For better or worse, Napster changed the music industry forever—and made Radiohead global superstars
Music Features For Our Consideration
You could spend hours walking the aisles of a record store in 2000. Vinyl records had long been relegated to the gift and collectors’ sections to make room for discs a quarter of their size, but these depositories of physical media were still full of shelf after shelf of music to discover. Folks lined up for days to be among the first to get their hands on the latest big release, and labels jockeyed for prime placement at the end of an aisle by sending life-size cutouts of their marquee stars. Record stores served as both gateways and gatekeepers in introducing new music to the masses. If it wasn’t offered at your local Sam Goody, the best you were getting was a janky live recording or a mixtape with unwanted cameos from your local radio DJ. Then came Napster.
Launched in May 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster began as a tiny startup out of Hull, Massachusetts. The founders, still just teenagers, had met in a chatroom a few years prior and bonded over their common vision of making it easier for people to share their personal music libraries with others online. By that October, Napster—also Fanning’s childhood nickname, due to his curly hair—had more than 4 million songs available for peer-to-peer file sharing. And by May 2000, Fanning and Parker had moved to Silicon Valley and more than 20 million people were using the service to share their previously private collections of beloved, rare tracks and new releases while downloading guilty pleasures like the Grease 2 soundtrack. (Just me?) That was the magic of Napster in the days before anyone worried about the ethics of it all: Suddenly, music was free and available to anyone with a modem. Napster democratized access to lesser-known artists and released consumers from the monetary concerns that may have kept them from checking out that Chumbawamba album they weren’t sure they wanted, having only heard “Tubthumping.” (In retrospect, I was probably fine without that one.)
But it wasn’t just the latest releases and long-forgotten B-sides that users were swapping. Occasionally, a track—or entire album—would leak ahead of its official release. Madonna’s “Music” was a particularly high-profile unauthorized preview. When an unfinished version of the single found its way onto Napster in June 2000, the singer penned an open letter about her disappointment in Icon magazine. Metallica and Dr. Dre took things a step further, actually filing suit against Napster for copyright infringement in the spring of 2000. And they were not alone in their ire: Much of the music industry decried Napster and its peer-to-peer kin as grim reapers and lamented that these leaks and the unmonetized access were eating into their well-earned profits. In addition to the lawsuits against Napster, record labels sued individual users and launched a public anti-piracy advertising campaign. (It actually wasn’t the first time the music industry spoke up about the issue: In the early 1980s, as blank cassette tapes became more readily available, record labels began slapping warnings on their products that read “Home Taping Is Killing Music.” Its cousins “Don’t Copy That Floppy” and “Piracy. It’s A Crime” would come in the decades to follow.)
But file-sharing services also provided unprecedented word-of-mouth buzz for artists who had yet to find global success. Unlike Madonna or Metallica, modern-rock darlings Radiohead had yet to fully crossover to the mainstream when their fourth studio album, Kid A, leaked online a few weeks ahead of its October 2000 release. Lead single “Optimistic” was getting solid modern-rock radio play, but the critically acclaimed English rock band hadn’t released a U.S. top-10 track since 1992’s “Creep.” Kid A was radical diversion from Radiohead’s past work, a full-on embrace of the electronic textures they’d only flirted with in the past, but it was still expected to perform similar to the band’s most recent album, OK Computer, and top out around the mid-20s on the Billboard 200. Instead, Kid A debuted at No. 1, easily besting offerings from Mystikal, Nelly, and Green Day. Much of that success was credited to Napster, since there was very little promotion for the album aside from a few 30-second MTV spots, a couple of intimate concerts, and a Saturday Night Live appearance. Even the band’s label, Capitol/EMI, agreed. “We didn’t use Napster. We wanted to keep [Kid A] off Napster,” the label’s vice president of marketing, Rob Gordon, said in Spin’s January 2001 issue. “But when it went up, did it create more excitement, more enthusiasm? Absolutely.”
The following year would bring Radiohead their second Grammy, but also the end of Napster as we knew it. At the height of its popularity—anywhere from 26.4 million to 80 million users, depending on the source—Napster was shut down when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of several major record labels that had sued the service over copyright infringement. (Napster later settled the suits filed by Metallica and Dr. Dre.) “There was a weekend…that felt like the last days of Rome,” The Guardian’s Tom Lamont wrote in 2013 of the warning Napster users got before the service was shut down in March 2001. “There were 48 hours of free music left and I remember the panic… Would there ever be such an opportunity again?”
The short answer to Lamont’s question was “no,” but the courts’ crackdown didn’t immediately halt unauthorized free access to music and video files. Rather, it sent users scurrying to other P2P services like LimeWire and BitTorrent sites like the Pirate Bay, which would prosper for another decade yet.
The music industry also got smarter. Madonna—not to be foiled again—had seemingly leaked tracks off American Life posted on KaZaA ahead of the 2003 album’s release, but when users downloaded and played the files, all they heard was the singer saying “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Nevertheless, she was outsmarted: A few days after Madonna’s prank, a hacker took over madonna.com, posting a message that read “This is what the fuck I think I’m doing” along with links to MP3s of the actual American Life album.
The public had gotten a taste of instant digital consumption, and the industry had to adjust. In 2002, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the five major record labels to offer their content for purchase through iTunes—a natural progression for Apple, since they’d given everyone a way to carry those digital music files with them, in the form of the first iPod, in October 2001. Radiohead even returned to an online-first release, this time intentionally: In 2007, the band released In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-want digital download (at that point they emailed you a .zip file) three months before making it available on CD and vinyl.
“This desire to use the technology was driven by distrust and frustration with trying to broadcast our music via traditional media, such as radio and television,” Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood wrote for Index On Censorship in 2010. “Music on television is scarce, and hard to do well. Radio has such regulated playlists that disc jockeys are lucky to have one free play per show. Why go exclusively through such straitened formats when you could broadcast directly to people who are interested in you, in that moment?” At the time, the move was seen as revolutionary, a way to short-circuit piracy and ensure artists were still being paid at a time when music sales were sharply declining. But what went largely unspoken was that the pay-what-you-want strategy could only be profitable for an act with a fanbase as large and fervent as Radiohead’s, which had expanded tremendously in the years since Kid A. The faltering industry wouldn’t truly stabilize until the development of subscription streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music—which could still be doing more to make sure the artists are being paid.
It’s no longer the Wild West days of Napster, but—for better or worse—that renegade service flipped the entire entertainment industry on its head and expedited its digital revolution. Compact disc sales continue to decline (down to 46.5 million CDs in 2019 compared to the industry high of almost 950 million in 2000), but now millions of tracks are available at our fingertips for just a small monthly fee or after a short ad on YouTube. If today’s teenager wants to listen to the latest Taylor Swift album the moment its released, they can. If they want to dive deep into Aboriginal tribal music, they can. The record-store doors are closed, but the gates are wide open for us to enjoy music like never before. Just maybe don’t go to a concert until this whole pandemic is over, please.
216 Comments
Horribly researched article. Everyone knows Sean Parker stole Napster from Seth Green.
you deserve more than one star for this
“It’s because I was napping at the time!” I have really fond memories of seeing the Italian Job back in 2003. I don’t think I’ve seen it since about 2005 but it was good times.
While he was napping… Shit, is anything in this article correct?
That should have been the actual Italian Job remake, Napster being stolen
…
No joke, the first song I downloaded off of Napster was the Perfect Strangers theme song
STAN. DING. TAAAAAAALLLL
Fuck. Now I’ve got THAT in my head.
RISE. AND. FAAAAAAALLLL
I feel as though the first couple years of the internet for me was just looking up halfremebered theme songs and commercials
Wow. You stepped in something good there.
And after you downloaded it, were you so happy you danced the dance of joy?
cool story bro.
What I lamented about this digital revolution was that it proved that the average listener didn’t care about quality audio, as long as it was free. Poor quality rips were rife on these services and the sound quality was terrible even on the cheap earbuds that came with those iPods of yesterday (and the iPhones of today.)Sadder still is that iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and others still traffic in low quality audio that sounds noticeably worse than the physical CDs which are being more and more difficult to purchase. YouTube can sound great but the quality varies widely depending on where the music comes from.
Maybe people just love music.
That and all the mislabeled, misspelled, and WTF ID3 tagged content that was all over the place. Something like 9incNalesfukulikananmal.mp3 would end up being a Gravity Kills live bootleg or something. I could never decide if it was trolling or if people were really just that incredibly ignorant of what they were listening to.
