Bob Dylan Says Streaming Has Made Music ‘Too Smooth and Painless’

[Tim Link]

It is no wonder I dent understand Bob Dyland. He does not know what he is talking about.

Seems like you now understand him! Or at least you've got an explanation for why he says the things he does.

 

[Gregadd]

Seriously. No idea what he is talking about. CD and radio allow rapid changes. Vinyl not so much. Maybe he is just an old guy who does no like change.

 

[Tim Link]

Seriously. No idea what he is talking about. CD and radio allow rapid changes. Vinyl not so much. Maybe he is just an old guy who does no like change.

I'd agree that some of the change happened with CD allowing rapidly moving from track to track. My old Sony ES CD player was lightning fast at that. I don't think any newer player can match it. If you had a multi-CD changer you could have a lot of tracks to randomly skip through. I never had one of those. Radio of course allows you to change the station but there's not anywhere near the immediate options tailored to your specific
whim-of-the-moment that we have with the internet. I don't really think it's a bad thing overall and I don't think that's what he's trying to say. I think he's just trying to say that it changes the way we listen and can possibly interfere with our enjoyment. There is a certain special ritual experience that is potentially being lost here. Without taking possession of and caring for a physical copy can we feel the same way about it, or without having to endure bad reception or radio commercials, or the effort to find the CD and drop it in the tray? I think we can if we remember the time we're investing to listen. I've experienced a bit of jarring disorientation with the switch to streaming music that surprised me. Who'd have thought that convenience would be a problem. My psychology has adjusted.

 

[Gregadd]

All I ca say is his opinion too the ext5ent I can decipher it, is at odds with my experience.

 

[properlydeafened]

"Very few songs of today will: go on to become standards. Who is going to write standards today? A rap artist? A hip-hop or rock star? A raver, a sampling expert, a pop singer? That’s music for the establishment. It’s easy listening. It just parodies real life, goes through the motions, puts on an act. A standard is on another level. It’s a role model for other songs, one in a thousand."

That's bullshit. I'm a Dylan fan and love that generation of musicians in general...but the notion that nobody is writing any good songs these days is simply not true. You can't dispute how great that era was, but so many of them think they were the last great songwriters and it's simply not the case.

 

[Gregadd]

You gotta kiss a lot of frogs to a great recording.

 

[godofwealth]

Can you think of a single songwriter today who might ever be in running for a Nobel prize in literature? Bob Dylan set an impossibly high standard for songwriters that’s unlikely to be equaled in this century. Listening to his early albums, like his Freewheeling Bob Dylan — preferably in mono on vinyl — one is shocked by the depth of his lyrics. Take Masters of War. Who writes such songs any more? Or the Ballad of Hollis Brown on his The Times They’re a Changin. Looking at his recorded oeuvre, I‘d have to say he’s one of a kind. We are not going to see his equal again. Not in my lifetime.

Albums | The Official Bob Dylan Site

www.bobdylan.com

 

[findog]

A quote from Thoreau: "...they are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at..."

Most innovators through history, I'm sure, thought their achievements would bring about progress, but many fail to, or ignore, the possibilities of negative impacts. For example, a commercial internet, the automobile (drunk driving), airplanes (plane crash), oil refining (climate impact). I recommended This is Not a Conspiracy Theory for entertainment and intriguing views on systems.

 

[properlydeafened]

Can you think of a single songwriter today who might ever be in running for a Nobel prize in literature? Bob Dylan set an impossibly high standard for songwriters that’s unlikely to be equaled in this century. Listening to his early albums, like his Freewheeling Bob Dylan — preferably in mono on vinyl — one is shocked by the depth of his lyrics. Take Masters of War. Who writes such songs any more? Or the Ballad of Hollis Brown on his The Times They’re a Changin. Looking at his recorded oeuvre, I‘d have to say he’s one of a kind. We are not going to see his equal again. Not in my lifetime.

