Everyone Has Gone Digital?!

[gunjack]

ppl don't want to pay for music anymore. that is the bottom line. so we have to go back to being diverse as artists. seperation of the wheat from the chaf and all that. i hate the way folks are so stuck into ONE STYLE and laugh at others or talk shit from envy because they can't make various types of music themselves. i mean, i would never make a trance record or a progressive record, but i enjoy making hip hop, dub music, west coast/detroit house, chicago hard house stuff, freejazz, cut n paste music, ambient, hard electro.... all these kids talk like techno is the ****ing answer and i am just too old and too stuck in my ways bang out 24 hours a day. a time and place for everything. those of us diverse enough, musically, will use the current changes in the ç"industry" to motivate us for creating something distinct, unique and based on what we feel rather than persuing the GENRE RACE toward a finish line that doesn't exist.

[Internal Error Records]

so if vynil died and most folk copied ther stuff(which i think would happen) wed be fuked...producers would prob get even less kick back.

.

if vinyl died there would be no stuff to copy. most good producers are doing this at least partly for the money. and vinyl is the only way to make money at this.

selling mp3's still has a long long long way to go.

[dirty_bass]

ppl don't want to pay for music anymore. that is the bottom line. so we have to go back to being diverse as artists. seperation of the wheat from the chaf and all that. i hate the way folks are so stuck into ONE STYLE and laugh at others or talk shit from envy because they can't make various types of music themselves. i mean, i would never make a trance record or a progressive record, but i enjoy making hip hop, dub music, west coast/detroit house, chicago hard house stuff, freejazz, cut n paste music, ambient, hard electro.... all these kids talk like techno is the **** answer and i am just too old and too stuck in my ways bang out 24 hours a day. a time and place for everything. those of us diverse enough, musically, will use the current changes in the ç"industry" to motivate us for creating something distinct, unique and based on what we feel rather than persuing the GENRE RACE toward a finish line that doesn't exist.

Wow, you pulled those words right out of my brain man
Someone else sees the way.

[Joseph Isaac]

I've actually considered doing my minimal label all online and CD based...The CDs would be set up so you could listen to them as regular, but would also contain data tracks for the digitial mixer/remixer.

With people like Kompakt going and creating an all "itunes" style site, the pressure to moving to digital is on. I think we must embrace it or begin to wallow in our own self-pity...

[curly]

I think what is important is the music, not what format it is delivered on, after all thats what we are all into. This is where records have the advantage. They have a built in quaility control system, They are usually mastered by a pro, and then a distrubutor has to like them(or at least think his custommers will), Then the record shop owner must also like them.
mp3, can be put on the web by anyone for anyone, from my own experiences alot of these sound ok, untill you play them againt a shop bought record, then the diffrences show.
But reciently this has changed, with record sales on the down, labels are trying to save money, less mastering, cheeper presses, no test presses ect, Now I a buying records that also don't stand up, good tunes, but lack of sound quality
There is need for a change,What is needed is a source of pro mp3's and cd's at cheep prices, There are far less overheads, so even at cheeper prices, the profit margin could still be the same.If this is cheep enough there would be no need for piracy

whoops just woke up.

human nature is to get something for nothing, so piracy is here to stay. but we cant let this kill techno like it currently is, Embrace the change and follow the market, rather than lagging behind, this will also make it accessable to those who have not got decks,

[detfella]

I think what is important is the music, not what format it is delivered on, after all thats what we are all into. This is where records have the advantage.

yeah definately, if a really good techno track was released it shouldn't matter what format. surely djs could use either and if its good enough people will buy it.

vinyl sales in rock have gone up (i know its slightly diff) but i think its still valid. if techno is about new technological we should be making AI techno by now, didn't kraftwerk start with robots in the 60's.

[sash]

why don't the people who run the party's only let the dj's that mix vinyl mix at their party's, that way dj's gotta buy vinyl and keep the labels in business? just a thought....

[Internal Error Records]

ok. everyone stop for a second and make sure you acknowldge that -

DISTROS DONT ORDER CD/DIGITAL!!!!!!!!


a label will ship on any format a distro is willing to pay for.


stop pretending a few hundred (or thousand) bedroom digifiles can change an entire industry just because a topic can be bitched about on a forum which is 90% opinion and nearly no facts (10% being filler).