Prior to streaming, I was “one of those guys” who would meticulously label his music library in iTunes. “THIS GENRE IS WRONG, ITUNES, OR AUTOMATICALLY GRABBED CD DATA!” etc etc etc
The “digital revolution” actually expanded my musical horizons and lead me down the path of spending far more money on legit purchases than would have been possible without the exposure apps like Napster provided.Agreed with your point on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon doling out low quality audio.
The “digital revolution” actually expanded my musical horizons and lead
me down the path of spending far more money on legit purchases than
would have been possible without the exposure apps like Napster
provided.
You are one of very few. (For the record, I am another one.)But I do think it’s interesting how many times over the years I’ve encountered this argument, including in this article and comment section. Sharing drives sales, yet somehow the entire music industry cratered and there’s far less money in it except for a scant handful of artists and their labels now. Digital sales and streaming revenues have come nowhere near closing the gap between the old industry and the new one; there is money there, but not nearly as much. And anecdotally, I know a lot of people–even fellow old-timers–who essentially stopped buying albums years ago. My wife is one of them. Sharing turns her on to more artists, but she listens to nearly everything on Alexa or satellite radio or YouTube. No musicians get paid much for listeners like her, and there are far more of her than there are of me and you.
A lot of people listen to a lot of music in ways that compression and less than perfect quality doesn’t matter. If you’re in your car or playing in your kitchen while you’re cooking or taking the dog for a walk, there is so much other noise intruding that it just doesn’t make sense to get hung up on it.
counterpoint: car speakers are one of the best way to listen to music.
When working in albums, there’s a whole lot of artists who go and play their songs in cars to hear what it sounds like
Yes! Maybe not the final master, but the mix for sure. What sounds amazing on your high-end, professional, full-fidelity recording studio speakers is not representative of the listening environment for most listeners. I’ve read about this for years. Engine noise, highway speed noise, everybody sitting in different places, etc. You’re not going to get any kind of “ideal” scenario and some things will jump out at you in a car the way they wouldn’t on the studio speakers or even your home stereo. Ooop, better dial down X. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve friends who do recording and live sound, and I’ve read lots myself and talked to them about much of this. It’s fascinating! I prefer to plug in and play my guitar and let other people worry about making it sound good. 😉 http://www.recording64.com/2014/09/19/3-reasons-why-you-should-check-your-mixes-in-the-car/
That was also when labels were mixing music like shit to try to get it as loud as possible. Just drop the whole midrange and give it some high end and bass.
RHCP Californiacation koff koff koff
Or Jimmy Eat World’s Lucky Denver Mint. The drum and high hat on the release mix sounds like a 96k MPEG-1.For 15 years I thought I had a bad rip in college until I heard it streaming.
hahahaha. Oh man, I’ve never listened to jimmy so I wouldn’t know. Californiacation, besides being maybe the most overplayed album in the past 30 years(?), really stuck out and made me aware of this shit for the first time. ESPECIALLY when I was still making mixed CDs and whatnot. Let’s say I had “Otherside” some mix, I’m jamming along.OH GOD MY EARSReaching for the volume dial. Or the way all the bass and low end just “thunked” around rather than sounded, like, good. The one that pisses me off is RATM “Battle of Los Angeles.” It is also a top offender in the loudness wars and it sucks, because I like a lot of those songs and frankly they would sound so much better with a more modest mix/master that let the rawness come out. C’mon Rage, you didn’t need to spend that much money on your album. Spend it on war orphans! (also all the “remastered” classic rock albums that just flatten the shit out of everything. I will 100% listen to the original if I can)
Yuuuuuup.Social D had some of the cleanest mixes of the era. Being a second tier band probably paid off in how you sound 20 plus years later. You get old school producers or fresh out of school interns who were top of the class. They follow the basics rather than the trends.That is why I dug Jack White. It wasn’t that he was mixing analog, it was that he admitted there were huge chunks of music missing off of albums and fixed it.
Only got into social d last five years. Their shit sounds great. Probably why a lot of the late 90s “Christian” rock I still like also sounds good. No $$$!
Also, I have to guess you are 4 years younger than me, or your RHCP hatred would stem from every dildo with an acoustic guitar playing Under the Bridge whenever a woman was within ear shot.
40 next year baby!I hate the red hot chili peppers despite their generally good music. For all the reasons we’ve mentioned and more.
LOL. 43.
You are a fucking champ. ☺️🤣☺️
And then there’s me, asking “is Under the Bridge the one that’s the first verse of Bedrock Anthem?”
Okay, High Fidelity, not everyone is a music aficionado. Some people just like a particular melody. Or a song’s lyrics. Or the lead singer’s voice. Or that guital solo. Or that bassline. They’re not concerned with having a system that will bring out the peak quality of that recording, nor do they have to be. Some people are just listening to music for fun. Calm down.
Couldn’t agree more. Listening to music off my phone in my car sounds completely inferior to the few CDs I still have in there. Meanwhile people have to have theater-quality sound for the TVs.
Hull, MA? I laughed at that because I know that’s a town of pretty much no significance.
A few thoughts. I’m not sure I’d qualify OK Computer’s success as “mid-level,” but I guess it depends on how one measures success. It was a multi-platinum album in the US with 2 inescapable singles, received widespread critical acclaim, and topped the year-end best-of polls of just about every music magazine out there.Also, torrent sites are still going strong. They’re mostly used for movies and TV shows (and porn!), but a lot of music fans use them for high quality downloads (FLAC, WAV, etc.) because, as pointed out elsewhere the quality of music offered by Spotify, etc., is pretty shoddy, especially if you’re listening on good equipment.Finally, a side-note perhaps, but music sharing still helps with sales. See the recent story about those two twins reacting to Phil Colins’s “In the Air Tonight” and how the side effect sent the track shooting up the digital charts. A lot of artists still block their music on YouTube, but if you watch any of these reaction videos, you’ll see there’s a hunger amongst younger listeners for older music and the exposure they bring to it can only be good. Sharing music is part of what listening to music is all about.
This is why no one likes people who like Radiohead
Ha ha, maybe. I’m not a big fan of Radiohead at all – I just think the article misses the mark on its claims here. Having lived through that period, I remember the immense hype about OK Computer.
I also remember Radiohead being pretty inescapable at that time. They also managed to be the unifying pleasure of several otherwise disparate cliques of musical taste at my high school. Even if they didn’t have Billboard chart domination, topping out in the mid 20s is only a failure if your only comparison is Madonna and Metallica. Radiohead were easily more established and well known than most of the disposable and quickly forgotten artists that outperformed them in the short term, and I think that was apparent even then.
OK Computer was a slow burn in that while it never quite took off commercially, a lot of people who like their rock more serious and arty became obsessed by the album. By the time Kid A came out, people saw them as the Next Big Thing, right on the cusp of U2 like stardom. Kid A was a big deal in part because they went they exact opposite way. Large parts if their audience were disappointed when it came out because it wasn’t that big epic album they thought they’d get.
It sold over two million copies in the us alone.
but…my mum says I’m cool?!?
This exchange made me laugh so hard.
“…a lot of fans use them…[because they’re]… listening on good equipment.”Christ, what a lame excuse…that’s like saying you can only eat your caviar with crackers stolen hot off the factory floor.
If you’re broke, I totally get piracy, but it takes a marathon of dipshit-mental-gymnastics for anyone with fancy-speaker-money to justify feeding into that ecosystem.Buy the cd, rip it.
You may be right, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. That’s all I was pointing out. The article makes like torrenting is dead, and it’s far from dead.
I absolutely had a few eyebrow-raises reading the article. One, OK Computer was MASSIVE. “#1 single” is far from the metric. Up here, MuchMusic still played the living hell out of the video for Paranoid Android. The album was virtually inescapable and like you said in your initial bit, it was multi-platinum. That is… the farthest thing from a failure, even in the heady days of the heights of CDs. And torrenting is alive and well. I no longer do it but FFS, “the next decade” or so? What, did torrenting die in 2010? haahahahahahahahaha.
Piracy is mostly because of lack of easy access, and is usually not because people just don’t want to pay for things (certainly there are people like that too). Once streaming services got big piracy dropped way less people pirated.
Actually, it is primarily because people don’t way to pay for things. Especially in low income neighborhoods and the third world where piracy is still huge. Those hacked fire sticks that allow you to watch the streaming networks for free for example, while Netflix shows can be spotted on the torrents. There will always be cheap skates who can’t even bring themselves to pay the $8 a month for Netflix.
“it is primarily because people don’t way to pay for things. Especially in low income neighborhoods”Do you even listen to yourself, ever?
