My problem is with quality. If there was some form of relativity between price and quality, I would not have as much of a problem.

Example; (using your terms) In 1970, a Porsche 911 was approx. $6000.00. In 2003, a Porsche 911 is approx. $70,000. But, you are still buying the quality of a Porsche.

It would be very hard for someone to convince me that CDs cost as much to produce as an LP. If you consider just the packaging that was provided with an LP of that era, (album covers, sleeves, artwork, lyrics, posters, etc.) versus what is being provided today in the average CD. Let's not even discuss the quality of the musical content.

Several weeks ago I purchased several XRCDs. Beautiful packaging, excellent sound, overall a very nice quality product. This indicates to me that the music industry is completely capable of producing such a product. The cost? $30.00 each.

Personally, I have a hard time understanding how a product of this quality can justify it's cost. Does it really cost that much more to produce an XRCD with all of it's packaging versus the average redbook CD? And the real clincher is that the XRCDs that I purchased were all recordings from the 50s-60s-70s era. Is this indicative of the fact that maybe even the record companies feel that much of the newer musical material is not worthy of "special treatment"?

Let us also consider the newer formats such as SACD or DVD-A. How often do you see new musical material being used for these newer formats? Why wouldn't the industry try to promote their new formats using new musical material. I mean how many times are you going to purchase "rereleases" of Pink Floyd's Dark side of the moon?

With all do respect T bone, I really have a hard time understanding this.

You'all gotta start looking at the politics involved with all this nonsense. Politics, as in: 1) Congress allowing the radio waves to be dominated by two corporations, thus controlling what music we are subjected to, 2) Recording giants force feeding the masses the dirty joke...rap, grunge, hip hop, nearly explicit sex music videos, violence and the many anti-social fabric messages, and 3) the anti-piracy brigade.

Spank a man's monkey and he'll spoog once. Teach a man to spank his own monkey and he'll spoog a lifetime. Think about it. The music (actually the entire entertainment monopoly) industry has been quite busy catering to our baser instincts. The problem is: instead of buying the material to spank the monkey to, the same industry taught us how to share our materials. Pass the Playboy please.

Geez, with all the dynamic range available on CD's I find it interesting the most compressed music ever made is on that medium. Note that whenever there are gains made in digital storage that the extra space is usually filled with high calorie, high fat, low nutritional fluff. Apologies extended to the small, quality driven artists and engineers.

Connect the dots if you care to do the research. Microsoft, the RIAA amd hardware manufacturers (our beloved high end gear vendors too, not just computers) are joining forces to stop pirarcy. Soon, if the sun, the moon and the stars don't line up inside your playback equipment the music won't be able to come out. And, they don't care one whit about quality of playback.

Lest some bonehead (like Pbb) chime in and attempt to place the blame on the good 'ol US of A, let all know that this is being accomplished by international banking efforts. There are huge dollars, not to mention "control" possiblities at stake with degrading the worlds values. Sure, the control freaks are having problems keeping the masses in line, but understand, they have deep pockets and the will/ability to pull this off. It is our responsibility to correct the problem. My effort is simple. I will forever be vinyl based. I will only pay for music which is at worst, value neutral. I refuse to listen to radio except publicly owned, local stations which are few.

Here's a test for the doubters: find someone in your email address book that has an @MSN address. Record your own voice or your dog barking, convert it to an MP3 file and send it as an attachment to that person. MSN will block the recipient from receiving the file. Maybe that doesn't bother you in the least since you may feel that piracy is wrong. But consider the freedom you have lost in this process.

I'm confident that most readers here will believe I have gone off the deep end and am a member of some radical political splinter group. The problem with being so quick with waving off my statements is that they are covered on a regular basis in the business sections of my two local newspapers (One is owned by Gannett-McPaper, and the other is a Northwest region owned paper) as well as covered in the internet techie news and written about by main stream authors available in hardback at your local library.

As you are reading this your computer is keeping track (and reporting to M$) what you listen to or watch on your Windows Media Player. Web sites are placing spiders to take and report your activities to whomever places the spider. Doubt it? Download Lavasoft Ad-aware and run the program to find out how many snoops live inside your computer. The innocent answer to why is that advertisers can market directly to you based on your habits-without personally identifying you-ha ha. The real reason is that once the industry has bought the legislation they desire, you will be stomped with both bootheels. It won't matter if you have an MP3 of Mothers Day. Your computer will be corrupted or you will be sued. It doesn't matter if you are innocent. You'll still have to fix your computer or defend yourself in court.

I urge you to create a music folder in your computer. Download non-copyrighted materials or make your own. Label these files with names of real artists and real songs that are copyrighted. Play them on your Windows Media Player. Back up this "evidence" to recordable disks. If enough of us do this and we are damaged in the future, some lawyer will sue on our behalf and maybe we can redistribute some of this ill-gotten wealth back to us.

Sorry for the rant. Complaining about the lack of listenable music on one CD is but the tip of the iceberg. Please read a little more than the headlines and get informed.

Wow, I cant' wait to sit down to dinner tonight and listen to an MP3 file and enjoy a nice bowl of soylent green

Bomarc .. I envisage lending libraries where the CDs lent are "special" non-production CDs, either with clever copy protection, or more likely the age-old copy protection of just cutting off the last 30 seconds of each song. That way you are forced to get the real thing to get the whole experience. I'm sure it could be made to work.

Lugnut ... I'm sure you're on the right track, which is why I am loading up on used LPs and CDs at the moment.

Buscis ... great thread. And guess what, I haven't managed to have this thread closed or shutdown yet :-)