Comment by taylodl
2 hours ago
Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people. Now I will tell you digital is far superior to analog BUT - the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music. Rigidly fixing to "the grid" makes it so music can't breathe. Drums are programmed. So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists.
In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.
> Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people.
Most vinyl record buyers buy records as a collectable to show that they like a certain album, not because they're deluded audiophiles who are trying to eliminate everything digital from their audio path. Half of all record buyers don't even own a record player: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-do... . When you look at it from that lens, I think it makes sense that records are so popular. They're the largest music format so you get the biggest version of the album art and the most extensive set of liner notes compared to buying a CD or something. Audio quality or "analogness" doesn't matter, since they're probably going to be listening to the album on Spotify instead anyway.
You’ve mixed up a few different stages as well as the reason some people prefer vinyl.
There’s composition, where music is written. A drum track may be a boring repetitive loop quantized to 4/4 beat positions, or it may have fills or polyrhythm or free time or who knows what.
There’s performance, which may be a sequencer just outputting notes at the right time or may be a human drummer of varying skill, imparting sloppiness or brilliant micro timing.
There’s recording, which today is virtually always digital, but which can theoretically be analogue tape or other exotic forms.
There’s storage medium, where we get vinyl or FLAC or MP3.
And there’s playback, where your choice of system components matters.
You can digitally record, mix, and master a bunch of drunk teenagers who don’t know how to play, and I promise it will be gloriously analog. And you can take music that was composed on an sequencer with pure quantization and no human feel at all, record/master/mix digitally, and store it on vinyl and play it in a good system and the sound will have analog warmth even while the composition and performance do not.
There’s more artistry in music today than there ever has been. More music is release every single day than was released in any entire year before 2000.
You just have to find the good stuff. If you’re hearing boring corporate crap, that reflects a need to improve discovery skill to match this new world.
What’s your current process for discovering new music?
> In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.
Incredibly daft over-generalization, the music scene is enormous, and while for mainstream artists what you say is certainly true, you're forgetting about the rest of the 80% of the music scene, which is mostly just people who like making music and don't even earn enough to make a living from it.
There are loads of small independent labels and distributors that release vinyl, CDs and tapes and there is nothing corporate about it. It’s basically impossible to make money as a small-med artist on vinyl. Please don’t generalise like that, it’s really not fair and weakens your comment for me