I mean they don’t have Hulu in the UK. I can’t watch their content because I can’t fucking purchase it in any fashion. The only way is VPN— which is probably technically as legally dubious as pirating. And even then, the region-specific Google/Apple stores don’t have the streaming service apps.People in other parts of the world don’t have the ability to stream a great deal of content with the increase of streaming services exclusive to the US. You have to rely on Netflix or one of the other random services to purchase the rights for a show/movie in a particular country or region, and that can take ages.
One of reasons why Hollywood has been stubbornly against putting their major, expensive blockbusters online and why they release some movies in different regions first before others is because of pirates. Also, given how expensive going to the movies has become ($60-80 for a family of four), or the streaming services increasing their prices, no one should be surprised that people would rather torrent instead of paying.
It’s incredibly frustrating to want to buy something, to have the money in your hand ready to give to the seller, and have them say “Nope, we’re not selling to you.” International streaming is slowly improving, but many US users don’t realize that a lot of content is literally not legally available in other markets. At least with CDs and DVDs you can, at worst, send money to a friend in the US, have them buy the disks and mail them to you.
It’s a double edged scimitar, my friend. I used to VPN Netflix saying I was viewing from the UK, because there was a lot more great British/BBC stuff available on the UK version.
I haven’t tried that in a while…I think they have become wise to VPNs.
Most people would rather pay a reasonable price for legal content than go through the trouble of fucking with piracy and firesticks with hacked firmware. Laziness trumps all.
According to the numbers and polls, that’s half true:
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/piracy-survey-illegal-content-muso-1202829757/As per that poll, its like I said, most people do it because they don’t want to pay for it.
Did you even read what you linked? “Around 35% of pirated-content users cited cost. But 35% also said they turn to illegal services because the content they want isn’t available on services or TV channels they subscribe to. And 35% said the content is not available through legitimate sources in their country (in this case, the U.K.).And check this out: Of those who admitted to accessing pirated material, 83% claimed they try to find content through legal avenues first, according to Muso’s survey. About 91% of those who admit to accessing illegally shared content said they pay for a subscription service such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Spotify or Apple Music.” I couldn’t have found a better article to prove my point, so thanks for that.
Did you read it? Or just skimmed and cherrypicked the items you wanted to see because you just wanted to get you win on the internet over something you are wrong about? Apropos:“Around 35% of pirated-content users cited cost.”“It may be true that some portion of the piracy-going public would fork over money if only they had easier, or cheaper, access to premium content. But there will always be people who want to get something for nothing — or pirate movies, TV series and music just for the thrill of it.”Go on. Keep replying and insisting on being wrong.
“As per that poll, its like I said, most people do it because they don’t want to pay for it.” How is 35% “most people”?
You tell me since you keep insisting and arguing 24 hours later that the other 35% that do it out of lack of access is the majority. Because I could swear I said word for word and not the lying bullshit you just tried to pull: “According to the numbers and polls that’s half true.” In what language does “half true” mean “majority?” Certainly not english.Is it really that hard for you to be a mature grownup and accept that your opinion isn’t as absolutist and 100% as you want it?
No one’s hacking the firmware on a Firestick. It’s just another app (Kodi) installed on it.
Exactly. I used to pirate TV shows when I was broke and it wasn’t easy for me to find them without a cable subscription. Now, I have subscriptions to streaming services so I can watch the shows I want to watch. I don’t mind paying for it at all. I just needed it to be available for me without having to pay for a bunch of channels I’ll never watch.
It’s interesting that you call people in low income neighborhoods “cheapskates.”
There are also people (though I’d guess they’re a relatively small minority) who have hybrid reasoning. They do subscribe to streaming services, but they want to have a permanently available copy in the event that it becomes unavailable for whatever reason, whether it’s simply a rights issue or a Disney Vault kind of thing.
Not that I pirate, but I am frustrated how when I ask my Alexa to play a song, it’s a real toss-up over whether it’ll play the version I want to hear.
On old stuff where the rights are difficult, for instance, Amazon is happy to play a live version or re-recording, leaving me frequently going:”WTF version is this? This isn’t what I wanted to hear.”
…so I listen to about 80% of my music on Youtube…
Indeed. The list of shows I “need” to pirate has trickled down to just Last Week Tonight for me, which is only available on Murdoch owned platforms ironically.
What CD? Lots of new releases don’t even come out on CD anymore. A lot of the top retailers have stopped carrying them. Your choices these days are either digital, or if you really want a physical copy of your media you can hopefully get in on that 200-copy limited run swamp-green vinyl release before it disappears in, oh, 7 minutes.
Hang on a sec. The problem is that CDs are NOT at that level of quality. Urgh, I don’t know the tech details off the top of my head (and I’m too lazy to look it up), but CDs have a ceiling. And that ceiling is well below what the finished, mastered musical product is. The lossless .wav files I have for my record sound better than they do on CD —- they had to be compressed down to the format CD can handle. That’s why HD cd was attempted.So if you really want LOSSLESS music in flac format, unless the artist is actually offering it somehow, you CAN’T get it. It’s not AVAILABLE. The CD is NOT lossless and it is lower quality than the actual masters, digital or otherwise. A site like BandCamp offers you a variety of file formats, including lossless wav or flac. And there are quite a few indy or smaller bands that give a shit about this kind of thing that have offered DIRECT from their own sites “your choice” of file format. So I’m not even sure where some of these flac or lossless files on torrent sites are coming from if they’ve never been offered. Because it’s better quality than an MP3 ripped from CD but it’s not the quality people are really looking for. CDs have a disappointingly meh ceiling quality.Now, if these folks are happy with “CD quality” as their flac and are still just being cheap/thieving, okay. I agree with you. And then I will laugh at them, because their excuse is “I ONLY NEED HIGH QUALITY FOR MY HI-FI” and they’re … doing CD quality.
I wasn’t aware until you just wrote this that CD quality isn’t as good as lossless masters. I assumed that most digital recording was done at 44.1kHz as well. It doesn’t really matter, though, does it?Most people have experienced music at CD quality since the 90’s. The fact that you could get an old album in better-than-CD quality doesn’t seem to matter when you’ve been listening to it at CD quality all this time. It would sound different than the album you already know (although would you really be able to tell?). I guess that’s technically better, but I’d rather hear Nevermind the way I remember it.Is it actually a degree of quality that makes it worth it? I assume you think it is, but I feel like better-than-CD audio is just the difference between 99.9% and 100%.
I actually use Spotify all the time. I use it on the highest setting but it is what it is. I listen to music in the car, doing errands, cleaning, etc. Often but I sold my vinyl collection. I so rarely get the chance to actually “put on a record.” I have also been downsizing over the years. Having no physical music and the ability to Bluetooth to car, speaker bar, google home… I love it. But for “true audiophiles” cd quality isn’t going to cut it. If it does, they’re just pretentious wanks. Though the Venn diagram of “audiophile” and “pretentious wank” has a loooot of overlap. 🤣
I only know one person who collects FLAC exclusively, and it’s to get CD versions of stuff instead of mp3. Myself, I can’t usually notice the difference. Not to say I never can, but I’m happier with more convenience than more fidelity.I read an article a while ago about how they have to compress the low end of vinyl (I may be using the wrong term for this). A lot of people talk about how vinyl is a superior sound, but it’s just as flawed as anything else. I figure one day there will be people nostalgic for the sound of mp3s.
These days your primo digital stuff is 24bit/96khz as opposed to the CD standard of 16bit/44.1khz. You do the math, but that’s what…like 3x the information?
Even the audio that you typically use to accompany video is higher than CDs these days, typically 48khz.
I record a lot with bands and the files studios send me are always 24/96. I kind of hate it, because it makes your computer chug a bit running, like, 30 tracks of that with FX and stuff.
And it’s kind of ridiculous because the original CD format chose 44.1KHz for a reason, which is the Nyquist theorem and human hearing, because that means that the top frequency that can be captured is 22.05Khz, which is approximately the highest frequency that the human ear can perceive as a tone. Having the final product sampled at 44Khz is generally smart (It’s a smaller file and gets you frequencies as high as humans can hear), not limiting. You do get some advantage going from 16 -> 24 bit, which gets you 256x the amplitude levels (each bit doubles; 2^16 = 65, 536; 2^24 is 16,777,216). That gets you way more headroom, so you’re less likely to get clipping.
p.s. for the OP of the whole thread, CD audio is, in fact, lossless. There is no compression. It’s just a lower sampling rate than the master. “Lossy” refers to compression formats like MP3 and AAC that use a psycho-physical model to actually discard frequencies that are less perceptually salient; when you play them back it is a different waveform. And CD audio can be losslessly compressed (i.e. the playback waveform is identical to the uncompressed) with formats like FLAC and ALAC .
