Why New Music Sounds Bad

A great deal of new music has suffered because of the "loudness wars" - i.e.: producers, artists, et cetera compress songs so that everything is loud all the time. This is presumably so the song stands out and is memorable. In reality though, it ends up making a lot of tunes suck, here comes the science:

Copyright Law Round Up

Canada is proposing serious changes to copyright laws and yet, outside of the blogosphere and other geek domains, it would be hard for anyone to tell. If you search for "Canada copyright law" in Google News the top stories are dominated by sites like Slashdot with only one mention from the Grope & Flail over a week ago as well as Reuters story even older than that.

Among blogs I usually read, Saskboy has been relentless in following this issue while JJ points us to, among other things, a news aggregator on the topic.

Do you like the internet?

Do you own an MP3 player?

Do you like to backup your media from one format to another?

Do you enjoy satire?

If you answered "yes" to any of this, this law will affect you. For what it's worth, I was going to see if there had been any comment on this matter among the Blogging Tories (I was wondering whether the only conservative position on this was strictly corporatist CRIA-worship or not), but they haven't said anything at all.

Criminalizing iPods

The Conservatives are set to unveil some kind of new copyright law that caters to the insane, vaguely suicidal music industry lobby. You can reasonably expect some kind of levy on, say, Mp3 players among other things. Saskboy has the goods on why this is a terrible idea. Of course I'd expect the Cons to yield to an asshole-filled corporate lobby group, but Saskboy raises this point to:

"Note the Liberal’s Minister partly responsible for the Copyright Act was also in the pocket of the CRIA, as was past minister Bev Oda."

That doesn't exactly fill me with hope. I know that there is a very Bay St.-oriented blue-grit wing of the Liberals that might well support this kind of let-the-business-lobby-write-the-law approach. What I want to see is how the opposition handles this law, and particularly what kind of Liberal party Dion is running. If you bend to the recording industry, why not the energy sector on climate change? I don't think it's too big of a leap from this comparatively venal (though important to music fans) law to something like emissions. Will they go for a US-style lawsuit-heavy industry-kowtowing law or will they vote against it? This is the kind of vote that separates the real progressives from the poseurs.

Fiddling while the Industry Burns

Atrios has a pair of posts on how badly the music industry has been doing over the past couple of years. His analysis:

"Instead of exploiting the desire of people on the internet to promote their stuff for free, they're obsessed with royalties and DRM. It's bizarre to me that an industry notorious for its payola scandals - paying radio stations to pay their crap so that people can hear it for free - simultaneously obsesses about the possibility that people might actually throw up a song on the internet so that people can hear it for free."

I'd never thought of music sharing in the context of payola, but it's a hell of a contradiction, isn't it? Besides, these days so much of radio is repression by boredom - but maybe that's what the industry wants. There's no reason to embed this video here: