Neil Young On Sound Quality And So Much More
Protecting their business model of having people pay exorbitant amounts to attend their conferences, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and their D: Dive Into Media conference refuse to post the entire Neil Young interview online. One wonders if they too have been paying attention to what has happened in the past ten years. If they posted complete videos would it enhance their brand or destroy it? Would people refuse to pay or would they be clamoring to get inside?
I’d argue the latter. Protecting their business model, they’re stifling the brand. They’ve got a blue chip roster of interviewees, and they’d be surprised how many punters are interested in hearing them pontificate, not only hoity-toity business executives.
In case your e-mail has been down, yesterday Neil Young was interviewed at the D: Dive Into Media conference. And he made news. Talking about the lousy quality of music. Not the songs themselves, but the bits that render the sound.
This has been a pet peeve of not only oldsters, but almost everybody who makes music. But there was no traction on this front until yesterday.
That’s the power of online.
Neil Young speaks and suddenly my inbox is filled up. This is the viral sensation all newbies are looking for. And we’re immune to hype, but if there’s something we want to see, we’ll dig deep, we’ll spend an hour watching, isn’t that the Apple paradigm, the same day availability of nerdy presentations that it turns out many people are interested in that ultimately sell more product?
Neil gets it right. We’ve got good listening devices, but the underlying product is crap.
He says that piracy is the new radio. He knows more about it than Bob Pittman, who keeps on trumpeting that we’re addicted to Clear Channel when the company’s radio stations are almost as hated as Ticketmaster.
He seems to oversimplify the album thing. But I believe his ultimate message is if you want to make a long-form statement, like "Sgt. Pepper" or "Greendale", you should be able to and still can. As to whether a company can insist people buy it that way…I think piracy has eviscerated that model.
And he even takes a swing at Beats headphones. Saying they boost the bass, but…
And speaking of Beats, for all the hype Jimmy and Dre have gotten very little traction on their underlying message, that sound counts, the headphones are fashion items. Sure, they’re better than buds, and that’s good, but who’s talking about what you hear through them?
What we need most is a national broadband policy akin to South Korea’s, with lightning fast connections that allow us to download and stream at high quality. But I don’t see the content companies lobbying for this. Because it would enable more piracy!
But it would also enable a higher quality of sound, which would pay myriad benefits. Hell, you’ll have to buy a good system just to hear it!
So Neil Young was in the right place at the right time and as a result of modern technology, the message spread. He’s been talking about high quality sound forever, but there was never any traction.
This is the power of celebrity, this is the power of thinking, this is the power of online.
Watch the video.