Bless you. You beat me to most of what I just posted.Definitely feel like audio quality is one of those areas that a lot of people know just enough to be dangerous, and not quite enough to actually know what they’re talking about.
Once people reach an age where they become obsessed with sound quality their hearing has already deteriorated down to below 16khz anyway.
I’m still a little confused. Can you relate this in a TNG-style “in a way” metaphor?
I don’t know if I can quite do a TNG-style metaphor. My brain just wants to say “like a balloon… and something bad happens”, thanks to Futurama.
Username/comment synergy -1
These days your primo digital stuff is 24bit/96khz as opposed to the CD standard of 16bit/44.1khz. You do the math, but that’s what…like 3x the information?
Even the audio that you typically use to accompany video is higher than CDs these days, typically 48khz. These numbers are essentially meaningless to an end listener. Humans only hear to about 20 khz. The sample rate for CDs was set to the standard of 44.1 because of Nyquist’s Theorem, which suggests to sample at twice what we can hear. They went beyond that number even, and there are basically no humans that can hear the difference between 44.1, 48, and 96.The reason higher rates have become somewhat standard (though still not entirely—I run a record label and burn masters all the time, and receive them in 44.1 and 48 at about an equal clip) is for more technical reasons that don’t have a lot to do with how the end product ends up sounding to listeners. It’s mainly misguided audiophiles who think they can tell the difference.As long as you’re just archiving, reproducing, or re-pressing an album, 44.1 audio is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly lossless. 48 and above may give you more flexibility to remaster without loss; that is the primary area in which it’s useful.I think people see the bigger numbers and assume this is akin to visual resolution on a TV set. But ears are not eyes and this does not correlate.
That’s all fine and dandy, but I can tell the difference between 16/44 and 24/96. Nyquist’s theory is great and rational, but there is a different feel to the higher end files. Something goes on in the way the brain interprets sound that the ears might not be able to detect if tested…
That being said, aside from the much-less-clipping you get with 24 bit audio, I sort of prefer the more limited range of 16/44…and I’ve been rethinking even that, as a lot of the time I listen to old radio tapes that came from cassette, then were digitized at low bitrates, and to my ear, there is something warm and pleasant sounding about them, similar to what you got with old radios and speakers (6×9 paper cone in the back window FTW) in a ‘70’s car…not a fan of high end!
Tell the difference in what context, with what equipment? Many pieces of audio gear aren’t even made to reproduce the highest frequencies of a 96000 khz file; playing them without downsampling results in a kind of distortion to the audible frequencies. So yes they may sound different, but in a way that is actually worse rather than better.
https://productionadvice.co.uk/high-sample-rates-make-your-music-sound-worse/Having a setup that plays both files natively, without downsampling and without distortion, and then running them side by side in a blind listen—most people won’t be able to discern any difference. There have been a couple studies on this, though I don’t have the time to dig them up right now (did a cursory search and didn’t find what I was looking for, alas).EDIT: Wikipedia helpfully linked a couple of articles on blind testing hi res audio against 44.1 16-bit:
http://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdfhttps://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fpixels%2Farticle%2F2015%2F08%2F21%2Fon-a-teste-la-musique-en-haute-definition_4711583_4408996.html (translated for your pleasure)Bit rate is a different question, although to my mind has a very similar answer. Theoretically 24 bit offers a more nuanced dynamic range, but when 16 bit already offers over 60k possible levels of loud, the benefit of increasing that by two or three or even a million times is questionable, IMO. Can our ears really hear fine gradations smaller than 1/60,000th? I am dubious. I can barely tell the difference between any randomly-selected setting and its neighbor on my receiver, and that thing only has a few hundred values for loudness.tl;dr version: As far as I’m concerned, this stuff is mainly about relative numbers and people convincing themselves they hear stuff they don’t in order to justify selling or buying ultra-luxe audio systems and double-dipped new media formats like the SACD.
I think that you might not be able to quantify sound at those levels, which is to say if you play the 55000th level of loud vs the 55001st level, nobody could discern which is which.
…but I also believe that is is these supposedly inaudible differences that make recorded sound different from natural sound…like, think how rarely you hear a recorded voice and think there is a person in the room, or a recorded acoustic guitar and think it sounds like a guitar being played near you.
Kind of like with video…my eyes are very meh these days, so the difference between 720p and 4k to me are largely lost, but high res-hi framerate still looks more like the reality I see with my eyes. In theory, there *could* be a resolution/framerate that I would mistake for a real object or person, even though I cannot quantifiably see the difference between the amount of dots in different resolutions from 4 feet away from my television.
…and I believe audio works like that.
For the record, at home I listen to stuff using a 24/96 soundcard into some Adam A7 powered monitors. It’s a pretty good rig…but then I also usually just listen to audio from YouTube lol.
I just wanted to say, we fundamentally disagree on this issue, but I like talking to you. 🙂
I feel like doing the math isn’t going to make it sound any better, though. Unless you’re listening to two tracks one after the other you probably won’t notice as big a difference as there actually is. It may be 3x the information, but will that translate into a listening experience that’s 3x better? How do you even measure that?I know with HD vs. 4K, the human eye can’t really detect much of a difference on an average-sized TV screen. Sure, you can see it on two TVs in the store, but get it home and most TVs look good enough when you don’t know what you’re missing.Also, I exclusively listens to low-fi indie rock like Sebadoh or Daniel Johnston, and 78 shellac records and old Edison cylinders.
I kind of answered all that in my response to the above guy.
I listen to a lot of radio airchecks from the sixties and seventies!
Yeah you might want to do your own research on that. Trusting what so called audiophiles say about sound quality is never a good idea.
The proof that any meaningful number of people have the ability to differentiate between a quality mp3 and CD is tenuous at best. CD quality wav vs. lossless on the other hand…not buying it. Sure, maybe you can hear it on a record you recorded when you know which is which, side-by-side, but in a blind taste test? Doubtful.Having worked as an engineer in a mixing/mastering house, I could rant on and on about capture vs render rates, the intent of a master, the near impossibility or reproducing uncolored sound, etc., but I’m tired. I’ll just say that I think that people who can *really hear* all those extra bits and bytes in a lossless file are the same as the people who can *really feel* all the positive energy flowing from their crystal necklace.
the same as the people who can *really feel* all the positive energy flowing from their crystal necklace.Tremendous rant. I love you.
Love you too.
Borrow the CD from the library and rip it.
Before Ok Computer most people thought they were just the dudes who did that song Creep. I remember the first time hearing it I took the bus to see Spirted Away. Then I put the CD in my player after it was over I played it again. The day later I bought The Bends then Kid A my least favorite of the three but How to disappear Completely is georgous.
“Before Ok Computer most people thought they were just the dudes who did that song Creep.”Most people still think that.
Yeah, that struck me as weird when really there’s way more ways to get free music than ever right now. In addition to torrenting, a ten year old kid can figure out a way to rip songs from YouTube, and there’s people making playlists and sending mp3s over every form of social media known to humanity. Plus, SoulSeek is still up, just saying.
not gonna lie, I need to figure out how to rip songs off YouTube cos there is some live shit on there that is literally that, live video, not anything off an album, that I’d like to listen to elsewhere.
Browser extensions are your friend! Just google “[your browser] YouTube downloader”.
This is all leaving aside the fact that Napster was notorious for low-bitrate and mislabeled mp3s. Which is why the first time I tried to listen to the Velvet Underground, I instead heard the song Crimson and Clover at what I can only describe as “long distance phone call” quality.
Plus, did you know that every novelty song ever, hell every song that ever showed even the slightest trace of humor, was by Weird Al?
He even addressed that on his website!
My favorite Wiered All song is still “Yes We Have No Bananas.”
Somewhere, I still have some AC/DC songs labelled as Van Halen.
…and I wouldn’t have it any other way 🙂
Even after all these years, the words “I wouldn’t have it any other way” remind me of my favorite Al@n1s M0risettee song, “Bitch.”
I remember searching for “I Love Rock n’ Roll” and it come up as Pat Benatar.
