USA: Never mind the lack of MP3 quality, feel the lack of MP3 breadth
Two things you thought you knew about MP3 and the iPod generation: one is that the quality of data-reduced music is acceptable – but only that – because you can cram so much music onto an easily portable device. The other is that there's so much music out there, the only problem is finding enough space on that portable device to store it all.
Wrong. And wrong.
Research from the States suggest that the download music status quo – and that could be only time you'll see me write those three words together – isn't quite as we'd imagined. For a start, it seems the core market for MP3 doesn't just tolerate the sound of MP3, but may actually prefer it over full-fat CD quality. And that comes not from a company with a vested interest, but a learned professor at Stanford.
Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at the California university, has been carrying out experiments on each year's new intake of students. It's not quite as creepy as it sounds: for the past eight years the good Prof has been playing his students music in a variety of formats, including MP3, and has noted "not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s".
Berger feels that the data-reduction process gives music what he calls a "sizzle" – a metallic edge to it, and that as young people have become more familiar with that sound, the more they've come to like it.
He reckons it's a phenomenon rather akin to some of us preferring our music on vinyl rather than CD: "“Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves. I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”
The iPod sizzle
Mind you, while the iPod/MP3 sizzle may be the way forward for a whole generation's sonic preferences, it seems those same consumers are voting with their feet – or at least their mouse-clicking fingers – when it comes to what's available as downloads.
US market research firm NPD reports that while 13-17-year-olds bought a quarter less CDs last year, exactly as expected, they also cut back on their downloading and ripping of music. Why? Well, it seems they're not that excited by the music out there, or feel they have as much of the stuff as they can handle.
CD sales dropped 26% last year, according to the survey, but paid digital downloads also fell by half as much. OK, so some of that is down to that well-known euphemism, the Current Economic Situation, with 24% of the teenagers saying they had cut back on their spending. But almost as many – 23% – said they already had a suitable music collection, and didn't need any more right now, thank you.
Enough music, already...
NPD says that ""As the portable music player market matures, there's a greater chance that teens will have already acquired the bulk of their collections, which reduces the desire to buy music or the need to get more by sharing and swapping with others."
"In fact it's possible teens could start spending more time creating playlists and posting them online, than they would spend sharing actual song files."
Even 'free' sources of music saw drop-off, with the teens using peer-to-peer sites 6% less, and a 28% decline in the number of CDs they borrowed from friends to make ripped copies.
If all that looks a bit bleak for those record companies who've pinned their hopes on users buying music as downloads, it gets worse. The survey shows a surge of over 50% in online radio listening, while over 31% listened more to the US satellite radio services. Meanwhile 46% of those surveyed said they listened to music on social networking sites, up from 26% in 2007.
Enough bad news for the record companies? No? OK, here's the final kicker – the survey says that "54 percent of teens who heard a song they liked on MySpace Music were likely to simply listen to that song again on the site, compared with only 1 percent who claimed they would click through and buy the song on AmazonMP3, which is MySpace's online partner for purchased music downloads.”
Back to the future?
In other words, we're going back to the golden days of radio, before most homes even had a record player.
A whole generation prefers to listen to that MP3 "sizzle" rather than hi-fi quality, and really doesn't want to be bothered exploring any music it hasn't heard before, let alone buying the stuff.
In such a world, who'd want to be a new artist, let alone a record company executive?
Or indeed a professor of music...?
- Andrew Everard's blog
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Oh and also, admittedly, I find the majority of new music today boring and uninspired compared to that of the last five decades. Again, for some of this, I blame the gallons of emotionless autotuned rubbish spewing out of the radios for obscuring anyone with real talent. Angry rant over.
Yes, I saw that 'Gadget Show' test as well. I thought it odd that they sought out a 320kbs MP3 to test against CD and vinyl, rather than the lower bit rate version that people actually use.
The biggest innovation so far has been Apple's "genius" software for helping you to find music that's similar to tracks in your collection. The obvious next step is to increase the use of IT intelligence so that your whole collection and individual playlists are analysed so that the groups of tracks throw up suggestions more likely to fit a mood or genre that you enjoy.
There's basically so much music out there now, and so much being distributed in innovative ways, that a cyber brain is needed to guide to music you'll enjoy. The music industry is by no means dead, but it needs to get a lot more interactive. At the same time it would help if record companies viewed consumers as friends, even members of their club, rather than enemies and pirates. Embrace the consumer and offer him or her useful services and perhaps their sales will pick up again.
"Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves. I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that". I just love these type of supposed analogies which don't actually work as analogies! Most vinyl listeners I know hate surface noise/dust etc. Where is the warmth and comfort in having LPs that are covered in dust and dirt and scratches?
A better analogy for the 'iPod generation' would perhaps be somebody who eats nothing but junk food and drinks soda all the time, and is given a good quality meal with some fine wine - their pallette has been so dumbed down that they will dislike the fine food and actually prefer the junk. So it is with compressed digital formats and high quality audio. However, quality audio has always been a marginal interest, so what is the real problem? Younger guys like ubercooldave who care about quality may be a minority but they will always be there, probably no less and no more than there have ever been or will ever be.
