I’ve said it before more than once, but I’ll say it again: The Onion AV club consistently puts out some of the best pop culture writing on the internet. Their interviews are particularly insightful, and this one is no exception.

Steve Albini, famed, fiercely independent record producer of such bands as Nirvana, The Pixies, etc, did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over at Reddit. The whole thing is worth reading, but I thought that his answer to a question about piracy and how it’s affected music is worth sharing:

I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it’s good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn’t like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that’s nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.

The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I’ll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example. There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.

Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.

Pretty interesting. I think he’s onto something.

A great piece about rediscovering the art of listening to music, an art that, under assault from earbuds, MP3s, and shitty laptop speakers, seems to be dying. Michael Chabon writes:

I’m no audiophile; I want to say that right off. I have no idea what impedance is, or how to set the levels of an equalizer with any confidence or panache, and I still find infantile amusement in saying the word “woofer.” But it struck me all at once that the sound quality of the music I’d been listening to so heavily, with the indirect attentiveness I give music when I’m writing, was thin, brittle; all sheen and no depth. It was tinny, tiny, and pallid. It sounded like shit, in fact; and not only did it sound like shit, but it had been sounding like shit for years. Shit in the kitchen, playing from a big hard drive attached to an old PowerBook, through a couple of small, flush-mounted wall speakers. Shit, in the minivan and the Prius, patched from an iPod through factory-installed speakers greased over with a scurf of children and their miasmas. Shit, through the endless, vaguely rattling series of earbuds—that nauseating term, with its suggestion of Van Goghesque mutilations—accompanying me on morning runs and onto airplanes. The digitized music itself “compressed,” “lossy,” reduced to a state of parity with whatever system I consigned it to.

If you love music, it’s worth a few bucks to invest in some decent headphones or speakers. Preferably both. Your ears will thank you.

This is going to be a good series.

Great advice from 37Signals’ Jason Fried:

There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.

Like Fried, too often, I’ve quickly jumped into a conversation to disagree. I’ve set out to prove my intelligence (or something) when, instead, I should have been listening, thinking, and asking questions.

Also like Fried, I’ve taken steps to stop doing this. It’s not easy, and I still fail frequently, but I’ve made progress that I’m proud of. I am better today than I was a year ago, and that’s really important to me.

So if you catch me acting like an asshole in a conversation, please call me out on it. I’ll thank you for it.