Has the mp3 Devalued Music?

[AlecBeretz]

320kbps sounds great for almost ALL applications. You really only notice the difference between that and wave if you're sitting in a treated room and someone shows you side by side triple blind comparisons.

So long I cannot hear the damage that has been done, I am satisfied. So if I'm listening on ipod headphones, I'm even cool with anything up to maybe 128kbps.

The real problem is that the up and coming generation (ages 9-25?) is becoming content with shitty youtube quality, because they plug their iphone into some shitty speakers and play songs off of youtube. its RAMPANT. I go to chico state right now and gawddd it suckssss

and I've asked them, and they know the difference, and don't care. so, fuck.

 

[fat_fleet]

I tend to think MP3s have devalued music. They've turned it to a world where quantity is valued over quality.

When I was a lad just starting to buy music, I'd have to save up a bit to buy a 45rpm single of a track I liked. If, heaven forbid, I liked it enough to want the whole album, that was a serious investment when I was twelve. You can bet I listened to every note and nuance on the records I bought.

Nowadays people have archives of thousands of tracks--so many that I bet many of the tracks are rarely, if ever, listened to. I use the word "tracks" deliberately. Would classic albums of my youth--say Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road or Houses of the Holy--become classic in their own right or would people just cherry pick one or two tracks?

And all that is before we discuss sound quality since many commercial MP3s are 128kbps.

We're all entitled to our opinions. I think digital formats have devalued music because you can get it for free now. It's taken away incentives for labels and artists. But I listen to MP3s all the time. They're convenient and I love music. Vinyl at home, MP3s on the road.

And as far as the quantity over quality argument, everyone's ears have different needs for variety. You mention archives of "thousands of tracks" and that does not seem like very much to me. 250 albums can easily contain over 2000 songs, assuming 8-10 songs on an album. I can say my digital collection, at 84GB, does not fill the capacity of my device (iPod Classic). It contains 416 artists, 1177 albums, 11312 songs. If I played all the music on it consecutively, allegedly it would play for 37.8 days. I can say for sure I have listened to everything on it at least a few times, am intimately familiar with over 80% of it, and more than half is music I've grown up with and loved my whole life. I sometimes get sick of it too. I asked my friend, who has a much larger digital collection than I, how much music he has and he told me it was about a terabyte. That's over 12 times the size of my collection. I have no doubt that he's listened to most of it.

Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy, and Abbey Road were all great albums for their time but life goes on. For me a song loses emotional impact after I hear it a hundred times or so. And I've heard all those songs hundreds of times easy. If I want to still get that rush, I have to find something new. And the search can be fun (if you enjoy music (I do)).