The article about the labels is rather intriguing and really seems to point out that most of them are doing it strictly because it's cheap, easy and fast. The best line is probably from Aurelius: "While the format is important to some extent, it's probably the least important aspect of the release in my mind."
Nick Sylvester, on the other, sounds like a pompous ass pretending that his little hobby is somehow important because it uses crappy technology. Not surprisingly he details his time as a music reviewer and failed rock star career which made him sooooo jaded...
@GP - I don't know for sure, but my guess is that most of them are recording to tape and don't have to worry about even simple mastering like dividing up the tracks. So as soon as they are done they can slap the master in a $200 duplicator and have the first few copies out in a couple minutes. It's typically easier to print, copy, cut, and fold tape artwork than it is for CD artwork. Part of all this is simply that people have less expectations with a cassette, so you can cut corners a lot easier without it appearing as such. It sounds like some of them are even just re-using old tapes.
I'm sure CD duplication scales much more quickly and cheaply - not to mention using services like CD Baby and Bandcamp can eliminate even more of the initial process - but for what they hope to accomplish the first 50-200 physical copies probably are cheaper, easier, and/or faster.
@thom, I guess. However, if any of the people involved already own a laptop or a desktop with a burnable CD drive, then they can still do pretty much the same without buying the $200 duplicator - record continuously to file (OK, maybe not as easy in the sense that some basic computer competence has to be factored in, but not mechanically more difficult), burn to multiple CDRs (running about 20c each on Amazon - maybe this is a bit slower, I don't know how fast the tape duplicators work, but I know that turning out 30 copies of a CDR for a class project doesn't take me long), the artwork only needs to be a square for the front if your're going for the non-pro aesthetic...maybe the expectations thing is a bigger difference; which still leaves me wondering whether the ease, speed, etc are more perceptions within that cultural subsystem than quantifiable gains.
Or maybe I'm just feeling argumentative today.
A cdr is probably cheaper, but also way easier for any buyer to rip and throw up on a blog. A tape is as hard to rip as vinyl, but way cheaper to put out than vinyl.
@GP - No problem with picking fights - this thread should be under Fight Club anyway! I would definitely say that perception is a big part of making tapes a good alternative. Sure, you can burn the music straight through to a CD-R without cutting it up, but I suspect most people would be annoyed if there is only one track on a CD whereas with a tape there will of course only be one.
Another thing as far as speed goes (from what I read, the tape duplicators can do 3 or 4 tapes in about 2 minutes), as much as we may view CDs as very reliable and durable, CD-Rs for audio can be a real pain in the ass. Whenever I burn audio CDs I drop the speed to 4x or less because of how many coasters I've burned. Professional quality CDs may last decades longer than tapes without any distortion, but CD-Rs are not quite so durable - a suspect tape copy will play with a little distortion, a suspect CD will either add glitches or just not play at all. Also, if you burn enough disks you will learn that regular ol' desktop drives can actually conk out pretty quickly.
I don't think it's a definite win for cassette tapes, but there's enough going for them that it makes sense with an underground scene.
I suspect most people would be annoyed if there is only one track on a CD
lol, you just dissed a valued chunk of my CD collection :-) I'll send Stephan Mathieu round to have words with you!
I guess it still feels to me as if the arguments about speed and ease and cost are probably (in most cases) to a large degree these days post-hoc rationalization - the kinds of reasons that we articulate for things we already wanted to do on more pre-rational, social/emotional grounds (which does not of course mean that such reasons can't have some truth to them, just that they may not be what actually set the behavior in motion).
A test would be: if CD burners on computers became unarguably faster and more reliable than tape duplicators, would the tape culture switch over? I doubt it, because I doubt that whatever slight increment of speed/reliability cassettes might have, that was not really the point in the first place.
