...at the Steve Hoffman forum. (You don't have to register to read)
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost.php?p=4939355&postcount=30
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost.php?p=4939355&postcount=30
If CD's are barely selling, you can be sure SACD was worse. Bad enough to not justify paying lots of money for studio time to do 5.1 mixes.I didn't see anything about disappointing sales...
I didn't see anything about disappointing sales...
...at the Steve Hoffman forum. (You don't have to register to read)
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost.php?p=4939355&postcount=30
I should add I don't think SACD was the proper choice anyway in hindsight, DVD-A was, Panasonic and Warner were right. Of course with Sony and other major players firmly behind SACD, DVD-A couldn't amount to anything either. All of the mistakes are behind us, let's hope something positive for high resolution stereo and surround music is in the cards for the future.
Chris
The Korg MR-1000 is cute, but again not a very useful piece as nothing can be done natively with the raw DSD stream it can record, only when converted to PCM.
Very sad, really..... Where is our future when it comes to superior audio standards??
As it was pointed out in the earlier story posted on SH, the majors are not even accepting to license their titles to third-party companies. It's like committing suicide rather than allow for people to enjoy the fruit and labor of
all these artists and producers... Scorched-earth policies.
In the "old days", 60's and 70's, music was more than just a business. Artists were given time to develop, and companies would take risks (not all of them successful) with new products and technologies. However, in these days of bottom lines, there is little time for a product or format to prove itself. The whole market is different. We used to pride ourselves on our "stereos". New speakers, new amps, that was all the rage. Today, it's all in the pocket and in the headphones. No one cares what kind of stereo you have, what kind of music format you use. It's all different. Not a good retail climate for audiophiles!
Let's think about it from the perspective of the record labels. What do all of these names have in common?:
Seymour Stein (Sire)
Chris Blackwell (Island)
Daniel Miller (Mute)
Berry Gordy Jr (Motown)
Jerry Moss (A&M)
Jim Stewart (Stax)
Ahmet Ertegun (Atlantic)
Art Kass (Buddah)
Jerry Wexler (Warner Brothers as a small label) and even John Hammond II to some extent...
They were all heads of smaller labels that managed to sign an incredible amount of original and unproven
new artists, in turn managing to successfully develop them into superstars with lasting talent and a recorded
output that is still revered and cherished today. In order to do so they had to put their everything on the table,
and more often than not took incredible personal risks to accomplish what they did, with little idea that they
were ever going to make a penny back, but they so dearly loved what they were doing that it felt worth it.
But over time, they all got bought out by majors and cashed their chips out a very long time ago. Just
as on the hardware side, companies like Sony were driven by certain men with passion such as Akio Morita.
(And it could be argued, Steve Jobs today)
(You may notice that the two Clives are omitted from this list, that is Clive Davis and Clive Calder, as they were far arguably much more profit and
hit-oriented than anything else.... men of great caliber of course, but arguably with a different passion than just music)
Name just one such executive today.... (yeah, Rick Rubin @ Sony LOL) Here's the crux of the problem.
Our now-consolidated four major music content owners have become governed by bean-counters and
pencil-pushers that only think of A&R and artist development as little more than following a one-size-fits-all
formula, sort of like Army-style haircuts. But they are all incredibly skilled at surviving mega-mergers and
boardroom battles, and geniuses at climbing their corporate ladders. So logically, they are who's left in that field.
I believe that a correction is in order, and it will inevitably occur as the stock valuation of those entities stops
being high enough to push those who are after profits first to look for greener pastures, once again motivating
those with the love of it to take these risks, rather than the fruitless exercises in corporate governance devoid of
any deep feelings we have been witnessing for a while now.
It well may be that Google, Yahoo or a similar entity will find it lucrative to acquire these catalogs and may have much more open attitudes towards allowing some of those gems to come out, in formats that may finally sound better rather than only catering to the lowest-common-denominator rung of the ladder?
Time will tell. Sorry for the rant... It gets heavy sometimes thinking about all of these missed opportunities.
sg
Yes, the majors failing to license albums was a major stumbling block for the audiophile labels who wanted to release more titles on SACD back in the day.
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