Dr. Dre, Hewlett Packard & Jimmy Iovine Want To Change The Digital Music Eco-System
The goal is nothing less than improving the sonic quality of digital music. From files, to players to laptops to headphones rapper/entrepreneur Dr. Dre, computer giant Hewlett Packard and Universal Music exec Jimmy Iovine want to upgrade the tinty quality of the music that the current generations find an acceptable audio experience.
"We have to fix the entire chain," Iovine told CNET News. "Our position
is to go to all the sources and try to improve sound and educate
people…We can't put anything weak in the line. Whoever puts out
things that sound bad shouldn't be as cool as something that sounds
great."
"I just want our product to sound better," Iovine said. "The record business committed many, many mistakes in the last 10 years, and I'm right in there. One of them was letting its product get degraded…
It's one thing to let it get stolen, it's another to allow it to be degraded because then you really don't have a chance…video games and TV quality are getting better and the quality of our work is getting lower. If that happens, then music will become disposable. That's something we can fix."
Dr. Dre already markets high end headphones under the Monster Beats by Dr. Dre moniker which is expected to be used for the new joint venture. Here's video of the headphones:
Interesting approach to re-monetizing the catalogs… Unfortunately, I’m not sure any amount of education is going to convince the current generations to correct their “less-than-stellar” listening experience. 🙂
hypebot….
your positioning to me: a (not the) gateway to music news.
i request more links, more meat, more thoughts.
Lastly, i also request email notification if others comment on the same comment thread.
Sounds like three parties who are totally un-qualified and un-prepared to lead the way, but I’ve been wrong before.
It’ll be interesting to see if they’re really talking about ending the Loudness Wars and educating consumers about FLAC…or just shilling over-priced headphones and some shiny new format to re-buy.
The phenomenal success of YouTube has proven that consumers prefer control and convenience over quality.
The only way they are ever going to have an effective impact on quality is to ensure they are first providing industry leading control (by which I mean freedom of use for the consumer) and convenience first just so they can be at the same starting point as the competition, only then can they beat them with superior sound quality.
Anything with even the faintest whiff of DRM will instantly be an order of magnitude (if not several) less popular.
I do agree with Jimmy’s sentiments but it’s a shame that it took such a huge loss of profits for them to come to such a conclusion. Thing is, if the money was still be flowing, they wouldn’t be reevaluating their business plan in anyway. These same record companies were happy to be selling lossy digital albums that paled tremendously sonically to their physical counterparts for the same price as the physical versions, although manufacturing costs were nil.
Now that all digital music is pretty much DRM and even the most computer illiterate individual knows how to find albums online, they’re concerned about sound quality.
The record industry had the chance to run with SACD, with the dual disc format, minidiscs (which, although not of a higher quality to CD’s, I did prefer the protective casing for the disc; but, cd’s prevailed because record companies want you to repurchase that soon to be scratched cd), etc…
They could have ran a whole campaign illustrating the audio superiority of any of those formats had they chosen one. Instead, because they’ve probably gotten the manufacturing costs of cd’s near to zero at this point, they chose to stick with that.
I don’t feel sorry for these bastards. They had their reign and now we get to watch them squirm while they try to figure out how to plug the holes in their bleeding industry.
How about as a precursor to whatever new format they intend to try next, drop the damn prices on cd’s? If single cd’s maxed out at like $10 on the regular, folks might be way more encouraged to make impulse buys. And let new releases sell for $7.99 first week.
But no, if you look at the latest Best Buy weekly ad, Eminem and a few other artists are trying to get you to buy their latest for 11.99.
They haven’t learned. They’re just suffering a little bit, but they’ll be back to their old ways once they figure a way out of this bind.
Consumers don’t care about audio quality right now because they’re listening to their music on earbuds. Good headphones are the first step to educating consumers about the listening experience.
FLAC is nice….but DSD is the only way to save the “industry”
1st DSD for Playstaion3 donation download record ever: whetaus.com
much Direct Stream Digital,
bbb
Hey, Jimmy, the fix isn’t shitty overpriced headphones, it’s called FLAC. Look it up.
Help your artists sell it direct via their websites. There are many artists already doing so.
And don’t try to charge us more money than that AAC crap on iTunes, that is if you really care about sound quality and it isn’t really about increasing your margins.
Oh God, BBB’s been packing his bowl with Wheatus again…..
Any format that requires a $300 piece of hardware just to listen to it is definitely NOT the savior of the music industry….
So Mr. Iovine still has some of his producer roots inside of him. Quality headphones instead of earplugs is a good thing, but the mastering of the albums needs to improve accordingly: the loudness wars must end, otherwise it all sounds the blaring same.
So thank you Mr. Iovine for publicly thinking about giving Universal’s releases better mastering jobs.
So please go ahead now and instruct the mastering engineers to give your recordings more dynamics at the cost of loudness. Thanks.
This is definitely a step in the right direction for ALL MAJOR LABELS. With Home Recordings becoming common and every kid thinking they are the next Dre, Snoop or Fall Out Boy, quality music has taken a back seat to flash. The only way I see the Record business surviving is to create a NEW MODEL which would only be available to the Majors. Technology (Internet, MP3’s) took away the control of “Quality Music” from the PRO’s and Technology can give them back the control. Just like it alway’s has! Design a “NEW FORMAT” like we had throughout modern music. If you wanted to play 8 trks you had to by a 8 trk player, a cassette player, a CD player and etc. Develop a system that only major artist’s music can be played on and you get rid of all these wanta Be’s and back to talented MUSICIANS… Finally a move by the Majors to seperate the wanta be’s from the pro’s…