By Tony Field
Neil Young has a problem with modern music.
It is not the quality of the songs, nor the performers that bugs him though, it is the sound quality of digital music.
“We live in the digital age and unfortunately we only have five percent of the content in the music we used to have in the mainstream,” says Mr Young.
And Neil Young says his concern was shared by the man who brought the world the ipod: Apple founder Steve Jobs.
“Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, and his legacy is tremendous, [but] when he went home he listened to vinyl,” says Mr Young.
And the better quality of vinyl is one reason why the format is making a small, but noticeable comeback.
“The better your stereo system the better your vinyl will sound. But as a general rule vinyl always sounds much warmer and more immediate than CDs or mp3s,” says Dorlay Bray, of Southbound Records.
Neil Young maintains he is not anti digital, but at the moment it simply is not living up to its potential.
“It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s just the way it’s being used is not sufficient to transfer the depth of the art,” says Mr Young, who says people should have the choice to download low resolution or high resolution music files.
The downside to this, however, would be that high quality files would be huge – requiring half an hour to download one song using high-speed broadband. They would also cost a lot more.
“People should not associate high quality with inconvenience. That’s a myth,” says Mr Young. “We are living in the 21st century,all of these things are possible”.
3 News