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Funny thing is tapes are gone, eight tracks are gone, cd’s are on the way out and the next thing will be too soon I’m sure.
But the albums, they still play.
Everything changes; you can't stop it. And I'm an old fogey enough to know that I'm grumpy and no longer "with it". But I listen to music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and I hear singers with real emotion, musicians who could really play, and bands that were tight, tight tight.
Nowadays, the big hits seem to belong to women with big voices but little emotion, backed by throbbing beats that are about as exciting as a metronome. And there is too much autotune.
I never even consider paying for the new stuff, unless it's obscure and unlikely to be found on any sort of "popular" radio station. The "popular" stuff just has no soul at all. And that's because the industry lost it's soul a good 20 years ago (at least).
A lot of young people treat music like wallpaper -- they don't actually listen to it, and the idea that people used to sit and pay attention to this stuff seems very alien to some of them.
Well heck what do I do with all my vinyl Albums?
Bttt.
Dying? I thought dead was more like it. Except to collectors.
Many disjointed thoughts...
-The format (33 1/3 LP) and concept of a collection of songs were somewhat joined at the hip therefore the loss of one means the loss of the other
-Many bands didn’t have more to say than a few songs or an EP’s worth...albums had a lot of filler even from good bands
-Unfortunately the by-the-song purchase format in the digital age plays right into the hands of the bubblegummers (both producers and audience) and is a return to the bad old days of the 78 when albums were a rarity and songs were purchased on a whim not because of interest in or loyalty to any one artist.
-Modern albums are blighted by record companies’ stupid tricks in the form of expanded/deluxe/special/fanclub editions on the first day of release. If you’re going to issue an album as a statement, then make ONE statement and let it stand.
-As always, the record companies’ desire to hold onto to old delivery media and sales methods clashed with quickly changing buyer tastes and preferences.
Ok, who built the ELO Spaceship that came with “Out of the Blue”?
I miss cassettes. I liked to make cassette recordings of songs from a single year—1929, 1946, 1958, etc. In addition to songs, I would include advertisements, political campaign spots and even news broadcasts. I loved to play these while driving my car.
Homer: Why do you need new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It’s a scientific fact.
Homer: I was in a record store, and they were playing all these bands I’d never heard of. It was like the store had gone crazy.
Marge: Record stores have always seemed crazy to me. Music is none of my business.
Homer: That’s all well and good for you, but I used to rock and roll all night and party every day. Then it was every other day... now I’m lucky to find half an hour a week in which to get funky. I’ve got to get out of this rut and back into the groove.
There’s still hope for all of us with turntables and lp’s.
There’s an interesting discussion here on new tech for old tech.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3222531/posts?page=8
Mitch Miller had sing along albums. The lyrics were printed on several pages inside the album so one could hand out the lyrics to sing along while playing the album. I enjoyed looking at who were the musicians that played on the songs whether it was rock, country or classical. Frank Zappa recorded a needle “scratch” so when it played one thought the arm must be malfunctioning and sent we audiophiles running to the turntables to prevent more damage. You can’t play a CD backwards as with the vinyl albums so recording backwards is not so novel. Albums made music fun.
How people listen to music changed. They will sit and watch an hour TV show or even a two hour movie if it is really good, or it doesn’t even have to be that good maybe, just OK. The number of people who will regularly solely just listen to music for an hour is probably drastically reduced now. The number that do so on a good home hi-fi system is no doubt even more reduced. So almost all aspects of popular music reflects how it is now normally and regularly consumed—as background music composed of individual tracks while something else is also being done, driving, cleaning, exercising, working, surfing the net and so on. It comes through earbuds or crappy computer and phone speakers, normally on shuffle play.
Freegards
Eh, maybe so and maybe not. Recorded music goes back to the 1800s. Cylinders (3 formats), then flat discs (3 formats). I only know of these pre-1920 releases as "singles" (single sided or double sided).
Classical music comes in and then in the 30s or maybe 40s the "albums" come in for other music (everything from comedy, to children's stories, to country music, jazz, big band, etc.).
And when the 12"/7" formats were competing, there were also 10" records. It is not uncommon to see the same title on 1 LP, 2 10" EPs, and a boxed set (album) of 7"s.
Singles didn't become the "mainstay of rock and roll" until the late 50s (the second or third wave of rock and roll, from black gin joints to white gin joints to watered down pablum for kids at soda counters in the span of 10 years). Those gin joints had the rock platters on 10" 78s in the jukebox. And the jukebox trade (which was largely run by mobsters who also had a heavy hand in the record trade) was lively for many decades and not just for rock music. If you wanted to put it in a jukebox, it had to be on a 7" slab.
The price of CDs were artificially inflated (it cost more to produce cassettes but they were wholesaled and retailed far cheaper) and the industry bigwigs (Sony and others) accepted an out of court settlement deal to avoid explicit admission of collusion and price fixing in the retail pricing of CDs.
It waaaas, but Taylor Swift proved no.
Talk to your kids. My kids looooooooooove vinyl. It is the coolest thing to them. They would move into Amoeba Records if they could. Wish I hadn’t dumped all my old records somewhere.
In the middle of the 60s, the age of the "Standards" began to die. The earliest form of the "record industry" was sheet music. "Standards". It was the songwriter that was the star because there was no radio to attach the song to a specific person(s). Then Vaudville and other "traveling shows", (or the opera and orchestra) might have created singing/music stars, but until recorded music was created, and radio became a "Thing", we had songwriters and regional/local versions of the same song being sung and that is why there are so many versions of, say somewhere over the rainbow
The days of Big Songwriters writing songs that 50 people would cover to varying degrees of success were beginning to end. The "DIY" of rock and roll began (and the covering/ripping off of blues) The songs were simpler, but more personalized, and more diverse. So from the early 50s to the end of the 60s, we had a lot of singles artists making their own songs (for the kids) as the Singer/songwriter phase (for the adults) went away.
By the 70s, FM started to get momentum, and those stations began to play entire sides of albums, or whole albums. By listening to these sides on the radio we "discovered" songs we wouldn't have normally. The prog rock groups began to copy the original "concept album" that the Beach Boys and Beatles (and some say Sinatra with The Voice) pioneered.
But then again, maybe record companies pressured artists to make "an album's worth" of songs to sell the album. Maybe it's both.
Anybody with the most modest home computer can produce their own mix disks that are as good as what are sold commercially that sound way better than the old mix tapes and it's relatively easy to up-sample even a lowly mp3 file to 24/192 resolution and you will hear the difference, even with crappy source material