[taylodl]

Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people. Now I will tell you digital is far superior to analog BUT - the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music. Rigidly fixing to "the grid" makes it so music can't breathe. Drums are programmed. So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists.

In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.

[brookst]

You’ve mixed up a few different stages as well as the reason some people prefer vinyl.

There’s composition, where music is written. A drum track may be a boring repetitive loop quantized to 4/4 beat positions, or it may have fills or polyrhythm or free time or who knows what.

There’s performance, which may be a sequencer just outputting notes at the right time or may be a human drummer of varying skill, imparting sloppiness or brilliant micro timing.

There’s recording, which today is virtually always digital, but which can theoretically be analogue tape or other exotic forms.

There’s storage medium, where we get vinyl or FLAC or MP3.

And there’s playback, where your choice of system components matters.

You can digitally record, mix, and master a bunch of drunk teenagers who don’t know how to play, and I promise it will be gloriously analog. And you can take music that was composed on an sequencer with pure quantization and no human feel at all, record/master/mix digitally, and store it on vinyl and play it in a good system and the sound will have analog warmth even while the composition and performance do not.

There’s more artistry in music today than there ever has been. More music is release every single day than was released in any entire year before 2000.

You just have to find the good stuff. If you’re hearing boring corporate crap, that reflects a need to improve discovery skill to match this new world.

[MrBuddyCasino]

There is another reason some people prefer vinyl, which is that they often used a different master than later releases. The medium, be it AAC, vinyl or CD really doesn't matter as much as what master has been used. There are CD pressings that don't sound as good as the vinyl, because they used a different master tape. A lot of this was the result of the loudness wars and the resulting reduced dynamic range, or even downright clipping (eg RHCP).

Some albums you cannot get digitally with the best sounding master version.

[taylodl]

I was talking about modern mastering, not what had been done back in the analog era when digital media had first been introduced.

[strogonoff]

What’s your current process for discovering new music?

[klodolph]

(I know you didn’t ask me)

I think a willingness to listen to unfamiliar albums and unfamiliar genres is all you really need. I look for “best of X” lists, which get posted everywhere from actual newspapers to niche sites nline forums, Twitter, and personal blogs. Type in different values for “X” and you get exposure to more music.

[scottyeager]

Community and listener supported radio stations can be a great resource. I discover a lot of music via a local station I discovered by surfing on the FM dial. Most stations offer online streams these days and some even produce video content too (Live at KEXP is one favorite, and NPR's Tiny Desk is in a similar vein). Non corporate coffee shops are usually playing some music selected by the baristas and I found some favorites that way too.

When I find something new, I like to look up live performances from that artist on YouTube. Sometimes people in the comments mention other similar artists or the source that led them to the video. YouTube's algorithm is a bit of a dark and dangerous thing overall, but I do sometimes follow a suggestion for music that I end up loving.

[AyyEye]

Find your local music venues -- the smaller the better. Listen to the artists that are coming to play. When you find something you like, see where they are touring and look up the other venues because a lot of them specialize in different types of music. Rinse and repeat.

[embedding-shape]

Maybe a more producer/DJ-focused way of finding new music, I use the "Most Recent" view for my favorite genres on Beatport, literally listen through / skim all of it, particularly for the more niche genres. Then also follow smaller music labels on Bandcamp (that some of my favorite artists are signed with sometimes too), as they tend to specialize in some niches, and basically does the discovering for you.

[taylodl]

I'm an amateur musician and I've been gigging, playing, and jamming with musicians for decades. There's nothing wrong with today's song writing and compositions. The problem is the tools used to record, and mix (and to a much lesser extent, master). They "encourage" a particular workflow - a workflow that's anathema to music.

Analog is crap - that analog "warmth" is snake oil - but the old analog workflow of recording and mixing yields music that resonates with people. The best of all worlds would be to capture that analog workflow using digital tools.

[jeremyloy_wt]

> the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music

> So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists

I’m sure the session musicians don’t appreciate this statement. Just because they can play with high precision and reliability doesn’t mean they are playing without soul.

If the featured artists can’t do so on their own, that’s sort of a knock on them, isn’t it?

[taylodl]

Session musicians know full-well what they bring to the table. They also know the trade-off: they're not interested in the continued touring, dealing with fans, having to create new material, etc., etc., etc. They're "no drama" kind of people.

BUT - to make any money as a session musician, certainly enough to make a living, you have to be good. Damn good.

[embedding-shape]

> In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.

Incredibly daft over-generalization, the music scene is enormous, and while for mainstream artists what you say is certainly true, you're forgetting about the rest of the 80% of the music scene, which is mostly just people who like making music and don't even earn enough to make a living from it.

[adw]

> So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists.

In pop music this has been true since the 60s. For independent music it has mostly never been true. This hasn't changed much.

[finghin]

There are loads of small independent labels and distributors that release vinyl, CDs and tapes and there is nothing corporate about it. It’s basically impossible to make money as a small-med artist on vinyl. Please don’t generalise like that, it’s really not fair and weakens your comment for me

[ndiddy]

> Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people.

Most vinyl record buyers buy records as a collectable to show that they like a certain album, not because they're deluded audiophiles who are trying to eliminate everything digital from their audio path. Half of all record buyers don't even own a record player: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-do... . When you look at it from that lens, I think it makes sense that records are so popular. They're the largest music format so you get the biggest version of the album art and the most extensive set of liner notes compared to buying a CD or something. Audio quality or "analogness" doesn't matter, since they're probably going to be listening to the album on Spotify instead anyway.

[scherlock]

I buy vinyl because I like the tangibleness if the medium. Seeing the tracks on the record, the liner notes, lyric sheets, photos, etc. It's great when the artist really embraces the format and goes all out. My player is a low end unit with built in speakers, but my youngest can listen to his records easily. We go to a local record store once a month and walk out with random records, some new some used.