![]() In the eyes of those dissenters, Spotify’s unwillingness to remove Rogan reinforced the idea that it views music as just another offering in a buffet of content. A number of artists, including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, pulled their catalogs from the platform to protest its exclusive deal with the podcaster Joe Rogan, who had aired misleading information about COVID‑19 vaccines on his show. The virus also spurred a public reckoning with Spotify earlier this year. When, more or less overnight, the pandemic made touring impossible, the difficulty for most acts to make a living from such an arrangement became painfully clear. Musicians’ foremost gripe is about money: Spotify, the dominant platform, reportedly pays a fraction of a cent whenever a song is played. Streaming, the cheap and convenient format that came to rule the industry in the past decade, has begun to grate on a diverse range of artists and listeners. Lately, though, his obsession with the antique has made him an unlikely power broker in what was supposed to be the digital age. After the band’s breakup, in 2011, his solo records earned consistent if narrower acclaim. This keen sense of the past helped the White Stripes-the Detroit band he formed in 1997 with his then-wife, Meg White-revive classic-rock rawness in an era of plastic pop and space-age hip-hop. This spring, a clip made the rounds online in which White demonstrated his uncanny ability to identify any song in the Beatles’ catalog in one second or less. White is the sort of listener who appreciates such detail. That solo really happened at that moment.” A sticker on one acetate-derived record for sale in Third Man’s store, by the dance-punk band Adult, promises “such detail in this live recording, you can even hear the fog machine!” “People who know, audiophiles-they see ‘live to acetate,’ they know the circumstances under which it was made, and it’s exciting,” White said. Flubs, flaws, and interference instead become selling points-evidence of a recording’s authenticity. Unlike a recording made with contemporary equipment, a performance etched into an acetate can’t be easily remixed or otherwise reengineered. “Cat Stevens said the same thing,” White told me.Įver since White installed a lathe at Third Man, a stream of acts has come to teleport to the time before Pro Tools. ![]() A few minutes before taking the stage at Third Man, Weir-a septuagenarian cowboy who spoke in a low mutter-had visited the back room and marveled that not even the Grateful Dead, those ancient gods of concert documentation, had captured a show in this fashion. The music industry largely stopped cutting performances directly to disc 70 years ago, with the advent of magnetic tape. ![]() Ted Gioia: Is old music killing new music?įor so finicky an operation to take place in 2022 is, from one point of view, absurd. Groove isn’t prepared, “the needle will literally pop out of the groove from the jolt,” rendering the recording useless. But “you can have a mellow song like this”-the Dead’s downbeat “New Speedway Boogie” drifted in the air-and then, all of a sudden, the drummer hits the effects pedal and pumps up his volume. Listeners generally want a record to sound as loud as possible, White told me as Dr. On this evening, White, now 46, wore half-rim glasses and flannel, the only hint of rock coming from the Gatorade-blue tinge of his hair. Thanks to the endurance of early-2000s White Stripes hits such as “Seven Nation Army” and “Fell in Love With a Girl,” the guitarist and singer is one of the few undisputed rock gods to emerge in the 21st century. Observing this process intently was White himself. The lathe he used was the very same one that cut James Brown’s early singles, in the 1950s. This is the first step in an obsolete process for producing a vinyl record. Ingram-stooped over a needle that was etching Weir’s music into a black, lacquer-coated disc called an acetate. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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