I’m looking up sales figures. Over 2 million copies sold in the USA. There is a (tiny) argument to be made that 2 million, in that era, isn’t a “monster smash.” Smashing Pumpkins “Adore” did 2 million or so; it was a “disappointment” next to something around 8-10 million sold for Mellon Collie. But OK did double platinum in the USA, nearly 5 million globally.(400,000 copies sold in Canada. We’re a country of then 25 million. That’s MASSIVE.)Kid A did… 1,480,000 sales in the USA. Single platinum.The Bends and Pablo Honey both did slightly better than Kid A, each hovering just above 1.5 million sold. ……So, in short, OK Computer remains the biggest album of Radiohead’s career. Fuck this article!
(just for my own benefit as a Pumpkins fan:Siamese Dream over 4 millionMellon Collie over 5 millionAdore over 1 millionSo… for that era based on the sales of their previous two albums, Adore is a commercial disappointmentannnnnywayyyy)
To be fair to the author, Kid A sold a lot faster than OK Computer. And that’s the only metric that a lot of people care about.
In other words, “I can afford to buy good sound equipment, but I can’t afford to buy the music for it”. Sure.
The Radiohead angle in this article is complete BS, as you stated, OK computer was a massive critical and commercial success. The band was headlining large festivals before kid a. Napster didn’t break , that’s just stupid.
Radiohead was so big around the time of OK Computer that they actually made a movie about the horrors of superstardom.
Maybe this is one of those ,” you’re not a big act until you break the US “ things . Radiohead were a fairly massive band in the UK , Ireland and a lot of the world after “The Bends” came out , and by the time OK Computer came out they were even more well known …I mean ‘songs showing up in primetime TV comedy shows’ well known.I think this might be a slight framing mechanism to get Radiohead (who really had gone huge in the mid 90s ) into an article about early 2000’s napster ..and I’m ok with that .
First song I ever downloaded was Don McLean’s American Pie for some reason. Which was great except that I had nothing I could play it on and had nothing bigger than a floppy drive, so I couldn’t even get it off my parents’ home computer to have on my laptop. We didn’t have a CD burner for another year or so.It was a different time!
One of the first things that they teach you when you study economics is that people are freeloaders. If there’s a way to obtain a product for free people will opt for that. It’s in their DNA. It goes back all the way to the bartering days before money was invented. I very well remember that despicable Neil Portnow wagging his finger at teenagers during the Grammys broadcast around the time he became the president of the academy. The bloodsucking recording companies should have invested in R&D and digital technologies and be ahead of the curve instead of screwing their artists up the arse and charging up to $18 for albums that contained only two good songs.
There is a counterpoint to the argument that people won’t pay for stuff they can get for free. While Napster was going strong, people were paying billions of dollars for ringtones, which were also available for free.I think the market for ringtones showed that people were OK with dropping a buck or two for a piece of music, and if the music industry had switched then and there to selling mp3 singles for a buck, and made it easy to find and buy them, people would have bought them.
It wouldn’t have wiped out piracy, but they would have found a huge market of people who didn’t want the hassles of Napster. I think the issue is that the music industry decided that milking a few more years of people who paid $17.95 for a CD with two good songs on it was worth more to them than letting people buy just those two songs.
But the whole idea that you should buy and listen to just the songs you “like” changed music for the worse. An album isn’t a collection of songs any more than a movie is a collection of scenes. You may like some scenes more than others, but to get the whole effect, you need to watch the movie from start to end. Same thing with albums.
I have seen more than enough movies to know you are wrong about enough of them to void your point. Hell, The Last Jedi doesn’t support your argument.And albums have been sold by their singles since like the 30s. Music videos have been around since the 70s.
I think by the time Napster came along you could count on one hand the number of albums that worked as a cohesive set of songs. There was a lot of filler, weird songs written by the bassist thrown in so he could get a cut of the songwriting royalties, alternate unfinished acoustic version of the hit track ….
Also, most bands often had a lot less input on what appeared on their albums than they would have liked. If the music company told them to cut their two favorite songs, add a flute to another, and throw in two Motown covers, that’s what the Russian death metal band did. It wasn’t a good situation for consumers.“Odin va tri! Zu kahnt hurry ze luv, zhu joost hav to vait, zhe set ze luv dahnt cam eezy, ist oon gam ov gev und take!”
Look man, I love “albums” as much as the next guy.I also remember that the majority of albums were… two good songs and a bunch of filler. And your comparison falls apart, because I, and everybody else, CAN enjoy a *single song* as a complete piece of art. There are bands that I like ONE song from. They have a beginning, middle, and end. Yeah, I agree —- there are albums that should be listened to as albums, start to finish, and the experience is better for it. I love those albums. But to suggest that it changed music for the worse? Nah dawg. CDs were 15-20 bucks for basically the one or two songs you liked and a bunch of naff durge. For every Siamese Dream there was a Frog Stomp. We were paying through the arsehold for one or two songs, and most of those albums weren’t any better or special for listening to the entire thing. Also: In the 60s and 70s (and earlier), 7″ were the jam. MANY of the Beatles best songs were never on “proper albums,” but on the 7″ singles. Or B-Sides. So you’re talking about this really narrow window of time when it was ALL about album. The 80s into the 90s were the death of the single. You could still get them, sometimes; if you had access to a LARGE or really good record store. But bands weren’t really releasing big songs on them, just the music videos/singles with some remixes and a B-side or two. tl;dr: that is a pretentious take, disconnected from reality, existing in a wistful dream world. (THAT SAID: I dislike when bands put out single tracks on spotify and whatnot, especially when they’re basically album previews. But that’s mainly because it’s a pain in the arse. A lot of indie bands have moved onto EPs… IMO I feel like that’s the best way to go. A full album is going to be ignored by most folks, a single might not be enough, but an EP lets you highlight your 5-7 really terrific songs without losing the span.Also, like, lots of old albums used to be 8 songs and under half-hour —- the bloated track counts and runtimes of the 90s were more of an aberration than a fixture.)
But it’s no different from the way singles have worked going back decades. Record labels and artists have been choosing arbitrary songs off albums to release as singles that can be purchased outside of the album pretty much since the beginning of the recorded music industry. Some of the earliest recorded music was a precursor to what we’d call a single today. (Old recording cylinders could only contain a short piece of audio, so there’d just be one or two songs or a movement from an orchestral work rather than the whole composition.) Even the Billboard Hot 100 list, which originated in 1958, has always been partly based on the sale of singles.
While there is definitely an art to the album, not every musician is talented enough to properly harness that art. In the vast majority of cases, most “albums” are really just a collection of songs. Hell, even some of the greatest album creators (The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Prince) still released some of their album tracks as singles, obviously going to show that they’re not above making sure they actually make some money with their music.
The biggest difference is that now people don’t have to wait for whichever song the artist and/or label agree is worthy of single release. They can purchase whichever song they want individually. If anything, it’s democratized the pop charts since now people can elevate a song to Hot 100 status without the artist or label deciding that it’s single worthy.
Not to mention most times your favorite song off a given album is not one of the two or three radio hits. I think about an album like The Joshua Tree, where my favorite songs are the middle run of Running to Stand Still, Red Hill Mining Town (#1 fav on the album), In God’s Country, Trip Through Your Wires and One Tree Hill. Where the Streets Have No Name is a great song and I’ll crank it every chance I get. But listening to the album straight through is an entirely superior experieince.
People cut down on pirating when streaming music, and tv and movies went to reasonable prices and locations. Then companies started fracturing their products again and the pirating went back up.People are willing to pay what they are willing to pay. I thought that was how the “free market” was supposed to work.
Your professor was wrong. Otherwise take a penny leave a penny jars would be empty. Most people have too much puritan shame to accept something for free.Most econ profs are wrong about the world. They don’t know shit about psychology or marketing. Yes, I aced my econ classes.
This probably has something to do with capitalism assuring that a vanishingly small amount of the population has a vast chunk of the money.
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That was the magic of Napster in the days before anyone worried about the ethics of it all: Suddenly, music was free and available to anyone with a modem. Just because you lack a moral compass does not mean an entire generation did. We knew it was stealing, we didn’t give a shit because music lables had been charging 15 to 20 bucks for CDs. While tapes, which cost more to produce, were less than 10. Listeners had been told for nearly a decade prices would drop after CD adoption and that was a lie. So people took their money back. Hell, even U2 said to steal music.Don’t confuse your lack of ethics for generational innocence. That is how you get Boomers.
