I make the following argument knowing full well that it’s in vain. Music is going digital, and there’s nothing I can do about it. In the future most music will arrive via downloads or more likely will reside in a sky full of clouds. Physical recordings—whether CDs, DVDs, vinyl or tape—won’t disappear completely, but will became a very small niche market. As a result of these changes, however, something valuable is being lost—and an argument must be made on that something’s behalf.
The most obvious casualty is sound quality. I’m sorry, but mp3s sound like shit. The sampling rate loses details, especially at the high and low ends. Yeah, you can hear all the obvious stuff—the lyrics, the hooks, the riffs, the beat—but you lose all the subtlety. And subtlety is what separates this year’s favorite single from an enduring memory. Repeated listening of a song depends on the belief that you might discover something new each time, and if all the subtleties are pared away, there’s no reason to believe that.
Worse still is the compression which squashes the dynamics into one blobby loudness. Few musical gambits are as dramatic as well-timed shift from quiet to loud or from loud to quiet. But if compression reduces the gap between the loudest moment and the softest moment to almost nothing, how dramatic can those shifts be?
Even if you don’t listen to mp3s, you suffer from this trend, because more and more producers and mixers are compressing their recordings for the dominant mp3 market. Worse yet, the lowered sound quality of mp3s encourages musical production to become more obvious and less nuanced—why should you bother if no one’s going to hear it anyway? Why should a singer or a soloist add subtle touches to their performances if most of the audience can’t hear the results? Even if you have the greatest audiophile system in the world, you’re going to hear the same the blobby loudness and simplified arrangements as the middle-schooler with buds in her ears.
Before too long, of course, it will be as easy to download .wav files as it was to download mp3s a few years ago. A lot more musical information will be included in each file, especially at the high and low ends and at quiet volumes. But what difference will that make if the playback remains the same? You can include all the information in the world, but if it can’t squeeze through the bottleneck of the listener’s ear buds, what’s the point?
Subtlety may matter in jazz and classical recordings, some will argue, but does it really matter in pop music? The school of pop apologists—of which I am a part-time, adjunct faculty member—will argue that obviousness is the whole point. Wasn’t the rock ’n’ roll revolution launched on terrible-sounding car radios and even worse-sounding transistor radios? I would counter-argue that rock ’n’ roll triumphed despite those limitations, not because of them, and that the stereo revolution of the mid-’60s made Revolver, Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde possible, even necessary. I would argue that obviousness is one point, not the whole point.
But sound issues are not the only reasons for lamenting the transition from physical recordings to virtual downloads. We are losing not just the high end of the music but also the tactile sensation of holding a piece of music in our hands and the visual sensation of bringing the cover art up to our faces and poring over the credits and liner notes. Sure, you can get all the same information on-line, but there’s more to the experience than just data. The interaction with a file temporarily lit up on your computer screen—or hand-held gadget—is qualitatively different than the interaction with an actual physical object that you can open for the first time, that you can hold while listening to the music, that you can shelve in just the right place.
The move to downloads is just part of a larger trend in Western society of abandoning physical things in favor of virtual reality. Something is lost when our hands are no longer grappling with actual objects and culture is presented to us as abstracted, bodiless, weightless content. The result is a population that is being detactilized, desensitized and ultimately desexualized. Culture is becoming less like a sexual encounter and more like a sexual fantasy.
What do we actually own when we download a single or an album? A collection of magnetized ones and zeroes. What do you own when the hard drive on your computer, phone or iPod crashes? A lot of useless, demagnetized ones and zeroes. You can scrupulously back up all your music, but what are you backing it up onto? Another hard drive. Here’s an idea: Why not use the original CDs as your back-up?
When you own a CD, LP or 45, you have something fungible, something you can resell. You can get some of your investment back, just as you can when you sell your car or your home. But you can’t resell your download, because you don’t really own anything. With the download revolution, the music industry has transformed music fans from the cultural equivalent of homeowners into renters.
But the industry isn’t satisfied with that. It now wants to turn us from renters into hotel guests. No longer will you own or even rent a musical house; you will check into a musical hotel called a cloud. No longer will you have a record collection that reflects your personality with the hundreds of choices you have made about what to buy and what to ignore, what to keep and what to get rid of. No longer will new friends be able to scan your shelves of albums and learn something about you that hours of conversation might never reveal.
Instead you will be borrowing from someone else’s record collection. Sure, it’s huge and it’s cheap, but it’s not yours and who’s to say it will remain cheap forever? What will you do when a handful of companies establish control of the cloud market and jack up their prices? Will you finally start that record collection you’d always been intending to build? If so, I suggest you head down to your local record store.
I know. I’m just a cranky old man standing waist-deep in the ocean trying to stop the onrushing tide. The sheer convenience of downloading will overwhelm every other consideration for most people. But if we talk about the price we’re paying for that convenience, maybe a sizable minority of us will hang onto physical recordings and cherish them for their palpable presence, for their very thingness.