Radiohead Guitarist: MP3 Is Good Enough
When Radiohead keyboardist / guitarist Jonny Greenwood shrugs off the issue of audio fidelity, indie musicians should take note. Given that Radiohead is perhaps one of the biggest proponents of alternative music monetization, it's ironic that Greenwood is discrediting one of the industry's key price differentiators. Musicians with tracks on iTunes, Amazon and DIY stores like Bandcamp have often chosen to price MP3s at lower rates while higher quality recordings have fetched more per track. In a recent article with The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, Greenwood admits there is little reason for the MP3 generation to look for a higher quality experience.
Said Greenwood, "We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record weren't encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you're already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands."
Greenwood's biggest complaint about MP3s was not quality or sound compression, but rather abundance. He suggests that MP3s make it far too easy for fans to hoard music without "giving it their full attention". In a recent Pitchfork article Eric Harvey suggests the opposite. Says Harvey, "The mp3 may have atomized music into millions of little pieces, but each piece, it seems, found a publicist. The average music fan now has the built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor in an ever-expanding arena that's making and eliminating rules every minute."
Whether you see them as hoarders or promoters, one thing is certain, the iPod generation is changing how music is consumed. But if they can't depend on tiered pricing for audio quality, how can companies monetize the new music fan? While a Stanford study suggests that the iPod generation prefers the flat sound of an MP3, it doesn't mean today's listeners aren't willing to pay for their music. According to an NPD Group report purchasers of digital music downloads increased by 29% last year with iTunes controlling a quarter of all music sold. Some of the ways fans still generate revenue for bands include streaming music subscriptions, track and album purchases, concerts tickets, merchandise and paid application downloads.
Update, Ed: there can be a big difference in audio quality of MP3s promoted on the Web. For example the quality varied greatly between Radiohead's In Rainbows album and Saul Williams' album (promoted by Trent Reznor). See Kim Gaskins' post on the new Latitude Research blog Life Connected for further analysis.
Photos taken from Dead Air Space
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Great article, thanks for sharing.
Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood is a BAFTA and Grammy-nominated musician and composer-in-residence for the BBC, best known as a member of English alternative rock group Radiohead. Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist, but serves mainly as a guitarist and keyboard player. He is the younger brother of fellow Radiohead member Colin Greenwood. In addition to guitar and keyboard instruments he fluently plays viola, xylophone, glockenspiel, ondes Martenot, banjo, harmonica and drums. He also does work on the electronic side of Radiohead, working on computer-generated sounds and sampling. He was ranked number 59 on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Citing his work with Radiohead, Channel 4 has described Greenwood as a "significant creative force within the music industry." I think, he wont need any cash advance.
That's all good and fine for Radiohead, but most musicians don't have the luxury of picking and choosing their revenue sources. They need every revenue source that they can get, and that includes revenue from the sale of high-fidelity audio files.
There will always be music fans (like me) who value audio quality, and we're willing to spend extra cash to get it. The cost of producing high-fidelity FLAC files from the master recordings is minimal, and the profit margins can be substantial. Unless you've already got big piles of cash in the bank like Radiohead, it's probably not a good idea to ignore this potential revenue source.
I wish I could agree with Radiohead's logic. It's a bit insulting to say that if you desire good quality tracks there's something wrong with you. Further, as the quality of portable music players gets better...guess what...music listeners will want higher end sound.
Good and high quality mp3 music plus great artist is equal to good listening..
It's quite a reasonable difference between the thoughts of an artist, the businessman and the listener. The first one cares mainly about music (artistic value), the second one cares mainly about money and the third cares about the music quality (including how close the music format can represent the actual things that the artist is working).
I think Radiohead is different from many artists or musician at the market. They are not that close to businessman or that money-oriented in my opinion and if you have noticed the changes of their music from time to time you will understand that their music are not really that market-oriented but idea expressing.
But as a listener no doubt I do prefer to pay for a higher quality music like FLAC .
Totally agree with him. Unless you're one of those losers that listens to their music in a professional studio environment, one format should be enough for you. If you're driving in the car, or jogging around the city, you can't tell the difference with all of the external sound sources surrounding you, so shut up.
"If you're driving in the car, or jogging around the city, you can't tell the difference with all of the external sound sources surrounding you, so shut up."
