Thursday, February 2nd 2012
News: Neil Young
Neil Young: “Piracy Is The New Radio”
Somebody better put a hit out on Neil Young, because the old codger isn’t buying into the idea that the music industry is being savagely murdered by rapacious digital thugs looking to leak & loot across the land.
Young made some level-headed comments at the D: Dive Into Media conference, which was built to explore the impact of the digital world on our lives.
“It doesn’t affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,” he explains. “I look at the radio as gone. Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around… That’s the radio. If you really want to hear it, let’s make it available, let them hear it…”
Yes, this is the same Neil that was pissed at YouTube for not sending him a royalty check when people uploaded his songs, but it seems the man has come to grasp the digital age a bit more over the years. His main concern, by the sound of it, is that the MP3 files we have are simply shitty quality sound. According to Young, the average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording, and he says Apple Lossless only offers “10.3 percent.”
Speaking to MTV news, Neil continued: “If you’re an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 percent great, but the consumer got 5 percent, would you be feeling good? “I like to point that out to artists. That’s why people listen to music differently today. It’s all about the bottom and the beat driving everything, and that’s because in the resolution of the music, there’s nothing else you can really hear. The warmth and the depth at the high end is gone.”
Check out Antiquiet’s exploration of 24-bit audio with Sean Beavan of 8mm.
Even the leader of the digital zeitgeist knew that the zeros and ones hadn’t yet reached a point of high-quality mass accessibility, which Young points out: “Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.”
it seems like eventually (hopefully) someone will come up with something that supercedes the sound of vinyl in the “truest” sense digitally and it would be difficult, if not ridiculous to embrace it, however much we love our vinyl. the engagement with music that vinyl forces upon us is a beautiful thing and will only be lost by those who choose to lose it.