[Internal Error Records]

ok. everyone stop for a second and make sure you acknowldge that -

DISTROS DONT ORDER CD/DIGITAL!!!!!!!!


a label will ship on any format a distro is willing to pay for.


stop pretending a few hundred (or thousand) bedroom digifiles can change an entire industry just because a topic can be bitched about on a forum which is 90% opinion and nearly no facts (10% being filler).

that came out much harsher than it should have. my apologese in advance.

[djshiva]

my personal opinion is whatever works for you, use it.

i personally like spinning records cuz i am a hands on kinda girl (with turntables...get yer minds outta the gutter... ;p ), but i like the fact that there are more options so that people can use what works best for them. plus, trading files and cds of yer own stuff is definitely nice if you haven't gotten it pressed yet. no waiting for white labels! (i know someone will crucify me for this, but whatever). i also like it cuz it makes things a bit more egalitarian. so the big guys get white labels and play new hot shit? screw em. get cds and files from all your unsung techno producer friends and blow em away with shit they ain't heard.

(i have to admit that i am gonna need a chiropractor when i am 50 for my poor vinyl luggin' back, so there are some other upsides to the new technology)

when someone invents a robotic record bitch that can fly for free, then we will have truly reached the pinnacle of this technology. ;)

p.s. sorry...mucho caffeinated...

[Heroes]

vinyl is an outmoded, outdated, inefficient, inconvenient, crap sounding, heavy, expensive, pain in the ass waste of time format. has been for 15 years.

but until recently it was the format directly connected to the only tools we had to use. and it was standardized. i.e. if you went somewhere to dj you didn't have to worry about whether or not your records were going to work. it was also most cost-effective and transportable solution AT THE TIME.

but even if you don't like the idea of laptop djing and still have an attachment to manual beatmatching, the days of the vinyl medium, on the whole, are over. thank god.

i disagree and agree, if that happens then theres gonna be a whole drop out of people who will work standard jobs because they cant survive off making records, quality will drop, and getting paid to support a scene will be lost. I think this is wishfull thinking by some who look at it as the only way to get the foot in a some what closed door, however i think it has its positives also, it will go back to how it used to be people will get booked on how they perform, rather than being booked because they made "or had made" for them good records

(and no, my thousands of records are not for sale ;))

no way is vinyl crap sounding, its all down to the mastering, but ive never heard cds get that transfered weight as you do when a vynle is cut, that needle gliding through the grooves just fattens it so much, i mean lets face it the cd/dj player isnt a new thing, i remember seeing one a good 12 years ago at a friends audio store. but sound wise i take records anyday. It wont be long before "thank god" we will be able to at least drop these mp3 crap dj units and swap for full blown wav or aiff. i mean lets face it mp3 has only surfaced due to a rubbish internet speed network, but with standard homes getting now between 1.5 and 4meg connections it wont be long before there gone for good, i think probably before vinyl if were lucky....

the thing i also like about listening to djs with the minimal setup of "vinyl a pair of decks and a good old alan and heath" is because the digital age has given rise to all these little tweakable poorly "made in china" effects units that dj's think it a god given rule to F*** with every 30 seconds

i disagree and agree, if that happens then theres gonna be a whole drop out of people who will work standard jobs because they cant survive off making records, quality will drop, and getting paid to support a scene will be lost. I think this is wishfull thinking by some who look at it as the only way to get the foot in a some what closed door, however i think it has its positives also, it will go back to how it used to be people will get booked on how they perform, rather than being booked because they made "or had made" for them good records....

[Komplex]

[quote="Heroes"]

vinyl is an outmoded, outdated, inefficient, inconvenient, crap sounding, heavy, expensive, pain in the ass waste of time format. has been for 15 years.

but until recently it was the format directly connected to the only tools we had to use. and it was standardized. i.e. if you went somewhere to dj you didn't have to worry about whether or not your records were going to work. it was also most cost-effective and transportable solution AT THE TIME.

but even if you don't like the idea of laptop djing and still have an attachment to manual beatmatching, the days of the vinyl medium, on the whole, are over. thank god.

i disagree and agree, if that happens then theres gonna be a whole drop out of people who will work standard jobs because they cant survive off making records, quality will drop, and getting paid to support a scene will be lost. I think this is wishfull thinking by some who look at it as the only way to get the foot in a some what closed door, however i think it has its positives also, it will go back to how it used to be people will get booked on how they perform, rather than being booked because they made "or had made" for them good records

