Quotes & Sayings About Digital Music

Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music. — Geddy Lee

Digital downloading of music has affected us all in adverse ways. — Wynonna Judd

For the nerd in me, I prefer full quality digital files as they give a truer representation of the source mix, the studio in fact. From these files I can quite often tell what kind of set up made the tracks. For the music lover in me, vinyl is more woosey, richer, more alive, more real, more imperfect and somehow becoming more like life itself. But I don't prefer it per se. The mastering engineer in me always loves to hear it as it was made. — Chris McCormack

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems. — Virginia Postrel

All digital music listeners are equal. Acquisition is painless. Taste is irrelevant. It is pointless to boast about your iTunes collection, or the quality of your playlists on a streaming service. Music became data, one more set of 1's and 0's lurking in your hard drive, invisible to see and impossible to touch. Nothing is less cool than data. — David Sax

For the last fifty years or so, The Novel's demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can't in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language - especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end? — Lance Olsen

I'm not the most technically savvy person in the world. Like, I'm not good at troubleshooting when stuff happens to my digital music. — Conor Oberst

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini — Brad Stone

You can fix things with digital technology and there's a temptation to fix everything or make it perfect and what you're losing there is the human performance that may not be perfect but there may be magic in it. You can make it perfect but music doesn't sound good perfect for some reason. — Joe Walsh

We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it's degrading our music, not improving it It's not that digital is bad or inferior, it's that the way it's being used isn't doing justice to the art. The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. ... The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn't have to make that choice. — Neil Young

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. — Brian Eno

Just as the music industry couldn't combat the financial impact of digital piracy, major corporations will have to rethink how to maintain margins when many of their most profitable items can be easily manufactured at home. — Jay Samit

The major media companies are playing a defensive game, and I'm not sure I blame them. If you look at the digital revolution, you look at who the winners and the losers are, there are some very very big losers - music, the newspaper industry. And there are some really big winners, social media, Facebook. — Harry E. Sloan

Even if there were no illegal copying, the advent of digital distribution will put a lot of stress on the movie and music industry. When the distribution costs comes down, that puts more price pressure on the rest of the cost. — Edward Felten

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music. — Donald Knuth

I don't think piracy is going to kill the music industry. But digital technology and the ability to download will change the packaging from CDs to a single-based business. — Richard Parsons

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals ... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick. — Oliver Sacks

Digital technology has eaten classic radio as we know it. Independent stations with disc jockeys who chose their own music have all gone; it's these huge parent companies that own a hundred stations and then decide what we should hear. — Joe Walsh

When people lose their jobs, they can either get another job or be entrepreneurs. In the music industry, a lot of people have attempted the latter by starting their own labels, but in the age of digital downloads, it's very difficult to succeed. — Judd Apatow

I think, once recipes become digital, pirating a digital recipe and all the questions that you have with music and so forth will become pertinent to food as well. — Hod Lipson

With the rise of the Internet, fashion did become part of the global entertainment industry in the last ten years, and will follow the digital evolution of the music or film industry. — Hedi Slimane

Digital books and music are often different from their physical counterparts in that consumers buy licences to a work, revocable under an ongoing contract, rather than their own copies. — Jonathan Zittrain

I think it's okay that there's digital music out there, because that does mean more people have access. I mean, you're a student, and you're studying music, and you want to find a CD of a whole work, but there's one piece that intrigues you. It's easy to get that piece for a dollar for the most part. And it's so easy for people to carry around music digitally. — Gail Zappa

All these kids who are growing up on Skrillex and all this digital music- what are they gonna think when they hear rock'n'roll? — Ty Segall

But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud. — Jennifer Egan

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars. — James Surowiecki

EMI is a proven leader in the emerging digital music landscape and one of the world's largest and most respected music companies. — Chad Hurley

Digital music boils down the actual musical experience. — Simon Le Bon

Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution, yellow-pages directories, landline telephones, and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution. — John Sununu

The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck. — Terry Teachout

Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols - every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because they are easily copied, transmitted, and error-checked. Unlike analog signals, they are not doomed to degradation over time and distance. That — Neal Stephenson

Directing music videos, especially ones that are concept/narrative driven is challenging in itself, but Directing a music video within a digital video environment is even more difficult. — Jon Jon Augustavo

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the "physical pleasure of turning actual pages" and how ebook will "never replace the real thing". Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They're only happy looking in the rear-view mirror. — Charlie Brooker