Music is personal and if people prefer higher quality, it's unclear why that would bother you or Mr. Greenwood. Maybe you've never heard the difference between lower and higher quality, or pre-compressed to post-compressed, or vinyl vs digital. It is definitely a different experience--especially for records that use high quality studio techniques and rich analog instruments.
Audio quality differences can be very stark, even emotional in the right circumstances. The price of an mp3 is actually not a great value compared to higher quality versions and the audiophile may simply be a smart consumer.
Are you kidding? GIGO..... mp3 is more than good enough for the dreck being released as music today. When the art of mixing is reduced to getting everything in front and at the loudest volume possible, MP3 may be too good.
Anyone remember dynamics? modern rock/pop is all FFFFF
Thanks for bringing that interview to my attention. I helped plan and execute an earlier name your own price download project, the release of Harvey Danger's 3rd album, Little By Little, in 2005. They took a long hiatus from recording after not one but two major labels bungled the release of their second album. They started production on the third album on their own dime with the idea that they'd release it on an indie label.
By the time they were wrapping production though, they'd concluded they should do something different. They all had other projects, my friend, the lead guitarist, was finishing up his computer science degree, the lead singer had other music projects, etc, and none were eager to go out on a long tour flogging the album. So, instead, they decided to offer the album as a free download to promote the band.
Since the free download was a promotional expense, we were keen on keeping costs as low as possible, and bandwidth was going to be our largest variable cost. On the other hand, we did care about audio quality. What we settled on was: For those concerned about highest quality, there was a CD available directly from the band at a nice price. For those who weren't willing to pop for that, we made high quality encodings using the then state of the art LAME MP3 encoder with alt-preset-extreme, and Ogg Vorbis. For those less patient and/or discerning, there was a 160kb VBR encoding with LAME. We talked about offering FLAC but concluded that anyone that concerned could pay the ~$10 or so for a CD.
All in all, our approach was well received. The band was happy with the quality of the compressed encodings. Audio geeks might have preferred a free FLAC, but they dug the fact that we cared enough to offer a high-quality LAME encoding at all, and that we even knew what OggVorbis was. I don't remember the final numbers, but I do know that once we got picked up on Metafilter, Digg and a few others, we did a couple terabytes of direct downloads in a couple of days and the free download generated a lot of good will which resulted in some $ from donations and sales of physical media, and their touring prospects were enhanced.
I appreciated Greenwood's good-natured dig at audio fetisishts and their predictably tone-deaf reaction. As he said at the end of the interview "I find this sound quality stuff both fascinating and ridiculous. It’s like the pixel resolution of digital cameras: higher numbers are better, but that discussion always pushes the actual photography to one side, somehow."
If anything though, I think his comments and the response to them reinforce the idea that there is money in offering higher-quality versions. For most acts, its surely a minority of listeners who will pay for the higher-quality versions, but the truth is that these days, for most acts, its probably a minority of listeners who pay for any version. Those who are most likely to pay for any version are likely to be older, which, really, is fine with me. It disturbs me to think how many people in the music business were 30-60 year olds scheming on how to get ahold of teenager's allowance money.
I love radiohead, but I didn't pay a penny when dl In Ranbow album. I think "how to monetize mp3" is still a long way to go.
he's entitled to his opinion, but it's not good enough. hopefully we will get better quality as bandwidth and storage space kep increasing for those of us who invest in audio (and no, it's not ALL a scam, though monster cable is bullshit) in order to experience music. the difference is big, very big, between digital source and lossy compression, however what will be amazing is oncce we can have 24/96 flac files to get the truest sound possible right from the recording stage. It may be niche, but the technology is slowly coming around to make it possible.
Thk for sharing. Differnet people usually stand on different angels to see the problems, right? Don't be too picky!
Wholesale MP3 Players
A lot of people believe that as long as you have a 44.1kHz sampling rate, and at least 16 bit samples, you're going to get really good sounding audio.
MP 3.COM writes about it:
Having switched over from using my CD player as my primary source of audio to MP3 files (as they're very handy when you're working on the computer all the time anyways), and having hooked up my computer into the AUX input of my stereo system (instead of using the cheaper PC-speakers), I wanted to find out for myself just how good MP3 stacks up in sound quality compared to older formats I used previously on my stereo - CD and VINYL. Don't laugh, the results were quite surprising.
The result is so that if you want listen music in very good quality you must buy really expensive equipment so be ready to get advance cash loan to buy good sound.