(and no, my thousands of records are not for sale ;))

no way is vinyl crap sounding, its all down to the mastering, but ive never heard cds get that transfered weight as you do when a vynle is cut, that needle gliding through the grooves just fattens it so much, i mean lets face it the cd/dj player isnt a new thing, i remember seeing one a good 12 years ago at a friends audio store. but sound wise i take records anyday. It wont be long before "thank god" we will be able to at least drop these mp3 crap dj units and swap for full blown wav or aiff. i mean lets face it mp3 has only surfaced due to a rubbish internet speed network, but with standard homes getting now between 1.5 and 4meg connections it wont be long before there gone for good, i think probably before vinyl if were lucky....

quote]

"fatness/warmth/coldness/meaningless buzzword" comes from the production, recording and mastering process more than anything.

Remember that vinyl was a cheap mass market consumer format, just like tapes, cds, mp3 etc.. They all have their flaws but out of all of them, cd (or wav audio) provides the best representation of the original recording (actually dvd's would be even better but thats not as accessible as cd yet). And if they sound sh1t, its because the original recording and the mastering done on it is sh1t. Whether vinyl sounds "better" than cd is just a personal oppinion tho. And when you take crap overworked club sound systems into account the whole argument about sound goes right down the toilet anyway so the format you mix with depends entirely on your personal prefference. Whether you mix purely off vinyl or with final scratch playing wav audio, it doesn't f*cking matter... its music.

Anyway, this sort of conversation is going nowhere cus vinyl is a very big issue and loved by many people. We all understand that and its totally cool. I've said it before, 1200's wont be disapearing anytime soon so you don't have to worry about a thing. Just don't bitch if the people of tomorrow don't partake in the whole retro vinyl movement when theres better ways to distribute and express ones music. It's the year 2005.

Choice is better than no choice.

[Komplex]

Well those quotes got f*cked up nicely :(

Can we get the [edit post] thing happening on this board?

[Heroes]

no bitchin here, just saying that vinyl adds a fatness or something that ive never got from digital, and because at the cutting stage you get professinal mastering again, theres always a certain forced quality control before it hits the street. Because we get paid for producing records through vinyl sales you can do that. Now the trouble starts when the wanna be mp3 fruityloop djs who has no quality control "cant have playing mp3" starts pumping out all there unmastered or poorly mastered fodder on the clubs. phew now thats stepping forward?. I can hardley see them paying the £200 "average" mastering price to improve there material when they wont get a penny back for it can you? i mean the place where i get my stuff done has speakers probably the same price as my studio, can you imagine the state of it? i do believe that the greed of some labels "mostly" the majors, the distributors of past and present and the shops has helped its decline, there is nothing to play with anymore in vinyl prices, ive never gotten back more than £2.00 per record so its just a case of getting the sales and a certain clientel that understands and supports this great scene, i mean look at it now How many virgin, sony, or warner backed techno releases do you see. I mean in the mid 90s warner were the main people behind harthouse, probaly because sven, hardfloor and the others were selling buckets of the vinyl they looked at another cash pot now they hardly do S***. And personally "thank" F*** for it, and whys that? iam guessing cause the moneys not in it after there raping. There probably too busy fighting over which ones gonna get the contract for the "big brother bonus cd clubs hits, with a bonus pull out nadia poster". too much sell out even from within, lets see what the next 2 years bring thats gonna be the interesting one i think

[g]

It wont be long before "thank god" we will be able to at least drop these mp3 crap dj units and swap for full blown wav or aiff.

...but you can do that right now, today.

...has given rise to all these little tweakable poorly "made in china" effects units that dj's think it a god given rule to F*** with every 30 seconds

lol, very true.

...however i think it has its positives also, it will go back to how it used to be people will get booked on how they perform, rather than being booked because they made "or had made" for them good records....

exactly. this needs to happen.

i freely admit that i am of two minds about the whole thing. i love vinyl, i'm not getting rid of mine, and i still buy plenty. but on the whole unfortunately it aint gonna last. and while i have a romantic attachment to vinyl, i truly love the ever-more-increasing availability to legal digital formats. for me, it means i am buying and listening to a lot more music, in many more genres, than ever before.