Back then Napster was just stupidly important for me, because I live in Russia and a lot of the music I discovered then wasn’t readily available for purchase over here.Gotta admit, I got hooked and barely ever actually bought any music since then. I came to AudioGalaxy in its last days, then I discovered SoulSeek which I, honest to god, still use regularly, then came RuTracker, also still going strong, and other, better, private music trackers (RIP what.cd), which, besides being a pirate hub, are also incredibly important as libraries, which gather all the stuff that would otherwise at some point just poof out of existence. And I’m a firm believer in preservation of media.These days I still have a ton of music on my hard drives, mostly in FLAC. I don’t like streaming, because much as it tries, it never has everything I need in my collection. I use a Hi-End music player for outside and I really appreciate the ability to store and enjoy high quality audio.
I loved the opportunity to discover while new (to me) genres, like my long drum ‘n bass obsession.
I experienced a really interesting situation many years ago when my son wanted to play “Hey Jude” on the piano. I wanted to buy him a legal copy on iTunes but it wasn’t available. I found a copy on Bittorent, but it was part of a torrent including the Beatles’ entire discography. It was literally easier and cheaper and faster to download everything the Beatles have ever made than to purchase a physical copy of one song.Anyway, my first Napster download was the 12” mix of Animotion’s Obsession. Not ashamed. That song rocks.
That’s right —- until they did the big remasters and sorted out the deal with iTunes about ten years ago, The Beatles were essentially unavailable through legal digital means.
Didn’t it start with the Beatles’ Apple Records label letting Apple MacIntosh use their logo, as long as they stayed out of the music business?
That sounds right!
I remember being floored when they were making a big deal about The Beatles being available for download for the first time. I had never looked (probably napstered a few songs) and just assumed the whole catalog had been online forever. Arguably the most important band in rock history??
Doing the same thing (Hey Jude on piano) today means going to YouTube and finding at least 50 results that match exactly what you want. It’s amazingly crazy the stuff that you can find on YouTube. My twelve-year old doesn’t watch TV anymore; it’s YT on his iPad all the time.
…the best you were getting was a janky live recording or a mixtape with unwanted cameos from your local radio DJ.
It’s important to remember that commercial radio was utter shit by the time Napster came around, which had previously been the main way most of us discovered new music. This was the era of consolidation where you were lucky if you even had local DJs, let alone local music directors.
Also the era when the industry was illegally colluding to keep cd sales artificially high, without even really pretending that wasnt what they were doing.
No. No they weren’t. You completely misunderstand MAP.
When did MTV really stop being a “music channel?” I know in Canada, MuchMusic held on longer… but 2000 definitely feeling like a time when they were airing more and more of the MTV reality shows and less and less music. So, yeah. When in ‘96 I could watch Much or listen to the radio and discover and hear all kinds of rad music, that was drying up.Look up the “100 songs” for radio. It was a big transition that “made radio more efficient” at the expense of making radio suck.
MTV2 came out around that time and they shoved all of the music stuff onto that channel while keeping the reality and scripted stuff on the main channel.
…and it freaking cratered. Turned out people didn’t want to sit around hoping to see their favorite video anymore.
When they launched Total Request Live, a show that primarily featured 13-year-olds screaming in facecams that covered 90-second excerpts of music videos which those very same 13-year-olds had asked to have played on the show.
I remember that period as hearing bad rap rock in an endless loops and having to turn the radio off every half an hour or so. So yeah? Any way of hearing music that wasn’t Limp Bizkit or Sugar Way was well needed
I was also paying AUS$35 for a CD at the time. They fucked themselves, the greedy bastards.
Both with absurd CD prices, and trying to stave off digital distribution for as long as possible. The labels themselves should have been getting their entire catalogs digitized for sale and thus control the pricing. Record store chains could have been the outlets for sales. Faced with $9 for a digital download versus $19 for a CD, people would willingly have migrated and the labels would still have made money. It’s Blockbuster and Netflix again.
I’m pretty sure they did that buy just being awesome. What they did with In Rainbows is what changed music distribution.
This article is completely ignorant of the basic fact that artist exposure was just fine long before the internet. It was called word of mouth. It was a little slower but still moved like lightning and you were either not around at the time or living under a rock if you didn’t know of Radiohead before “Kid A.” I know because I ran a record store at the time. It was also incredibly easy to explore all the music you wanted to if you lived any where near a large city or college town and if you didn’t you would get in your car and drive to these cities and guess what? It was fun. All it took was curiosity and the slightest bit of effort. If anything people were far more invested in music at the time as opposed to now when they are merely consumers in the worst sense of the word. I can discover more music in an hour at a good record store than I could in a day on Spotify or YouTube and only by the act of thoughtfully buying that music and taking it home and living with it (as opposed to listening to it once before scampering off in search of something five minutes newer) do I ultimately fully appreciate it.Most importantly, downloading and streaming have financially devastated musicians. Just talk to those who were around at the time. As for that old argument that artists just need to tour more, well, that was bullshit to begin with (YOU try living like that) and look at where it has left them now. If people still bought music that would at least be a lifeline.
The notion that people weren’t discovering new music before the internet or even not doing it as well is childishly naive and if your argument is that you would otherwise have to get off your fat ass and go out to do so then you have nothing of value to say on the topic.
“It was also incredibly easy to explore all the music you wanted to if you lived any where near a large city or college town.”This statement is fucking ridiculous. All the music you wanted to? No, not even close.
The range of music at my college was really narrow, both in terms of bands that came, what people listened to, and what the college radio station played. The idea of, say, Mexican pop music was just unthinkable among the taste setters. You could get all the Grateful Dead you could stomach, but Zydeco, George Clinton, Indian pop, forget it.
I think he’s in character as one of the guys from High Fidelity.
If the internet didn’t exist, I doubt I would have found a lot of genres and musicians that I loved, especially music from abroad.
Well why didn’t you just work in a record store too, IDIOT.
“hello, Burn Department, you got a new patient on his way (chokes back tears)”
I’d call specific bullshit on Napster helping people discover new music. Internet speeds were too slow and searching Napster was too much of a crapshoot to be used for discovering something new. Napster was where you went to pirate a hot single or download a random song you heard in a commercial. Only a psychopath would use it do cobble together a complete album. The only things Napster did was 1) make it clear that people would rather not go out to a store to buy music, 2) would rather not pay for music, and 3) upend the system where hit singles drove album sales. The closest Napster came to music discovery is that a friend could suggest you download a song, but that’s not any different than dubbing cassettes, and after Napster was shut down and Gmail became a thing, people just emailed MP3s to each other.
I’d call specific bullshit on Napster helping people discover new music. Internet speeds were too slow
true to a degree, though Napster was also instrumental in influencing demand for high speed internet.https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/broadband/comments2/Napster.htm
How about that. And as a nice little touch, apparently 2000 was the year Bell Atlantic changed its name to Verizon, which I had to look up, because I was certain I was on dial-up until at least 2003.
It motivated me and many people I know to upgrade to a DSL line and modem.
I don’t remember the exact timing, but remember going from qeueing up four songs on my 56k and leaving the house for a few hours, hoping one or two had made it, to lining up full albums and having the whole thing inside a few minutes. Other than gifts, I didn’t by CDs for years. Download and burn to disc. so yeah, I’m one of the tens of millions of people collectively responsible for fucking recording artists out of their livings and don’t feel great about it.
Do console yourself that the music industry knew digital was coming for years and they didn’t do anything to prepare (other than sue those 80-some downloaders, which did scare me away) while jacking CD/tape prices. So you likely entered the era with a significant credit (remember BMG and Columbia House). Do also remind yourself that you probably paid murderously high rates (and still do) for tickets. I like that iTunes gives a product that seems like a fair price.
If there had been a reasonably priced market for digital distribution then the industry could definitely have headed off much of the P2P disaster, for sure. I’m culpable for my own actions, but in general if people can get something for free then they’re going to take it. Getting out ahead of that opportunity would have softened the industry blow, though.
Disagree. I think it depended on the type of music consumer you were. It’s been a long time, but I think on Napster (not just the successors we ran to), you could go to an uploader’s library and see if there was something else you liked. So, no, I wasn’t necessarily changing whole musical genres, but I was picking up covers, live versions, and tangentially related artists. But I would put in the time on all of the P2P sites and definitely wasn’t only there for friend suggestions.
I miss having to make some effort, too, despite the imperfect results. I started off on jazz in a used cd store, not mostly knowing who the artists were and picking which to buy based upon the song list and wondering what they could do with it. Very hit or miss but worth it. Having whatever you want by clicking a button does nothing for your problem solving ability and patience levels that could not be achieved faster by hitting you in the head with a brick. Now, get off of my lawn.
