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Jameth
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- #1
- Posted: 06/13/2019 15:39
- Post subject: The Day The Music Burned // NY Times Article
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/maga...dings.html
Here’s an excerpt:
| Quote: | The recordings that burned up in the Universal fire — like the songs that are blasting from car windows on the street outside your home, like all the records that you or I or anyone else has ever heard — represent a wonderment that we have come to take for granted. For most of human history, every word spoken, every song sung, was by definition ephemeral: Air vibrated and sound traveled in and out of earshot, never to be heard again. But technology gave humanity the means to catch sounds, to transform a soprano’s warble, a violin’s trill, Chuck Berry’s blaring guitar, into something permanent and repeatable, a sonic artifact to which listeners can return again and again.
The act of listening again has defined music culture for a century. It is also the basis of the multibillion-dollar record industry. Today a stupefying bounty of recordings is available on streaming audio services, floating free of the CDs, LPs and other delivery systems that once brought them to audiences. The metaphors we use to describe this mass of digitized sound bespeak our almost mystical sense that recorded music has dematerialized and slipped the bonds of earth. The Cloud. The Celestial Jukebox. Something close to the entire history of music hovers in the ether, waiting to be summoned into our earbuds by a tap on a touch-screen.
This is the utopian tale we tell ourselves, at least. In fact, vast gaps remain between the historical corpus of recorded music and that which has been digitized. Gerald Seligman, executive director of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Library of Congress, estimated in 2013 that less than 18 percent of commercial music archives had been transferred and made available through streaming and download services. That figure underscores a misapprehension: the assumption that the physical relics of recorded sound are obsolete and expendable. “It feels as if music has evolved beyond the reach of objects,” says Andy Zax, a Grammy-nominated producer and writer who works on reissued recordings. “In fact we are as dependent on irritating physical stuff as we ever were.” |
I had forgotten all about this fire...it’s pretty astounding that a multi-billion dollar company would store such a priceless collection so carelessly.
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Jameth
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- #2
- Posted: 06/13/2019 16:21
- Post subject:
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Sorry, I added the link. 
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baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash
Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts
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- #3
- Posted: 06/13/2019 16:31
- Post subject:
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Yeah, I posted this article earlier today in another thread. Really tragic story and well worth reading.
Unfortunately, it's not astounding to me at all given the profit motives that are detailed in the article. There needs to be more philanthropy put toward developing non-profit musical archiving organizations, and then these large firms should have to either use or lose (to non-profits or government entities like the Library of Congress) all the masters they're sitting on / mismanaging that represent our collective cultural heritage.
_________________
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Tha1ChiefRocka
Yeah, well hey, I'm really sorry.
Location: Kansas
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- #4
- Posted: 06/13/2019 16:33
- Post subject:
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That really sucks.
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