Agent Cool: you're right - that thing on the 'awesome' Gadget Show was very funny.
Tear Drop: I'm not sure what the Prof said actually was an analogy.
And Will H: surely the next great step is for sofware that will just carry on synthesising music just like what you've listened to, so you don't have to even think any more...?
Bang on with the 'junk food' analogy TearDrop.
The Gadget Show test used MS Performance 6 speakers, highend-ish Denon amp and CD player, a unidenfied turntable and an Ipod with dock. To me it showed the importance of system-matching above any format considerations....
jules.
Back in the 1970s lots of teens were taping from the radio (probably a cr###y portable) to a cheap, plastic cassette machine. Often they even bypassed using a connecting lead and just used the cassette's built in microphone placed near to the radio!
The generation before them were more than likely to have been using a portable 'autochanger' record player with scuffed up singles being tracked by a chipped and worn ceramic stylus.
The idea that there was once some 'halcyon' period when young teens were all playing high quality music on great hifi systems is myth.
Is this an April fool joke?
No, not everything today is, johnbutler...
Is this an april fool?
Darn you john butler!!!
I hope this isn't an April fools, some of the points here are very useful to me, I am designing a record company HQ for my degree... thanks!
i found this article which is of some relevence regarding quality of mp3
Thomson, the company that helped create the MP3 format, has developed a lossless version that's backwards compatible with the original.
Despite its ubiquity, MP3 is often derided by audio purists for its lossy compression scheme, which discards audio data that's less noticable to the human ear in order to achieve small file sizes.
The new format, dubbed MP3HD, follows a line of lossless compression formats such as .SHN and .FLAC, but reverts to a generic MP3 file when there's no supporting codec for higher quality version.
A spokeswoman told PC Magazine that MP3HD stores its extra lossless data in id3 tags, where artist and track names are already held. MP3 players not supporting the HD format will still play the generic MP3 version.
PC Magazine also raises questions about royalties, and whether hardware manufacturers will sign on. The magazine's in-house audio analyst, Tim Gideon, said MP3HD is "basically a theoretically cool thing that can't actually be used" unless Apple, SanDisk, Samsung, Microsoft and others support the format.
I hope they do. It would be great to see lossless audio files offered through iTunes or other download services, and a backwards compatible format paves the way because there's no further conversion required to get it on an iPod or Zune.
Perhaps a cunning hardware maker could even work with Thomson to allow the stripping of lossless data as it's transferred to the MP3 player, saving precious storage space while preserving high audio quality on home computers.
it seems strange that MP3 files are preferred over lossless, however it may be the fact the compression reduces some of the harshness of the lossless version and that's easier on the ear. One of the issues of digital music is listener fatigue. On analog, there is a limiting of frequencies (tape and vinyl) both and that may be one of the factor why vinyl sounds warmer. Also 16 bit 44.1 KHZ is still a compressed format it is not truly lossless as some of the original signal doesn't really get fully captured in the bits and gets lost anyway - an analog signal has an infinite possibility of voltage whereas on 16 bit it has to fit a range of 65535
Interesting stuff Andrew, and it ties in with what ex-Depeche Mode memeber Alan Wilder said in an article I saw from him on another website... that is that basically the 'sizzle' is the music equivalent of the stuff that Mc D's et al. put in their cheap food to make it addictive. I guess it's mixed in to a sonic soup with heavy compression.
And mixing/mastering music with heavy compression is something that Mr Wilder says is very common these days with producers and record companies as they believe that it fits in with todays audience who increasingly no longer have the audio playback equpment to experience the dynamic richness that hi-fi allows.
So the public gets what the industry thinks they want and in return the public only want what they are getting. Surely a cycle that can't easily be broken?
LOLZ, people don't actually 'watch and believe' the gadget show's tests ...... do they ?
I am 16 and I still buy CDs and even vinyl albums occasionally.
I use lossless compression whenever I can. I would not download or listen to an individual song as I much prefer appreciating a song in the context of the whole album.
I hate the sound of compression artifacts just as much as I hate the sound of autotune (another horrific music ruining sound my peers appear addicted to)
However, everyone thinks I am insane.
I feel I am definitely in a minority...
I occasionally buy CDs but I mostly download from iTunes or Amazon MP3. Both stores now offer 256kbps as standard which offers a decent quality sound. I've even experimented ripping CDs I know well at 320kbps and compared the rip to the original and can only just tell the difference on my £1000 system. I also tried a rip at 128kbps and it was very easy to tell the difference. So, as long as you always buy/rip at a high enough bitrate and use a decent connection/iPod dock, the difference is only going to be small unless you're a real audiophile.
Funnily enough, an experiment comparing CD, 320kbps MP3 and vinyl on Five's 'Gadget Show' a few weeks ago found that both presenters (who weren't allowed to talk to each other during the test) thought the MP3 was the best. It wasn't the most scientific of tests but it was certainly an interesting result.