Albums | The Official Bob Dylan Site

www.bobdylan.com

Oh don't get me wrong, I agree he's the best ever and I don't think I'll see anyone that equals him either in my lifetime. I have Freewheeling in mono...on vinyl...and Masters of War has been my favorite Dylan song for ~30yrs.

I'd still be more impressed if he had named some artists he thinks are writing good songs right now rather than claim streaming has turned all current music into the equivalent of Nashville pop country. That element exists for sure...but he's not trying very hard if he really thinks that is all there is.

 

[godofwealth]

Part of the answer, I think, is that great art requires suffering. A tortured soul seems a prerequisite for genius. Mendelssohn wrote wonderful music, but not at the level of Beethoven. He was privileged to live in a wealthy cultured family, surrounded by love and exposed to a lot of great thinkers. Beethoven suffered deafness, abject poverty and in later life, neglect. He was almost a street bum in his last years, paradoxically as he was writing his greatest music. Vincent van Gogh was also a tortured soul who cut off his ear. There are exceptions, I’m sure. But Dylan wrote great songs because he lived on the streets, enmeshed in the daily lives of very poor people, and saw their suffering first hand. He lived through the trauma of Vietnam. These days, artists make a successful album, they are drenched in millions of dollars of revenue from record labels and concert tours. Where’s the suffering? The pathos you need to write great songs like Schubert? A half baked theory of creativity, I’ll be the first to admit. But deprivation seems essential to produce great works of art.

 

[Gregadd]

I agree to a degree. I don't think you necessarily have to suffer but you need some emotion and knowledge of the art you proclaim to perfect. The pursuit of fame of fortune is a different matter.

 

[properlydeafened]

I agree with this as well. My favorite artists have never been happy go-lucky well adjusted souls. BUT...I don't think artists with that emotional connection died out entirely with the advent of streaming...nor do I think they are all getting rich from their work and losing their vision.

 

[findog]

One of the most admired artists is Duchamp and he lived a rather conventional and undramatic life but inspired countless artists worldwide and for generations. Another is John Cage.

 

[Blackmorec]

Agreed. Streaming makes it possible to sample an enormous variety of music. It’s a bit overwhelming of course to be given a library of millions of tracks. One has to pick and choose. And most of us will end up sampling a very tiny sliver of the available choices.

But I worry about the long term stability of the streaming companies. Qobuz and Roon are here today. Who knows if they’ll be around in 5 or 10 years time?

I’m not getting rid of my large physical library. In my long experience over 35 years, it is hard to beat the reliability of long-term storage media like optical discs and vinyl records. The US Library of Congress did a study of the best medium for long term storage. Surprisingly vinyl records came out on top! I have CDs that I bought in 1985 that playback perfectly. Hard drives from that era? They’re like 5” floppy disks, 3.25” floppy disks, which you can’t use any more. I have a whole closet of non-working hard drives. The bigger the hard drive, the faster they fail in my experience. SSDs and newer storage media are just as unreliable, and prone to overheating, particularly NVME drives.

Cloud storage might be more reliable, but it’s subject to the vagaries of the internet and the companies that maintain it. Will Dropbox be around in 10 years?

Hi gow,
Just bear in mind that long term storage isn‘t at all the same thing as long term usage. All the above means is that records are great for people whose goal is to preserve music. Personally I prefer certain forms of digital where the actual media is remade each time I want to play the music. All we store is a template. What we listen to is always ‘freshly minted’
Add to that the fact that we have access to and control over the quality of how its minted and we’re Golden.

 

[Gregadd]

" Too smooth and painless" Still waiting for Bob to explain the benefits of rough and painful. How does that benefit the listener? So far, I can only come up with is streaming cuts into his record sales.

 

[thedudeabides]

Too easy and painless. No argument. Too many choices? Absolutely. How much music can one seriously listen to in a lifetime? Privacy? Alexa, how is privacy defined? From a song writer perspective. Bob Dylan vs Leonard Cohen. I prefer the latter.