I stumbled across this excellent 2017 video by Arran Lomas, a Brit who publishes his videos under the handle "Thoughty2." It is 20 minutes long, and has been up on YouTube for a bit over one year. In that time, it has garnered nearly 5 million views and 70K comments (which I didn't read except for the first few, and those comments are mostly thoughtful and reflective, and not spammish or sophomoric idiocy).
For me, pop music is simply a subject of passing interest, but it is economically huge, and therefore the video is relevant to the discussion of consumerism and global economics discussion on the current tariffs thread in another forum here.
I agree with much of what Lomas says, and enjoyed the excellent integration of audio and visual elements in the video. The discussion of dynamic range and it's effect on music was very good, and his explanation of compression as the "louder is better" marketing meme was interesting. It included an example of how compression degrades the "quality" and "artistic expression" of music., which I will listen to that again, but on my main system this evening.
Also interesting were his thoughts on the concept of strong, long-lasting intimacy with individual songs which we older folks cherish over the years via repeated listenings. Lomas claims that the evolution of recorded music and its marketing methods has diminished that factor significantly. In the early days of recorded music, such attachment to pieces of music was partly the result of the technology and economics related to the limited numbers of songs on early media such as records and tapes.
Like many music lovers these days, I am guilty of possessing thousands of downloaded music tracks. I have done a lot of "streamripping" which is legal as a form of time-shifting for individual listening. My limited retirement income is what prevents me from buying more music as in the past for most of my adult life. I listen to classical music, jazz, classical and other acoustic guitar, folk, Americana, electronic, and other non-pop music, and I will buy such music from artist or small-label websites, but not from corporate rip-off sources where the musicians only get pennies on the dollar.
As far as personal listening habits go, I don't use playlists. Digital storage is cheap and compact these days, so rather than using playlists or tagging favorites, I simply copy songs that I like into separate folders and subfolders and play them by the folder, usually in random order.
And finally, just out of curiosity, and since there are many headphone fanatics here at ASR, what are those headphones at 16:05 minutes into the video? They remind me of the world's first cellphones...
For me, pop music is simply a subject of passing interest, but it is economically huge, and therefore the video is relevant to the discussion of consumerism and global economics discussion on the current tariffs thread in another forum here.
I agree with much of what Lomas says, and enjoyed the excellent integration of audio and visual elements in the video. The discussion of dynamic range and it's effect on music was very good, and his explanation of compression as the "louder is better" marketing meme was interesting. It included an example of how compression degrades the "quality" and "artistic expression" of music., which I will listen to that again, but on my main system this evening.
Also interesting were his thoughts on the concept of strong, long-lasting intimacy with individual songs which we older folks cherish over the years via repeated listenings. Lomas claims that the evolution of recorded music and its marketing methods has diminished that factor significantly. In the early days of recorded music, such attachment to pieces of music was partly the result of the technology and economics related to the limited numbers of songs on early media such as records and tapes.
Like many music lovers these days, I am guilty of possessing thousands of downloaded music tracks. I have done a lot of "streamripping" which is legal as a form of time-shifting for individual listening. My limited retirement income is what prevents me from buying more music as in the past for most of my adult life. I listen to classical music, jazz, classical and other acoustic guitar, folk, Americana, electronic, and other non-pop music, and I will buy such music from artist or small-label websites, but not from corporate rip-off sources where the musicians only get pennies on the dollar.
As far as personal listening habits go, I don't use playlists. Digital storage is cheap and compact these days, so rather than using playlists or tagging favorites, I simply copy songs that I like into separate folders and subfolders and play them by the folder, usually in random order.
And finally, just out of curiosity, and since there are many headphone fanatics here at ASR, what are those headphones at 16:05 minutes into the video? They remind me of the world's first cellphones...