Running way behind in this thread so some bulk responding follows.
Respect, and more power to you. I don’t get this societal and cultural insistence that women’s bodies must be baby smooth, and the shaming of those that elect not to participate in that ritual. (Actually I do get it, it’s the patriarchy rearing it’s ugly head again, obviously. My previous statement was mostly rhetorical.)
They do have a safety but it’s built into the trigger mechanism.
I know right? My late FIL took a firearm with him everywhere he went, and now my MIL does as well. Concealed carry, naturally.
What kind of paranoia do you need to think this is necessary?
That’s… A hell of a name.
It’s such a race to the bottom. Hey let’s take a 50 year old design and bolt some modern stuff on to it whether it makes sense or not rather than innovate on making planes that make travel not suck so much. I don’t get it either.
I think the swept wing was first introduced as a crude hack. When engineers were working on the Me. 262, at 1st they didn’t know the size or weight of the engines, and when they did, it was easier to sweep the wings than to redesign where they met the fuselage, the control systems, etc.
But at high speeds, it turns out to reduce drag and improve performance, because changing cross-sectional areas create shock waves. If you have a straight wing, you have a sudden change in cross sectional area. If you have a swept wing you have a more gradual change, and the fuselage can be shaped to compensate.
The bit in the article about Bryan Adams trying to track down the masters of one of his albums so he could release a remastered 30th anniversary edition was a bit surprising until I remembered how bad record contracts often were (are?) for the artists. I kept thinking, he’s a pretty big name, how does he not have master copies of his own freaking albums? And then: oh yeah, he might not even own the rights to his own songs…
I’m not sure I follow your point, here. I think we agree that the value of preserving music is not just to be able to listen to old songs, but to remember and understand what that music says about our society and/or communities, and how it relates to what came before and led to what came after, and so on. But when it comes to the nuts and bolts of safeguarding those recordings, it seems to me very much like a “data problem”, especially for the stuff that can be copied with high fidelity.
I’m probably seeing the question through the lens of my own experience, so my initial “legacy data” metaphor is probably not as clear as I imagined it was when I wrote it. Mostly, I was just expressing frustration with an attitude I’ve seen too often, where orgs want to keep their old data, but don’t want to spend any money on maintenance. As if entropy is not a thing.
They (Universal) had all this valuable stuff, valuable both culturally to everyone, and commercially for them, and they’re just like “eh, let’s just put all this stuff in the old barn and maybe write down what we think we have in this spiral notebook.” The sad part is that, from a data standpoint, backups and disaster recovery are fairly well-understood problems, even if they’re not necessarily trivial to implement. And I can’t help thinking that if they’d had a decent DR plan, then a fire at the warehouse wouldn’t be as newsworthy as it is, because they wouldn’t have truly lost anything (or at least, not as much).
I didn’t know the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress did as much of that sort of stuff as they do, though, so that was nice to find out.
It’s incredibly rare - it was rare in the 1960s and is still rare today. The stranglehold that many labels have on their artists is crazy. And it’s not just the big labels - even the smaller indie labels are known to do this as well.
Taylor Swift of all people has been leading the charge to try to set forth some systematic change around recording artists’ rights, and also now has ownership of her masters in her contract.
Several people in my family are or were in the biz and I’ve heard and seen the many ways the industry fucks over the talent.
Nowadays, sure. But until at least the late 90s (and probably much later, because we’re talking about industry standards) people typically recorded on tape. Big, wide, reel to reel tape which only could be played on expensive big studio gear. And it is very, very analogue, even if some of the sounds on it were produced by electronic gear.
Any copy of that was, by definition, not the master and an inferior copy. Since it was an analogue copy, this was only correct.
The whole concept of “make a backup” didn’t exist until recording to hard drives became the norm. And it took a while. I know a lot of audiophiles who were not satisfied with digital sound (if they ever came 'round to it at all) until years after everyone else has switched over.
Add in how rabidly anti-piracy the labels are, and of course they want to hang on to the sole source of audio truth.
It was just “throw it in the vault with everything else”. Sometimes these vaults get robbed and as a result a whole cottage industry of bootlegs is built around these stolen tapes. (As an example, dozens of bootleg Beach Boys albums have been illicitly produced from stolen masters and session tapes - but they are also somewhat unique in that they controlled all their session tapes so the label wasn’t allowed to destroy them. Normally they go right into the dumpster.)
That’s so weird to me, because I was the office backup person back in the mid- to late-1980s – in the financial industry – so I know for a fact that we backed up all our data and documents once a week (on 8" floppies!). It wasn’t music, but still. The idea that they had no system for this back then just floors me.
Yeah, but remember, there wasn’t really a concept that the master tapes were data.
Even after CDs came out… anyone else remember recording industry types referring to the data on CDs as “software”, thereby publicly confirming they were starting to get it, but didn’t have it yet? That was in the 90s.
I have a sneaking suspicion the people in the accounting department knew a lot more about computers than the people in talent management.
Jody Rosen wrote an article about the loss and what it means and was interviewed on Sound Opinion last night (or I heard it last night, I don’t know when the show is originally recorded):
I want stress again, this is not a “data” problem. This is a corporate problem and a private archive problem. Some of the stuff here are priceless historical artifacts that are literally just gone now. These masters aren’t just the songs as you heard them on an album, they include songs that did not make it on an album, studio chatter, alternate takes, etc. They physically have all sorts of information on them, as well (what studio, when the recording was made, who participated).
The list in the article is heartbreaking. The loss from the pre-digital era, if confirmed are really staggering.
I dumped an Instagrammer off my list for this stupid outrage. I was on the fence about her, but she finally showed her true colors in an idiotic rant. Of course, she is Russian, so…
Ms Widdecombe, one of six MEPs representing the South West of England, said the process of choosing the leadership of the EU had convinced her that “the best thing for Britain is to leave here as soon as possible”,
She went on to say: "There is a pattern consistent throughout history of oppressed people turning on the oppressors - slaves against their owners, the peasantry against the feudal barons, colonies… against their empires, and that is why Britain is leaving.
“And it doesn’t matter which language you use - we are going and we are glad to be going.”
For a artist or group that I really like, things like studio chatter and alternate takes are like crack to me and in some cases can change my opinion on a song I may not like or give me a new perspective on a song that I do. I can’t even begin to quantify how much time I’ve spent poring over Beach Boys and Beatles session material (sadly, much of it is bootlegged). It’s just such a fascinating glimpse into the creative process and how the sausage is made. It’s pretty heartbreaking to read about all this material that’s lost forever.
From a purely capitalistic standpoint, this is the kind of stuff that practically prints money. Serious fans eat this stuff up and would happily pay good money for this material. Just slap it into some fancy and numbered packaging and charge a premium and it’ll sell out. Talk about missed opportunities.
