Taking care of the music is something I think about every day. I’m always trying to find new ways to communicate how much music means to the world and why it’s important for our survival and happiness that it be enjoyed in its full glory.
I do believe that one of the big streaming platforms is going to take the leap to adaptive bitrate Xstream by NYA or similar technology at some point. Once that happens, others will follow. They’ll have to. That’s the way things work. Courage and foresight from one of the big streaming companies will give you what you’re entitled to. Insist on hearing all the music.
TO THE RECORD COMPANIES: PREPARE NOW
What you’re selling is mostly crappy-sounding audio that compromises the music that made you who you used to be. You’re downgrading the music so much to sell as much as you can, anywhere you can, without thinking about the future of music.
I can’t blame you for not offering better-sounding music if there’s nothing available to play it back on. If what everybody uses to listen to it is going to dumb it down anyway, what difference does it make?
But wait! Music on Xstream by NYA sounds better right away, no matter where you are or what device you’re using. That’s simply because Xstream by NYA is able to play a full high-res file. All the other services are limited to a dumbed-down file.
Spotify’s desktop app, for example, is limited to 320 or 160 kbps. That’s two levels of quality to choose from. On an Android, iPhone, or iPad, the Spotify mobile app has four audio quality settings: 320, 160, 96, or 24 kbps.
Xstream by NYA has 15,000 levels of quality and continuously seeks the highest-quality bandwidth allowed by your device at your current location. That’s anywhere from extremely low to super-high. Good bandwidth allows all music to be heard in high res, exceeding an iPhone’s capabilities for playback. Still, even with that limitation, anyone can hear the difference. It’s big! (Some phones by Samsung, LG, and others can play full high resolution today, but not the iPhone. You should hear NYA on those phones.)
Try listening to one of my songs on your phone using the NYA app. Now listen to the same song through Spotify or one of the other streaming services. It doesn’t matter if you are using Bluetooth speakers or whatever. The Xstream music is better sounding because Xstream by NYA is able to play a file with the closest quality to the original. Spotify is not capable of that.
It’s up to you, record companies, to improve the status quo of music quality. Don’t wait for the new and better phones to arrive. They are coming.
Be ready. When the change comes, your music will sound as great as it can. People will be able to feel the difference. You will be ready to give our best files to the great streaming company that makes the jump first. Do it now. Save the sound of music. Let it live.
Please stop using CD masters to make vinyl if you have the original analog tapes of legacy music. You should be making great legacy vinyl from that analog, and at the same time, you can transfer these timeless pieces of art to high-resolution digital for the next generation of streaming. It’s coming. Our greatest music will be preserved and shared forever.
Remember, analog deteriorates over time. Your transfers need to be done now to be saved and ready for history. Start with your all-time top 100 albums.
It does cost to do these transfers. It’s your music to take care of. Be responsible to more than your three-month bean counters! See the future.
Some of you are taking high-res masters—192 masters, which is what many digital masters are—and you’re making CDs from them. You’re both downsampling and interpolating to make CDs. Then you make a vinyl record from the CD and ruin it before it’s ever listened to. It has no chance of sounding great, but it’s vinyl, so people think it’s going to sound great. It’s such a rip-off. I know why you’re doing it. It’s easier, cheaper, and you already have a CD master. You haven’t improved anything. You’re just sending out shit, deceiving and fooling your music-loving customers. Shame.
Lastly, rethink your pricing. If you charged the same price for all music, more listeners would go to the better quality and you’d be doing the world a huge service. And it wouldn’t cost you any more. Maybe $2,000 for each high-res master—$50,000 to preserve your top twenty-five albums of all time at archive quality. To share the cost, make vinyl simultaneously. I ask you to bite the bullet now and transfer your analog masters to preserve the future of music history at the highest resolution. It’s your responsibility.
TO THE AUDIO EQUIPMENT COMPANIES: AIM HIGHER FOR THE FUTURE
I’d like to see you offer a pure analog line of products, low, medium, and high quality, with amps and bypassable DACs. It’s very simple. Design to play directly off a phone’s digital output or from its analog output. I say less is more. You should support playing high-res audio and not limit to CD quality. I’m speaking especially to you, Sonos, Apple, Amazon, Google, and others with your smart speakers. You work hard to design your speakers to sound decent, but limit what they can play with your cheap and underperforming electronics. Lenbrook, a Canadian company, has improved on Sonos with their BluOS, delivering high-res audio throughout the home and proving it can be done.