[DELTA9MDA]

back to the beginning of this topic: i was at ultra music fest and yes there were a couple of lap tops(josh wink) and yes, for every turntable there was a cd player.
so yes im refuting what you said.
watched carl cox for and hour.
he played both recs and cds. mostly recs.

watched tiesto, oakey and a few others so i could get an idea why people love them (and thier shit, dog help me) and for the most part i saw records. no lap tops.

at last years wmc, i saw frankie bones and some others, and everyone was playing records.

[tocsin]

it will happen, and label owners need to make the jump, because the whole scene is in an inbetween limbo that is doing no one any good

as a label owner i can safely say i will never make the jump until there is money in it.


no money = no mp3 or digital.

until labels can make money from digital, djing with digitial is the same as pproudly saying "yeaha i stole your tracks"

unless of course you bought the vinyl first anyways then do whatever you want.

vinyl is the medium of the techno industry.

if a distro placed a purchase order for cd's, i would fill it.

but guess what, distros dont order cds.

But, common listeners and an increasing number of DJs do order mp3s directly through webpages without ever bothering with the distributor. It's really just a matter of time. The question is whether you want to be experienced and cozy when things shift or whether you want to play catch up.

[tocsin]

ok. everyone stop for a second and make sure you acknowldge that -

DISTROS DONT ORDER CD/DIGITAL!!!!!!!!


a label will ship on any format a distro is willing to pay for.


stop pretending a few hundred (or thousand) bedroom digifiles can change an entire industry just because a topic can be bitched about on a forum which is 90% opinion and nearly no facts (10% being filler).

Let's also stop pretending that most of the labels we like are moving 10,000+ pressings. In an "industry" where a run is sometimes as limited as 500-700 pressings, a few hundred bedroom "digifiles" are a significant market factor that should be taken into consideration. I used to buy my records directly from a distributor due to a friend. He stopped working there, the music I liked stop coming in and I pretty much stopped buying records entirely. This was years ago. All the new music I hear is acquired online. If I knew where to actually buy mp3s of quality, rather than getting them in a 64-128kbit mix hosted on the web, I'd start buying tracks again. But, from what I've seen, none of the music/labels that I particularly like has taken this step yet. It's either released via CD/vinyl through a label or the artist hosts it themself and lets people download it for free. I also really don't know what you mean by saying distributors don't order CD/digital. As I mentioned in another thread, the most
money I've seen roylaty wise is from a CD release. More people bought the CD than the vinyl in numbers. I've also seen the tracks all over the place on Soulseek. I'm not going to say that everyone would buy them. But, I don't doubt for a second that there aren't enough people using filesharing to get such tracks who are like myself and might shell out a buck or two here and there for one or two high quality mp3s.

[Komplex]

ok. everyone stop for a second and make sure you acknowldge that -

DISTROS DONT ORDER CD/DIGITAL!!!!!!!!


a label will ship on any format a distro is willing to pay for.


stop pretending a few hundred (or thousand) bedroom digifiles can change an entire industry just because a topic can be bitched about on a forum which is 90% opinion and nearly no facts (10% being filler).

Let's also stop pretending that most of the labels we like are moving 10,000+ pressings. In an "industry" where a run is sometimes as limited as 500-700 pressings, a few hundred bedroom "digifiles" are a significant market factor that should be taken into consideration. I used to buy my records directly from a distributor due to a friend. He stopped working there, the music I liked stop coming in and I pretty much stopped buying records entirely. This was years ago. All the new music I hear is acquired online. If I knew where to actually buy mp3s of quality, rather than getting them in a 64-128kbit mix hosted on the web, I'd start buying tracks again. But, from what I've seen, none of the music/labels that I particularly like has taken this step yet. It's either released via CD/vinyl through a label or the artist hosts it themself and lets people download it for free. I also really don't know what you mean by saying distributors don't order CD/digital. As I mentioned in another thread, the most
money I've seen roylaty wise is from a CD release. More people bought the CD than the vinyl in numbers. I've also seen the tracks all over the place on Soulseek. I'm not going to say that everyone would buy them. But, I don't doubt for a second that there aren't enough people using filesharing to get such tracks who are like myself and might shell out a buck or two here and there for one or two high quality mp3s.

[Komplex]

I've gone on a personal crusade to buy music only cd's now (or mp3 if I can't get it on cd).

I've wanted heaps of vinyl only releases to be available on cd just because I like the music and actually want to listen to it too :(