Or maybe it was the point at some stage way back when tapes were much easier than vinyl, but it's no longer the point in the current resurgence, which seems to me more rooted in feelings associated with past relationship with the medium/the particular kind of other people who identify with the medium/perceptions of the interests and values represented by the other media from which one is distancing oneself/a particular kind of self image/habits of self-investment. And in all of that I mean to dismiss precisely nothing - those are all perfectly valid reasons, in fact I think they might be better reasons than rationalizing the thing in terms of logistics, which feels flimsier to me.
"it makes sense with an underground scene" seems accurate, but I suspect the "sense" is only tangentially based on logistical comparisons of what cassettes have "going for them"; perhaps rather those who already value them for that reason look for their advantages. Underground scenes also often thrive not only on ease, but on doing things in ways that actually demand special kinds of effort (like composing chiptune music on a particular generation of gameboy, a laborious process if ever I saw one).
Oh, screw that. Vinyl, cassettes, 8 tracks. They belong in museums, at this point.
I draw the line at CDs because I can still get them from my library, but that will go away in time, I'm sure. I haven't bought a CD in over 5?7? years, and it will soon be 10.
Haha, I read an article the other day about baseball card traders bemoaning the entry into the digital age. How they couldn't rip open the package and read it all. I remember making a similar post on Mordac about music CDs. Baseball cards are going digital.
I've gotten over ripping open a new CD and those baseball card collectors will, too.
This tangentially reminds me of something my 10-year-old said the other day when I was looking for my DVD copy of "Back to the Future".
I was having trouble finding it and he said helpfully, "Maybe it's on one of those weird box thingies?"
Pause.
Mrs Nereffid: "You mean video cassettes?"
"Yeah, those".
Anyway, he liked the movie but was surprised by the amount of swearing for a PG - another 80s thing I guess...
It feels to me like I am still living between times. When Amazon and emusic (or their progeny) routinely deliver lossless files....when my home bandwidth budget more easily supports a lossless file habit without hours-long downloads...when I get set up to play lossless files on my good stereo...when I some day get a car stereo recent enough to handle file-based music well...when some substitute is invented for the pleasure of rooting around in other people's cast off music objects at used record stores (though I must admit emusic booster sales come close)...when digital releases start coming with proper liner notes...then CDs will be obsolete.
(I think both sides of the MP3 sound quality debate are true - there are albums that I have on CD and MP3 where I cannot, despite trying, hear the difference even on my good speakers; there are others for which the difference is very noticeable.)
I teach mostly college freshman and while some semester I grade nearly everything online, I think I prefer to grade hard copies. Mainly because I don't have to track a student down if I can't open a file to grade which has already happened this semester.
Also to go back before cassettes, there is an Eight Track Museum in Dallas, though it sounds like a very part-time affair or maybe it's already :ahem: obsolete.
@GP - I meant single track containing multiple songs. I've got plenty of long tracks that take up the entire CD/vinyl.
@Katrina - For mass consumption, yes. But I'll still take the experience of listening to vinyl over the convenience of digital. Not to mention that I won't ditch CDs completely until Amazon and others switch to WAV/FLAC.
@choiceweb0pen0 - yes, I too have to mark assignments online, and but I still prefer hard copies, I can't quite scribble and put lines linking things (mistakes often) together etc on a digital copy
I also agree with both GP and Doofy, there is something about going through second hand CDs and books that you don't get on say Amazon!!
Wrong thread~! But while here I will add that most of my work begins with "marking up" PDFs, and I have tried, Lord knows, to do it on digital copies. Over the years I've evolved my own system of squiggles that mean nothing to anyone but me, that I just can't reproduce on screen. (And which, btw, I would probably want to print out anyway.)
And just in general, I have trouble 'writing' on the iPad. Even with a stylus, I don't like the way it looks or feels. I suppose I would work up a way of doing it if I had to...But since I don't, I feel no need to change the way I work to accommodate the technology.
when some substitute is invented for the pleasure of rooting around in other people's cast off music objects
I think that's exactly it, for vinyl and tape. People are just rooting around for cast of objects as a cultural category rather than as a specific object. Which makes it interesting to me because that kind of cultural rooting is relatively new in music. Retro has been around for a long time, but retro in terms of physical recording media is new.
