I was recently pointed towards an interesting article on the future of the ‘Loudness War’ that is plaguing recorded music (I’ve posted about this issue before, but if you’re still not sure what it’s about, see the original ‘Over the Limit’ article).
The gist of the article is that as CDs are replaced with purely electronic formats like mp3, and as volume-correcting technologies like ReplayGain, which allow for shuffled, jukebox-style playback at consistent volume, therefore become ubiquitous, mastering for maximum loudness will cease to be possible. Once over-compression has no effect on the overall volume of the music, but instead only makes it sound shittier, people will stop doing it.
I must admit, I have always seen the demise of CDs as a bad thing. I still prefer to have an actual, physical product when I buy music. I like to have a package with artwork and sleeve notes. And I worry that the unbundled nature of electronic music downloads will lead to the demise of the album format, which I think would be a great loss. There are also issues of audio quality — although downloads in lossless formats are becoming more widely available — and of permanence — although at least the DRM aspect of that seems to be going away.
But if the rise of electronic formats means we can go back to sane mastering practices, then maybe it’s not all bad after all.
Of course, there is some uncertainty over how doomed CDs really are. According to a recent survey, 77% of people (aged 14-24) said they would carry on buying albums even if they also had legitimate access to unlimited downloads. Interestingly, 64% of those cited the desire to own a physical product as a factor. A quick calculation shows that to be 49% of the total number of people polled, which is quite a reassuring thing to learn; I had previously suspected that this was just a peculiar fetish of mine that most people didn’t really care about.
Of course, it’s not clear that these albums people would still be buying would necessarily be on CD. Vinyl is making something of a comeback at the moment, particularly among the kind of collectors and real-physical-object fetishists that still prefer to buy albums that they could download instead. I’ve never had any particular fondness for vinyl. I’m not quite old enough that it has any nostalgic value for me, and while it clearly has aesthetic advantages over a CD, its technical disadvantages have always outweighed them in my eyes. Particularly, I like the fact that a CD can be easily ripped to electronic formats and placed on a portable player, so that it simultaneously has all the advantages of both a physical and purely electronic format.
More long-term, though, I suspect the days of recorded music as a product to be bought may be numbered anyway. I think it may only be a matter of time before recorded music becomes a service one subscribes to. Whether that will necessarily be a bad thing, I don’t know. But I am inclined to be pessimistic.