Just as the digital dominance of the recording studio seemed complete, analog had its revenge. Musicians, producers, and engineers searching for the sound of the music that inspired them - roots Americana, blues, and classic rock - began thinking about how the process of recording affected the sound. These artists, including White, Dave Grohl, and Gillian Welch, began experimenting with old tape machines and vintage studio equipment, returning to the analog methods they'd once used. Critics and fans noted that these albums sounded different - more heartfelt, raw, and organic - and the industry began to take notice. — David Sax

We see ourselves as the world's digital library. That can be a lot more than books. We do want to expand to other types of content: sheet music, magazines, user-generated content. — Trip Adler

Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives. — Nick Harkaway

But ebooks will rule the day, and when people a few years from now talk about 'books', what they'll really be referring to are ebooks, not print books. Eventually the 'e' will be dropped, and books will be assumed to be digital, just as most music is now digital; after all, we don't refer to music as e-music. — Jason Merkoski

The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face. — Virginia Postrel

I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. — Beck

We are pushing ahead as fast as we can for all audiences, whether for the business user, the child, or the digital music enthusiast. — Jim Allchin

The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age. — Jennifer Egan

I'm fine. I'm fine, he says, and fine, fine, repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world. — Lauren Groff

Digital might capture the dynamics of what I heard before it went to tape a bit more accurately, but on the other hand, when we'd switch from listening to the digital version to the analog, the change was so profound - the music would suddenly go three-dimensional, and it felt much more engaging. — Kevin Shields

What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open. For the most part at the moment we get less information for slightly less money - though we could be getting a lot more. — David Byrne

In music, we can still record analog and then do the post production in digital. In film, sooner or later, we're not even going to be able to film because they won't be able to process. The labs won't exist anymore. You'll just have to do it with digital. — Mathieu Demy

Finally, gatekeepers still matter. Technology makes it easier for people to listen to any kind of music they like, but digital availability and ubiquity are steering them increasingly to the biggest hits, not the niches. Bloggers and podcasters and tweeters have shaken up purveyors of news, but not replaced them. Book publishers, art dealers and film producers will still play the biggest role in what gets bought, read, contemplated and listened to. — Daniel Franklin

I buy digital music off of iTunes all the time. I Shazam something in an airport or in a club or something; I Shazam it, I buy it. I am fully digital. — Richard Patrick

There's an upside to the digital thing from my point of view because I find that I have access to all this wacky, weird-ass dance-music stuff that I just can't go into a shop and buy on vinyl. — Thom Yorke

In the digital age we're in now, with satellite radio and Pandora and stuff like that, it's not about, "I listen to this kind of music." It's about, "I listen to good music and bad music." — Eric Church

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents' garage became the world's most valuable company. — Walter Isaacson

We have all this digital equipment, and sometimes this analog stuff comes back and people say "Oh my god!" It makes a different sounding music. — Sam De Jong

We know that ATT is upgrading their TCI network to provide voice services, but we believe that upgrade will go beyond that, for total interactivity at very reliable rates. Video telephone calls, downloading music videos, television broadcasts, online newspapers - all of this would be in digital mode. I think they certainly intend to be the one-stop shop and once they do that, it will force the other multiple system operators to follow suit. — Robert Rosenberg

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall. — Jaron Lanier

I'm trying to satirize what it's like to be a recording artist in 2011. I realize that standing on a soap box and ranting and raving about my opinions on the digital age and its effect on music is only going to get you so far. — DJ Shadow

The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it. — Edgar Bronfman Jr.

SOPA has been described as hitting a carpet tack with a sledgehammer. But technology was a sledgehammer to the music industry, one that allowed digital distributors like Apple to grow rich. — Peter Lerangis

I want the music to be heard as close to when I made it, as much as possible. I don't want to get into some "future of the music industry" thing, or where I stand on digital this or that, but I think it's ridiculous that a lot of people in the industry plan so far ahead that it makes a lot of improvisation impossible and makes a lot of people's expectations fixed and not fluid. — Bradford Cox

CDs are clearly dying out, and it's going to be moving to an all-digital format. Along with it, you raise this interactivity with the music. I feel that it's not stealing sales from anyone; it's turning people on to the music. — Girl Talk

The rise of the iPod meant that digital music became the norm, It's sad, but you can still find the real stuff out there if you look for it! — Peter Hook

Look at music for what it's worth around the world and not just America. In other countries, people are still buying CDs and going to record stores. But in America, it's all about digital. The game is breaking down. But, look at me, you need to know how to play the game the right way. — Snoop Dogg