Yep, Greg, I sure do know TurnItIn. It's okay. I admit its internet only use is my biggest issue with it. I do like that you can see if a student read your comments or not though.
Looking for Record Store Day info on www.dustygroove.com? Sorry folks -- we've been asked by the folks at RSD to remove all the news we have about titles that are coming up this year. They intend to make a more "official" announcement later in March -- a few weeks before the actual date. Sorry if we overstepped our bounds as a source for music news!
Record Store Day keeps growing on me. It took me a few years to get over the chaos and figure out what's going on, but this year I had a lot of fun. My local record store is the Record Archive; they've been around for 39 years! And it's great to see them so packed with people. They had live music, ice cream, great local food trucks and wine and beer too. I wanted to get the Grateful Dead release; but I naively did not realize that Deadheads all camped out at midnight; I didn't even know what time they opened. But I did find Omar Souleyman's Jazeera Nights, which was a cool find, and not absurdly priced. I'm pretty sure it's the first time I've ever bought new vinyl that wasn't in a cut out bin. Plus some cheap CDs and $1 records. So all in all it was fun.
Looking for Record Store Day info on www.dustygroove.com? Sorry folks -- we've been asked by the folks at RSD to remove all the news we have about titles that are coming up this year. They intend to make a more "official" announcement later in March -- a few weeks before the actual date. Sorry if we overstepped our bounds as a source for music news!
Yes, the only goal of we who run RSD is for you to celebrate independent neighborhood music stores, but by god, you will celebrate it the way we tell you to, and we won't tolerate any independent neighborhood music stores getting in the way of that.
I tell you what, those RSD folks sure do make the (one true) Pitchfork in me proud.
I just wish I had an independent record store to go to within, say, one hour travelling time, or even, come to that two hours! (And I don't live in a remote area of the UK)
Two new vinyl only record stores opened in St. Paul proper in the last two months. Those are in addition to the 10 or so larger stores that already existed (and sell more than just vinyl) in the Cities. It's crazy.
Record Store Day may well be a sham, but at least in the Twin Cities record stores are thriving at the moment.
I think part of the issue here is that more people download than in the States - I did see a comparative figure a few months ago but I can't remember the details, combined with two big retailers taking over the market several years ago and then going into financial difficulties and closing altogether in one case or closing many shops in the other chain. The two small stores here within 20 miles both just deal with dance, electro, rap etc mainly singles, few albums, not even chart stuff. Amazon, sadly, rules. But who am I to complain? I downloaded a new Bruce Springsteen EP this morning from them
Comments
Nick Sylvester, on the other, sounds like a pompous ass pretending that his little hobby is somehow important because it uses crappy technology. Not surprisingly he details his time as a music reviewer and failed rock star career which made him sooooo jaded...
I'm sure CD duplication scales much more quickly and cheaply - not to mention using services like CD Baby and Bandcamp can eliminate even more of the initial process - but for what they hope to accomplish the first 50-200 physical copies probably are cheaper, easier, and/or faster.
Or maybe I'm just feeling argumentative today.
Another thing as far as speed goes (from what I read, the tape duplicators can do 3 or 4 tapes in about 2 minutes), as much as we may view CDs as very reliable and durable, CD-Rs for audio can be a real pain in the ass. Whenever I burn audio CDs I drop the speed to 4x or less because of how many coasters I've burned. Professional quality CDs may last decades longer than tapes without any distortion, but CD-Rs are not quite so durable - a suspect tape copy will play with a little distortion, a suspect CD will either add glitches or just not play at all. Also, if you burn enough disks you will learn that regular ol' desktop drives can actually conk out pretty quickly.
I don't think it's a definite win for cassette tapes, but there's enough going for them that it makes sense with an underground scene.
