Downloads?...pah!

A belated Happy New Year to everyone…I’ve been stuck in the studio recording over the holidays and am just getting the chance to surface now! Hope you all had a happy holiday.

I was interested to read Paul’s comments about the i-tunes situation, which led me to wonder just how many industrial Beatle fans care about when the catalogue will be available on the service? I, for one do not give a flying monkey about it! Let me tell you why I don’t care and what I’d prefer to see.
Firstly, the download thing: Yes, I love the technology and convenience of being able to download music because it is instant. You don’t have to travel anywhere to pick up a reasonable sounding file, so for me it’s ok for the less important purchases.
I can just sit in front of my computer and peruse at my leisure. I don’t have to sit in the car, bus or train. I can just download, pop it in the media player of my choice and there it is…sounding….all mp3-ish with no artwork – great eh? In a word, it does a job. No more and no less. In terms of sound quality, it’s not the same, but it IS the modern equivalent of the cassette to me. I really hate the sound of mp3’s and/or anything else close by, like the itunes format. Another point not to like about i-tunes is the hassle of conversion. I bought an album by The Paramounts (who would go on to become Procul Harum) from i-tunes and it was a royal pain right in the neck. I wanted to play it on other devices you see! My punishment was then locating a suitable conversion programme, installing it on my machine, learning how to use said software, then converting the music to the format I wanted and then …well…do you know what? I just couldn’t be bothered playing the album after that. I just wanted to go and lie down in a darkened room, speak to my analyst and try to get over the trauma of it all. I just want to play the music! I DON’T WANT TO PLAY THE I-TUNES GAME. Am I the only one here with this view? I’ve said it before…I used to go to the record store, buy the record or cd, pop it in the player or on the turntable and BANG! … “It was twenty years ago today…”
Music to my ears…instantly!
No software upgrades, installs, learning curve, file conversion. Nothing but sweet music, sweet music.
Which brings me to this issue of the Beatle catalogue on i-tunes. Let me say right off. It is emperor’s new clothes syndrome right here in my opinion folks. Does anyone actually care about the availability of Beatles music for i-tunes? What? You can’t take the CD’s and convert it yourself? Why would anyone want to degrade the quality of the music? Mp3’s and the like are a lossy format and are less than the full dime. I can spot a low quality mp3 from fifty paces. They sound terrible to my ears. If you don’t know the difference, try taking any CD track you like and convert one to say…128mbps MP3 and do an A and B comparison. The high end is all crunchy and sounds like the aforesaid bad old days of the cassette to me. Even the so called higher end ones are detectable.
But I digress.
What I want from the Beatles is NOT availability on i-tunes, or acrobatic shows in places I am extremely unlikely to get to or indeed any of that nonsense. No. What I want is cleaned up, re-mastered, extended releases of the catalogue which changed my life thank you very much. I don’t want drippy “file” versions of the most important catalogue in popular music, I want full fat, all singing and all dancing physical releases which I can play ANYWHERE. I will choose how I want to access that material and what conversion processes I want to put it through to suit my life. If I want to make all the good work the musicians, writers, producers, engineers and mastering engineers sound less than good, then I will choose that route. When you have the physical disc, you have the best range of choices from there. Keep it as is for your CD player at full bandwidth quality, re-convert it for your portable or whatever.
Further, whilst I have no doubt about the impact The Beatles catalogue will make when it becomes available online, the fact is that most of the horses have already bolted. At this point they’ve hedged their bets and held on to the money too long. The race is over already. The Beatles should have been leading the way when the online thing started, not following the pack, which is what they will be doing now. Most of the modern world just won’t care about the releases. As for the Beatles core audience? They want the shiny new improved catalogue with a few extra bells on top for good measure. No more, no less.
Did I say Happy New Year?