Neil Young's music and the continuing conflict of streaming

"The thing is, I want the sound of music to come back — and it’s gone,” Young, 72, said while seated in a large, rustic chair in the front room of the Calabasas home of his longtime manager, Elliot Roberts. “CDs have less than 20% of the quality that music could be, and MP3s in most cases have only about 5% of what’s on the master recording.”

So says this Neil Young interview in which he touts the importance of good sounding music when it comes to streaming. Fair enough. But the questoon is does any one really care about KBS besides musicians like Young or the hi-fi geeks out there?

I can't help but feel like Young is missing the larger point here. It's one thing that his music sounds great, because his music is worth it at least to enough people that he's been able to sustain a very long career. But how many non-legacy musicians are putting out music that begs to be heard in such pristine condition? How many bands formed in the past, say, four years are even looking at the prospect of a long-term careers?

It's not that I don't think great new music is out there because obviously it is in every genre. But the one downside of accessibility for all, is that there is a hell of a lot of chaff to separate from the wheat.

Perhaps even more an important question to ponder is how much does the fidelity matter? I have to assume a lot of producers are already taking into account the limitations one has in making music meant to be streamed in much the same way they were producing records meant to be heard on shitty car radios back in the 1950's. But are we even listening to music in the same way we used to? Or is it more background music? (See YouTube's Chill mixes for reference.)

And while Young is still kicking against the record companies for his PONO not taking off, he introduced it at a point where people were streaming more than anything else. In other words, the innovation advanced quicker and he was a victim of circumstance more than anything else.

But to still and only put blame the record companies for musician's woes is a bit myopic. Record companies don't want to lower the price of music because their piece of the pie has been so dramatically reduced thanks to Silicon Valley. It is impossible to dispute this.

Note that I'm not defending the record industry any more then I would defend big Pharma or any other corporation. But they're a corporation, and are in the business of making a profit. That's how it goes. There's no utopia for artists.

Still, it's interesting to compare Young's take with Jonathan Taplin.
Taplin who is roughly the same age as Young. He produced Mean Streets among a bunch of other films. Among other accomplishments he's also is Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC. In a recent tweet that came across my feed, it seems Taplin has a different view on whose at fault for this mess.

There's a lot of blame to go around. The thing Young does get right in the article is when he says that any musician could do this. And frankly, every musician should. Why stream your music on someone else's platform when you can do it on your own channel?