I guess it still feels to me as if the arguments about speed and ease and cost are probably (in most cases) to a large degree these days post-hoc rationalization - the kinds of reasons that we articulate for things we already wanted to do on more pre-rational, social/emotional grounds (which does not of course mean that such reasons can't have some truth to them, just that they may not be what actually set the behavior in motion).
A test would be: if CD burners on computers became unarguably faster and more reliable than tape duplicators, would the tape culture switch over? I doubt it, because I doubt that whatever slight increment of speed/reliability cassettes might have, that was not really the point in the first place.
Or maybe it was the point at some stage way back when tapes were much easier than vinyl, but it's no longer the point in the current resurgence, which seems to me more rooted in feelings associated with past relationship with the medium/the particular kind of other people who identify with the medium/perceptions of the interests and values represented by the other media from which one is distancing oneself/a particular kind of self image/habits of self-investment. And in all of that I mean to dismiss precisely nothing - those are all perfectly valid reasons, in fact I think they might be better reasons than rationalizing the thing in terms of logistics, which feels flimsier to me.
"it makes sense with an underground scene" seems accurate, but I suspect the "sense" is only tangentially based on logistical comparisons of what cassettes have "going for them"; perhaps rather those who already value them for that reason look for their advantages. Underground scenes also often thrive not only on ease, but on doing things in ways that actually demand special kinds of effort (like composing chiptune music on a particular generation of gameboy, a laborious process if ever I saw one).
tl;dr - Vinyl sales are up, and it is not just the hipsters this time.
I draw the line at CDs because I can still get them from my library, but that will go away in time, I'm sure. I haven't bought a CD in over 5?7? years, and it will soon be 10.
Haha, I read an article the other day about baseball card traders bemoaning the entry into the digital age. How they couldn't rip open the package and read it all. I remember making a similar post on Mordac about music CDs. Baseball cards are going digital.
I've gotten over ripping open a new CD and those baseball card collectors will, too.
I was having trouble finding it and he said helpfully, "Maybe it's on one of those weird box thingies?"
Pause.
Mrs Nereffid: "You mean video cassettes?"
"Yeah, those".
Anyway, he liked the movie but was surprised by the amount of swearing for a PG - another 80s thing I guess...
(I think both sides of the MP3 sound quality debate are true - there are albums that I have on CD and MP3 where I cannot, despite trying, hear the difference even on my good speakers; there are others for which the difference is very noticeable.)
I teach mostly college freshman and while some semester I grade nearly everything online, I think I prefer to grade hard copies. Mainly because I don't have to track a student down if I can't open a file to grade which has already happened this semester.
Also to go back before cassettes, there is an Eight Track Museum in Dallas, though it sounds like a very part-time affair or maybe it's already :ahem: obsolete.
@Katrina - For mass consumption, yes. But I'll still take the experience of listening to vinyl over the convenience of digital. Not to mention that I won't ditch CDs completely until Amazon and others switch to WAV/FLAC.
I also agree with both GP and Doofy, there is something about going through second hand CDs and books that you don't get on say Amazon!!
And just in general, I have trouble 'writing' on the iPad. Even with a stylus, I don't like the way it looks or feels. I suppose I would work up a way of doing it if I had to...But since I don't, I feel no need to change the way I work to accommodate the technology.
I think that's exactly it, for vinyl and tape. People are just rooting around for cast of objects as a cultural category rather than as a specific object. Which makes it interesting to me because that kind of cultural rooting is relatively new in music. Retro has been around for a long time, but retro in terms of physical recording media is new.
Yes, the only goal of we who run RSD is for you to celebrate independent neighborhood music stores, but by god, you will celebrate it the way we tell you to, and we won't tolerate any independent neighborhood music stores getting in the way of that.
I tell you what, those RSD folks sure do make the (one true) Pitchfork in me proud.
eta, Now reporing Girls Scouts selling cookies out front! If it's good for the Girl Scouts, etc
Record Store Day may well be a sham, but at least in the Twin Cities record stores are thriving at the moment.
Craig