Invest in better-quality DACs and amplifiers. Divest from unneeded features that compromise your sound.
There’s also an opportunity for you to create new kinds of products. Great ideas that are based on simplicity and quality sound. Make a headphone with a high-quality DAC and amplifier that plugs into your phone’s data port. High-resolution-capable streaming is coming. Your customers will be ready to listen to anything. Be ready, too.
TO APPLE, GOOGLE, AND AMAZON MUSIC: OPEN THE DOOR TO GREATNESS
Why don’t you help preserve the history of music in its true greatness? Make the products to reproduce it and share it with the world forever.
Offer the high-resolution and CD files on your streaming services and in your stores. You are one step away from preserving the art of recorded sound—all the music of the ages since recording began. Open the door to greatness. If you offer these commonsense solutions to the people, the music companies can provide the product and the world will rejoice again with great-sounding music, feeling it to the soul. Without you, the potential is limited.
TO THE PHONE MANUFACTURERS: LEAVE A DOOR OPEN
It’s just as easy to stream great adaptive bitrate sound as it is to stream the crap we have today; probably easier, since adaptive bitrate only needs one file, not several files for different audio qualities. That’s what today’s old-school streaming services are forced to use with their twentieth-century technology. Make your phones so they can play all the music back. Streaming services are coming to deliver it. Some are already here. Be able to play it back or have a way to get it out to a playback device that can handle it.
Unlike camera technology, you have no consistent strategy to improve audio quality. Most of you currently use low-res DACs and limit your playback to CD quality or less. When you do focus on audio, it’s often about your built-in speakers instead of what is going into them. Garbage in, garbage out.
Some of you are on the right track, building in better DACs and audio players, or allowing direct access to the digital files. That would enable absolute highest-quality twenty-first century listening. This quality is coming to your phone. Be able to deliver it to your music-loving consumer. You can change the world.
New phones with these capabilities would be quite amazing, letting their users drive a world-class sound system anywhere with a phone, in their headphones, houses, and cars.
Providing high-quality audio from your phone is the best way to stand apart from your competitors. Audio remains your opportunity to excel. Our NYA app and others like it can now deliver high-res audio to your customers, but we need you to free the music, so they can hear it all.
TO THE STREAMING COMPANIES: EMBRACE THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Grow with contemporary technology. Release the music. Your products are based on technology that’s about twenty years old, addressing nonexistent problems that are gone. This old approach requires your customers to make unneeded compromises in their audio quality. We’ve solved that all now and it’s working. There’s no longer any need to make compromises. We’d love you to adopt what we have done with Xstream by NYA. Whether it’s our way of doing it or somebody else’s way, it doesn’t matter. Just be aware that the technology exists to do it and it can save the sound of music.
Adaptive bitrate streaming technology is obviously superior to anything else. It’s beyond formats. It’s simpler. It means that you get everything you can, all the time, wherever you are, from just one file. As the streaming market progresses, one streaming company will recognize that adaptive bitrate can set it apart, yielding a huge advantage over the competition while bringing a giant benefit to customers and giving back the gift of music to the world. Everywhere music is heard, it will sound great.
TO MUSIC LOVERS: FEED YOUR SOULS
When I started making music, it was presented on vinyl records, and the listener heard everything we created. Today, with digital music, what you are getting is less than 5 percent of what I created. If you get a CD of my music, then you hear less than 25 percent. Digital is numbers. It’s all math. That’s just how it adds up. You are getting a raw deal from the technology and record companies. I am sorry about that.
When I started my music career, everyone loved music and it was a big thing. It brought joy and it brought tears. Music reflected our lives and we felt it. That was when we heard it all, 100 percent of it.
You’re the ones who are getting screwed the worst. You’re not getting what it is you think you’re getting. You are getting a small percentage of what people used to hear and feel.
Look, I don’t want you to feel bad. You’re probably enjoying music because it’s music. Music is good, so you’re going to enjoy it in almost any shape you can get it. Just recognizing the song is not enough, though. That’s not a good enough reason to settle for 5 percent of the music you bought.
I want you to feel music. You deserve it. Music has a lot more to give to you and your soul.