anomie life

I was over at Digg and was reading the comments about a news story where the RIAA said that the price of CD’s should be higher for some stupid reason. It only reinforced my belief that the RIAA does nothing positive for the music industry. All the RIAA does is sit in between artists and consumers to tax every piece of audio they produce.

But what really caught my attention was that someone posted this article about over compression in today’s music. It’s quite long, but a very interesting read. There’s pretty much a constant war between albums to try to have the loudest CD possible. And they achieve this by using compression which pretty much just flattens the sound and destroys dynamics.

The problem I see is that different consumers want different things in a CD. So your typical ear bud listening teen will want something pretty flat and loud. But a audiophile wants something with a large dynamic range with some parts of a song being really loud and other parts being really soft. The typical driver with a CD in their CD player will want something that stays consistently loud too, otherwise they have to constantly adjust the volume to hear the song over the engine.

As a producer/mixer/mastering engineer/whatever I think it would be great to take the “high road” and not give in to the compression-loudness game. But I understand why people would want compression.

I’m very big into distributing music through online means and I realized that this could allow artists to release variously mastered versions of their songs. Although it might take a little extra work, when someone buys a song online they are given a couple different files that have been mastered differently. Then the person can pick which one best suits their listening habits.

When I release my first CD, thats what I want to do. We’ll see if it happens.