For all the havok the digital revolution wreaked on the music industry, it was especially hard to feel much sympathy for them at the time. Singles were truly inescapable back then. When radio and MTV were the only way to hear new music, and new artists only get added to the rotation every month or so, it was easy to burn out on everything. And then if you plunked down the $18 (in 90s money, or about $27 in today money) there was a good chance that not only would the lead single be the only song on the album you enjoyed but that it would also be a stylistic tangent from the rest of the album. For those of us that didn’t have easy access to a legit record store where a CD could be previewed before purchase, this felt like the entire industry just flipping us off repeatedly.
And the only way to discover new music outside of radio/MTV was word of mouth and magazine descriptions, and then (again, without easy record store access) more or less blindly ordering a copy by mail, waiting 6 weeks, and hoping for the best. On my teenage budget of the late 90s, this meant a wildly inconsistent music collection that was about 5% great, 50% meh, and 45% practically unlistenable.
Napster and the p2p/torrent brethren it spawned were a godsend and, as a music listener and buyer, I was grateful.
Fuck you, Chumbawamba produced a number of terrific albums. Not least of which, Shhh! Give it a listen. It’s excellent. It’s also not on Spotify so you’ll need to make a teeny, tiny, fractional effort to track it down.
Gomez, this article is badly researched. OK Computer was and remains the clear best selling album of Radiohead’s, where Kid A did similar numbers to The Bends and Pablo Honey. And what is your bit about torrents? Come on. Torrents are still going strong, they hardly ended “another decade” after the collapse of Napster.
Torrents are definitely still big, especially for live shows which nearly always aren’t available any other way. Not even just shows people recorded surreptitously— also ones that band/venue were happy to grant people permission to record.
I want Spotify and all digital music to do better. It is appalling how hard it is now for a musician or band to make a living in music, especially without touring or merch sales. At the same time, the music industry at the turn of the century was a bloated, slogging mess. Most artists only received a fraction of the money from their album sales. The people getting rich where the label owners, publishers, and mostly a bunch of shitty suits who had been spending decades figuring out how to exploit artists and fans to line the pockets of a few. And usually owning the publishing rights to songs, fucking over the people who CREATED THEM. And withholding lots of royalties bands should have been getting. Obviously Spotify/Apple paying such pittances to artists isn’t great, either. But it’s also far more possible to be in charge of your career and own your music outright…
I’m struggling to think of when recorded music ever made much money for most bands. There have always been a few top tier bands which had the leverage to negotiate good new contracts, and a few lucky songwriters who got tons of royalties from a surprise hit, but touring has been the only option for most to make a living, and even that is dicey.
Very, very, very true. It’s funny because the article on Almost Famous/High Fidelity yesterday (or Friday?) talked about how AF shows the kind of descent of the music industry into shittiness. The money in music is in songwriting royalties. And the reality is that rarely is the whole BAND credited as songwriters. That’s why some one-hit wonders do well —- they’re making money off that one song for decades. (I remember reading that Rick Astley actually hasn’t made anything off of “Never Gonna Give You Up;” perhaps he didn’t have anything but performance?)There are things such as performance royalties; ie, all who played on a song should get royalties when it is played. But those are not really doled out well or often. The whole thing is a mess.The industry from the days of Motown and early Nashville has existed to exploit artists. It’s gross, really.
Stock Aitken Waterman wrote and produced a lot of Rick Astley’s work – SAW wrote and produced over 100 UK top 40 songs and have made over GBP40 million. Bananarama, Astley, Dead or Alive, Donna Summer, Kylie Minogue, and Jason Donovan were all SAW written and/or produced.
“The money is in songwriting royalties”. Perfect time to just throw out Dolly Parton, who had the foresight and tenacity to hold onto complete ownership of her songs as soon as she was able to start doing so. Even to the point of denying Elvis Presley the right to record “I Will Always Love You”, because he got 1/2 ownership of any song he recorded. We know how that one turned out – the proceeds from that song eventually made her wealthy enough to literally buy her hometown, and to build Dollywood.And that is why she can afford to say anything she wants today.Boycott her, for saying “Of course Black Lives Matter”? You might as well boycott the – the – I don’t know, looking up at the stars, or something.
I have always been aware of Dolly Parton. One of my mum’s favorites. I literally just read that terrific profile on her where talks about BLM and the Elvis story. I’ve fallen in love with the woman the past six months. While my mum was dying, I learned “Jolene.” Fucking dynamite.
That’s awesome – what’s really amazing to me is how she leaned into the sexism which was so rampant and just taken for granted. “Dolly Parton jokes”(ie: big breast jokes) were EVERYWHERE around her for a long time, and she encouraged them, and laughed with them, and then outlasted them to become the titan she is today.
Another piece I read. Parton said (paraphrased): “I give them two minutes to stare. Then I say, let’s down to business about how we are going to make so much money together.”
Well, yes. A person who repeatedly underwent the surgeries would likely have an appreciation that she created a physique to inspire gawking. And thus tolerate the gawking (as opposed to someone born with massively disproportionate boobs). Like, it was part of her calculus in getting them and upping them in the first place. She’s an icon, but very little about her appearance is real and that’s ok.
Heh, titan.
Heh missile silos
Dolly is awesome.
At the same time, the music industry at the turn of the century was a bloated, slogging mess
Was it ever not?
This is going to be interesting to maybe two other people, but I need to write about this. I grew up listening to classic rock (from my dad) and country (from my mum). I got into grunge at the tail end of its peak. Somewhere around 96, I also became *fervently* Christian. Perhaps some of you understand this. It meant you didn’t listen to so-called “secular” music. IE: Music that wasn’t “christian.”There was an entire Christian Music Industry that existed, side-by-side, with the Actual Music Industry. Some were owned or worked with the majors, but that didn’t really matter. By and large, Christian music wasn’t to be found in regular record stores. You needed to go to a Christian Bookstore to get it. The labels had different distribution. Christian bands played the Christian circuit of churches or christian clubs. I mean, they couldn’t play in a BAR! Gasp! Christian Radio existed. It had a target audience: “Becky,” the 30-something soccer mom who wanted something “safe and uplifting” to play in her car with her kids. Which naturally excised 90% of the christian music being made outside of super-Jesusy stuff.Columbia House had a Christian “get 10 cds for a penny” club. This isn’t a diatribe against “christian rock.” The average person mocking xtian rock knows like, three bands. And there were some terrible bands and many knock-offs of what was popular in music at the time. Not arguing. (the bookstores would have charts: “If you like (BLANK SECULAR BAND), try (BLANK CHRISTIAN BAND. Ugh.)There were hundreds of tremendous bands I still listen to. When Napster hit… and when the digital thing started… it also came at a time when some Christian bands, particularly in the punk and metal scenes, were trying to escape the confines. Tooth & Nail Records/Solid State Records got their stuff into Best Buy proper. Bands like Underoath got on (and eventually headlined) Warped Tour. Bands like Switchfoot got mainstream play. The super-christian, all-jesus bands, were still on radio and not interested, but a lot more bands were bristling at the artificial confines of the “christian music scene.” Many more questioning it, pushing back against it, etc. Touring with “secular” bands and not giving a fuck. Being in that, having grown out of it, and moving forward: one of the biggest death knells for “christian music” was iTunes and then streaming. Because now, these bands didn’t have to depend on a “christian bookstore” to get their music out. Anybody could get it. Go to their website, click a link, buy the single. Or buy the CD from the band or label, much easier than you ever could. Go to BandCamp. Put your music everywhere.While CD sales were shrinking everywhere, from what I glean, CD sales in the christian world shrunk at an astonishing rate. A friend of mine, an older jesus hippie, ran the music dept at the local bookstore. He worked hard to stock the weird, eclectic shit, and recommend it. You’d still get the moms and old people buying some new “worship” album but the alternative stuff?I could get it on iTunes.I could get it from Best Buy (for way cheaper; the christian market was even more expensive than regular CDs).I could get it from the band. Etc etc. It was a source of freedom for piles and piles of artists that led to the functional dismantling of the Christian music industry. It still exists, in a tiny form; but it’s almost entirely “church” music be it gospel or modern “praise” stuff. Good riddance.
Had no idea Switchfoot was a Christian band
Their first record or two were definitely “Christian” label records. They were one of the first to focus on the mainstream rather than Christian circuit. And got the major label interest to make that push. Which is it. I’m not a huge fan of switchfoot, but good music is good music. They had (have?) a good career.
I hope you’re recovering okay.
Loads! I would write abook about it but like, three people would be interested.
