08 September 2009 — Sasha Frere-Jones Interviews Johnny Greenwood About Sound Quality
I've been working on a few longer posts recently, but in the meantime it's worth reading this interview between Sasha Frere-Jones and Johnny Greenwood.
I like Greenwood's pragmatism, and I'm inclined to agree with him in a general way. Although many musicians and composers that I've spoken to recently care greatly about the lack of audio fidelity in mp3 format, I tend to feel that it's not really worth the struggle. There are two reasons for this. The first is that, for those of us who store music on our computers, storage space is climbing at such a rapid rate that the size of music files are becoming effectively meaningless, thus negating the need for compressed audio formats. Secondly, as people are apparently moving to a music-listening model whereby they stream tracks from the internet, file size is only important in terms of bandwidth. This will, once again, initially start with horribly compressed audio, and probably last longer than mp3s – given the slower rate of internet speed advances – but will surely end in a similar way. To me, it seems likely that in the near-future file compression will cease to be a major issue. Perhaps I'm just being optimistic though.
On the other hand, I can't help but feel that Greenwood is being slightly disingenuous, and this may relate to my experience with buying their album In Rainbows. When I found out about their decision to offer it as a download, with the famous "pay what you want" model, I was excited. I'd been listening to most of my music through iTunes for many years by that stage, and I'd never had a particular attraction to the physical medium of the CD. I decided to pay something like $15 for the download, because I wanted to support their decision to distribute the album in such a way, and because this was instead of paying $30 for a physical release (or much more for the whole collectors' package).
When I downloaded it, though, I saw that it was encoded at the relatively low bit-rate of 160k, which I didn't really notice when playing on my computer speakers, but did make a small difference when playing through my stereo. It wasn't the actual quality that bothered me so much as fact that it made me feel like Radiohead weren't quite as into this model of distribution as I thought they were. Sure enough, I soon read articles about them getting a distribution deal, and their manager being quoted as saying that "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing." So it's a bit to easy for Greenwood to come out and suggest that if you care about such things you "have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands." The reason why I wished they had released their album in higher-quality was because I thought that they were leading the way in online distribution to some extent. Instead, it was a (very good) publicity stunt. And the album is amazing, of course. As Greenwood is right to point out, at the end of the article, "It’s like the pixel resolution of digital cameras: higher numbers are better, but that discussion always pushes the actual photography to one side, somehow."