My interview in the UK’s Metro newspaper last week appears to have touched a raw nerve with many people. In that interview I claimed that mp3 downloads will be replaced by music at studio master quality. And it was this prediction that seems to have raised the most hostility. This surprises me. It’s not like I predicted the demise of the toaster…
I cringed throughout Neil Young’s recent appearance on The David Letterman Show, in the way you do when sensing public embarrassment of one of your heroes at the hands of a talk-show host. What made it worse though, was the confirmation it gave that my visit to Broken Arrow a year ago had made zero impact on the great man.
Last summer, when a friend invited me to a gig in a tiny venue in Glasgow, I had no idea it would end up with Linn signing one of the UK’s most exciting rising acts, Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo. That night there were about 25 people crammed into Brel, a little pub on Ashton Lane, in Glasgow’s trendy West End. From the atmosphere alone it was apparent that something very special was happening…
It recently dawned on me that most of our family time is now spent in the kitchen. Of course it’s where we cook, but also where we eat, where we socialise and increasingly where we listen to music. Music as part of family living means lots of different things for us; during the day my wife likes the radio on in the background, my kids use the iPad to watch TV in the afternoon, I watch the news on the laptop when I get home from work. That’s all before dinner.
Perhaps the last thing you’d expect to find hidden in the Japanese countryside, nestling in a beautiful forest, is Linn’s old exhibition stand from the 1987 London show “Hear Linn Live!” But indeed there it is, the wooden cabin that Linn’s founder Ivor Tiefenbrun commissioned for the show, once he realised it would be more cost-effective, and reusable, to build an actual house than a typical exhibition stand. Over an adequate sufficiency of drams after the show, so the story goes, Ivor pledged the cabin to Yoshihisa Mori, the legendary audio engineer and log cabin enthusiast. It was packaged, shipped to Japan, and rebuilt on Mori-san’s small freeholding, about halfway between Tokyo and Fukushima.
Finally it’s begun. The waiting is over. I’m delighted and excited to report that this week we’ve launched our Studio Master download partnership with Universal Music Group. The first titles are some of the greats of classical music, remastered at 24-bit by Deutsche Grammophon and Decca Classics from their original analogue tapes.
Apple’s decision to finally open source its Apple Lossless (ALAC) format is welcome news. For one thing, people who use iTunes to store and archive their CD collection, and take care to change the audio quality to Apple Lossless, will be able to stream their collection to a wider range of products. For Linn, where we’ve been advocating FLAC, yet supporting an unofficial version of ALAC, it means we no longer risk the wrath of Apple HQ for letting people listen to their music collections through our systems.
You might have noticed that the Linn website has changed in the last couple of weeks. Our previous website was conceived as an online catalogue. The structure neatly mirrored the areas of Linn’s business and the categories of products. This was ideal for people who knew Linn and knew what they were looking for.The home page was used as a podium to display the latest products and upgrades. It broadcasted: “Look at our latest offering.” It assumed knowledge of Linn, assumed that the latest offering made sense in the context of an existing understanding of our business and products.Out with the Old
Following my last blog on music industry moves towards studio master, and Neil Young’s blog on the same subject, I was both gob-smacked and terrified to be invited to Broken Arrow Ranch to meet with the man himself. Neil Young’s music was a soundtrack to my teenage years, especially Harvest. Inevitably, every time I was dumped by the seemingly-never-to-be-replaced love-of-my-life, ‘Man Needs a Maid’ with its heart-breaking story and dramatic orchestral backing felt like it was written for me. And ‘Needle and the Damage Done’ just had to be nailed on the guitar in order to have any kudos at all with my guitar-playing friends.
The music industry has spent the last 25 years trashing the quality of its own product, mesmerised by the allure of convenience whilst watering down the quality of the music. It may not have been apparent to the music industry in 1985, when CD started to appear in the mass-market, but it was the beginning of a gradual decline in quality that led to the commoditisation of its core product -and to today’s crisis. The solution: the adoption of the Studio Master download as an industry standard is the only way out of this mess…
Feeds