You’d be surprised
Oof, your note about the “safe and uplifting” music gave me flashbacks to z88.3 here in Florida. All their logos ads would always label it as “safe for the little ears!” instead of calling it like it was: the absolute blandest Christian music available. My parents never cared about what radio stations we listened to because they also liked pop and top40, but one of the mom’s in the carpool growing up only ever played it, and then the waiting room of the terrible Christian therapist I was forced to go to also played it. It’s almost like it was purposefully trying to push people away from Christianity.
It’s pap. And even when “Christian music” was at its biggest, radio was only interested in a tiny sliver of the output. How many Jesus per minutes, the “mission” or “ministry” of a band or artist, etc. It was commodified Christianity that looked eternally inward. Yknow. Like most evangelicals. They are less ubiquitous in Canada, but my local has the tag of “safe & fun for the whole family!”Says a lot about the mentality of many evangelicals. I mean, look, I’m not saying your eight year old needs to start jamming to WAP or anything, but… Eeeeesh.
Yeah, I was lucky. My parents’ record cabinet was full of Allman Bros., Stones, Dylan. Newer records were Petty and Seger. I have to give credit where due.
I grew up ultra religious but I’ll always appreciate the fact that I started out listening to classical (thanks mom and a musical education outside of school). Discovered Top 40 when I was maybe 7-8, so 1983-48, classic rock around the same time, and got on the grunge boat almost immediately. That said, it really does seem to me that CCM really hit its’ peak like mid-late 90’s. I never really got into it, because I already had enough God in my life throughout the week. But I knew things changed when my local alternative radio began playing Jars of Clay and DC Talk. Like, regular rotation during the day (ugh, DC Talk!!!).
I really like later Jars of Clay. Good monsters is a terrific album. What… You’re not d d d down with the DC talk?🤣I’ll show myself out.
I can honestly say I haven’t thought about CCM in years, nay, decades. I’m sure quite a few friends from that former life are still heavily into it. I hadn’t thought of JoC probably since 1997, think I even had that first album they put out. I will say that I do still dust the cobwebs off my brain and listen to the first Sixpence album (it was solid) and the other one that got them mainstream play when they reformed (can’t recall the title). I recall that the first three songs off the latter were on a top 5 “Best opening trilogy of songs” of mine for a number of years. Can’t believe I still remember this crap after 25+ years.
The only album that competes with Kid A as my all-time fav is Jars of Clay’s ‘Much Afraid’. Sure, like Death Cab or Arcade Fire, some of their songs are a lil too cute and on the nose, but man they swung for the fences every time and landed some truly profound and beautiful songs. What a great band.
One thing that’s unmentioned in the article is that during the boy band 90s/00s explosion and CD sales almost topped a Billion was the actual price of CDs at the time. Almost everything was over $15 and a lot of new releases were nearing $20 with tax. Older releases from big artists weren’t immune either. So instead of physically stealing them we started stealing digital copies. The record company’s were pricing people out for people wanting 1-2 songs as singles were no longer a thing.
That is absolutely a huge part of why people embraced Napster. It wasn’t just that it was free. It was that it was so damn expensive otherwise, and if you just wanted one or two songs off the album, you didn’t want to pay $18.50 to get them. (This was the average CD price at the time according to Pitchfork, which is about $27.84 when you adjust for inflation. Imagine being asked to pay over $25 for the newest Rihanna album today.) OF COURSE, people flocked to this service. And honestly, given that the biggest groups to suffer as a result were exploitative record labels and artists who were already rolling in dough anyway, I can’t exactly feel bad.As others have commented, if the record industry had embraced the new tech and gotten ahead of it by implementing paid a la carte streaming and downloading options early, they probably could have stayed on top of it all. They had to resist progress, which almost never ends up well for industries.
the guy who invented napster went to my high school!
It’s no longer the Wild West days of Napster…Ain’t it? You can’t throw a stone without hitting a P2P torrent service nowadays, catering to any taste there is, and don’t get me started with the deep Web.
Bonus points for including Don’t Copy That Floppy, btw.
One thing I remember about that time is that it REALLY started coming out that it wasn’t the pirates who were driving the musical acts into bankruptcy. It was the studios. They were stealing the lion’s share of the profits right out of the artists’ mouths.
Best part of Napster was being able to download all those super embarrassing songs you loved but didn’t want to buy it. Would I buy “This is How We Do it” or “Spice up Your Life?”No way. Would I download it for free and listen to it on my computer at home when nobody was listening? Hell yes
One of the other benefits was that it was suddenly possible to get that one hit wonder song that was popular 15 years ago but which was no longer possible to find as a single. Maybe it was a band that was otherwise pretty crappy, but they had that one great song. Almost no one was going to go buy that album anymore, but now you COULD get the song.
Oh, yeah. Sitting there at work trying to figure out what random song you can find and download off of Napster was a major time waster for me
“BitTorrent sites like the Pirate Bay, which would prosper for another decade yet.”You might want to double that time frame.
Speaking of high CD costs and shitty, greedy record company executives:
tl;dr I hate this poorly-researched and spurious article.
The good old days. You’d queue up 10 songs and go to bed. Half of those songs would fail. One would be mislabeled. But, you could have 4-5 free songs every night.
What sucked about the mislabeled song is that it might actually be a good song from a different group, but you would have no idea who it was.
The ones that killed me were the plants by the record label where you’d go to all that trouble and then get five seconds of the song followed by a blast of screeching electric noise. Bastards.
This is a complicated issue, especially as it relates to financial effects on the music industry. On the one hand, downloading media through file sharing is technically stealing. However, there is a very good argument to be made that a lot of smaller and mid-level bands have actually had a net benefit from file sharing. Yes, perhaps that fan downloaded their first few songs or albums without paying, but because they did so, that user became huge fans of the artist. They purchased subsequent albums. They paid to go see the artist live in concert multiple times (something that I understand to be much more financially lucrative than album sales for a lot of bands). They bought merch. They talk about the artist with their friends who also became fans. This person has now spent hundreds of dollars in support of this artist all as a result of having stolen $15 worth of content in the beginning, and if they hadn’t stolen that content, the net amount they would have spent would have been $0.I know there are some people who will always try to get the content free. It’s not a matter of affording it. It’s a mentality. And there are people who will always pay. That’s a mentality, too. There are a lot of people in between who used file sharing as a way to sample an artist – to be able to listen to that album over and over for a while to determine if they really do like it before they actually fork over the money. We’ve solved some of this now with free music streaming services, but back then, this was the only way a lot of people had of “trying music out” before buying.
Perhaps, but this is also the argument that labels and downloading or streaming platforms used to get bands to accept next to nothing to get their songs listed. “Sure you’ll only make a penny a copy, but think of the exposure!”It was like any other era; the bands big enough to negotiate did, and everyone else ate shit.
Just remembered: I used to look up the European dance charts top 10 (thank you mtv.de!) and then download as many of those songs from Napster as I could. I was listening to Darude’s Sandstorm years before it became a meme. People thought I was so worldly!
With a minimum back then, I am guessing, of 25 million people hearing you on SNL, I do not think that you can dismiss that as only a minor amount of advertising.
Wasn’t there a brief time after or during the lawsuit that Napster tried to offer itself as a legitimate music service?
I think that was a futile last-ditch effort to keep the company from folding. By then there were P2P options and people were like “I didn’t come here to buy music. See ya.”
I’ve never really bought the idea that the success of Kid A was due to publicity from the Napster leak. Radiohead had built up a sizable following in the 3.5 years since OK Computer came out. OK Computer went platinum in 1998, and The Bends eventually went platinum in 1999. The fanbase was there. I suppose that you could make the case that the leak made Radiohead “bigger stars” in the sense that more people who didn’t buy their records were aware of them. I mean, Radiohead are probably more of a household name than Tool, even though Tool sell more records (in the US) than Radiohead.
Soooooo…that’s it? Your article on the biggest album of 2000 is about how you could download it on Napster? Two full articles about video games. TWO.
So, where do I go now for free music? 🙂
It was theft. It cost jobs. It closed Tower records down.Please don’t ignore the ‘warts” in your glowing praise of Napster.PS. yes, I’m biased… I lost my job as sales rep with WEA/WMG after Tower closed it’s doors. My lifelong dream of a job in the music industry was gone after 10 years of working…
I remember searching for Radiohead b-side tracks and having this track called “Svefn-g-englar” by this band called Sigur Ros being suggested to me or showing up in the search results. I can’t remember which, but I bit and downloaded. Man, 20 years later and I’m so very glad I did. Turns out that they were using Napster to promote their relatively unknown music to US audiences prior to touring there. What a mind-blowing first listening experience my 16 year old stoned self had with that one!