Killing music

Streaming services are killing music

Reissues are killing music

Laptop speakers are killing music.

If anyone wants t-shirts with these slogans, please send me your address.

From an improvised email:

'Reissues are killing music (and they should be illegal)'

I wish there were no reissues/repressing. i wish if you wanted to find that archive record that Mojo magazine had on the cover, you had to get out to a record fair and dig on your hands and knees until you found it (like in that episode of black books), churning up loads of other lost gems in the process.

case in point: I recently acquired an LP of Julie Tipett's record "sunset glow" for the sole reason that it is mentioned in Robert Wyatt's biography as 'a companion to [his magnum opus] Rock Bottom'; perhaps they were written about the same holiday in Tenerife, or just capture the same vibe? Julie tippets seems to have only three mentions in the biography but they appear to have been very close.

According to discogs, the album has only been reissued once during the 90s, and then only on CD. 

The sender included the original inner sleeve, as well a more recent improvement to actually house the disc. It is an utterly excellent record, heavy psychedelic jazz. No-one I know (outside of the bloke in the record shop) has heard of it. It's not on Spotify.

my local record shop is drowning in nostalgic deluxe reissues and carrying very little actual new music. new artists are strangled like by the parasitic vines of their parents' and grand parents' back catalogues. Old records should just https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E54m7vgqXUY. I saw that SFA were putting out a reissue of Radiator, with a 2nd cd of all the bsides. Great, I thought, at last, I could get all the SFA b-sides I always wanted. basketed it. and then... realised I neither needed nor wanted nor deserved it. I decided not to go back, dwell in the past in the familiar warm glow of 90s necrostalgia, but save my money for new and informative experiences. Experiences that make me feel like I'm still alive, rather than that life was something that happened when I was young.

What's more, what you say about the sounds quality is critical, but you forget that 90s records were mastered for 90s stereos and 90s ears. you physically can never hear those records again, even with the unremastered version in your hands. I never heard much of Smashing pumpkins or Manic street preachers at the time; they sound terrible to my new ears now. you can't go back.

CEX have stopped selling CDs. that's how bad things have got. there is such an incredible glut of physical media that it's impossible to even sift through anymore, unless the stock is curated. So reissues are criminal, in a world of landfill-oriented music product.

The same problem in computer games, where backwards compatibiltiy is not remotely a thing; Try to track down Tony Hawk 3 (the best in the series, according to considered opinions); all you can get these days, unless you buy an actual PS2, is the HD remastered collection that grabs bits and bobs from different games (despite this being inferior to TH3). These nintendo things they're bringing out now have an air of completeness, but it's a complete illusion, like the idea that spotify is 'all music ever'. It's not, and it's dangerous to think that it is. it's revisionist necrostalgia. it's how the past gets massaged into an easily digested narrative that ignores the real richness, fertility, of cultural history.

Just don't get me started on streaming music services. They offer all the convenience and none of the support. They are murdering music.

I don't know about Bandcamp. I like what they do, I like what they offer, I like that they stop you freeloading if you try to listen to something more than a few times without paying. But what appended to taking a risk? Buying an album because you liked the singles? I'm inclined to return to an older model with my next release: put up a shareware version, which is the first three-or-so tracks. Buying the record gets you access to the whole thing. This is basically what singles, or radio play, used to function as.

the confounding thing is earache records' "high dynamic range" master series - reissues that are meant to sound as un-compressed as they did back in the day. a brave thing to do in the metal world arms race. 

"what's this? [holds up finger horizontally]"

i don't know..?

"a babymetal waveform".

I think that's actually a very good joke if you visualise it. also it's a reference to a series of jokes in Asterix (where the finger represents a how a very strong man might hammer in a a nail) that might be a bit a obscure.