This was on digg today and I have to say I agree with it.
“The music available to the consumer today isn’t musical at all. It’s best described as anti-music. It’s anti-music because the life is being squashed out of it through over compression during the tracking, mixing, and mastering stages. It’s simply, non musical. It’s no wonder that consumers don’t want to pay for the music that’s being produced today. It’s over priced and sounds bad. Our musical heritage is being threatened by this anti-music.”
On of the great oxymorons is “Music Business”. Strange bedfellows indeed.
The compression (a technique in which the softer parts are made louder and louder parts made softer to make the whole thing “even”) is necessary to compete – to stand out. A compressed track will sound “louder” in relation to uncompressed tracks and so it tends to stand out. Ever notice how advertisements on television seem louder than the program content? It is because they compress the bejeezus out of the audio to make sure that EVERY SINGLE UTTERANCE COMES ACROSS AT FULL MAXIMUM VOLUME.
Of course, if everyone does that, then nobody stands out. A tall man at an NBA allstar game will look average to below average in height.
But who can afford to quit? It takes courage to choose not to compete on a business level and focus on the music. It can be done though. Nora Jones has one of the softest sounds out there and yet she stands precisely because she is the roaring silence in the deafening noise.
I’ll be working on trying to expand the dynamic range of some of my songs in the next go-round. Given that I no longer need to please the record companies to get distribution, we should start to see the emphasis begin to move from “Business” back to “Music”.