As I stated last week, mp3s are destroying music.

Since that column many people have – with varying degrees of politeness – hailed me on the street and made clear their differing opinions. This has, in my mind, completely reinforced what I said.
Their argument: 'They're really convenient and I can't tell the difference between mp3s and CDs.”
My argument: 'They're really convenient and if you can't tell the difference you need to have your ears syringed.”
Yes, mp3s are a big step down in musical quality and – for the moment – the world, while revelling in the best quality audio-visual equipment available for watching hi-def movies in surround sound, has abandoned music as a thing of quality in favour of the strangely competitive pleasure that comes from carrying round twelve hundred songs.
But, as with any new 'leap” in technology, it's hard to tell the wider downstream effects. And it's now becoming clear that those effects are also insidiously destroying recorded music as the artform it was once considered.
Do you think I'm exaggerating?
Here are just two ways in which this is happening.
Firstly consider the album. If you're judging music as an artform then the album, once on LP, then on CD, is the grandest of musical statements, a complete package where songs can intertwine and connect with each other, where greater themes can be explored by the push and pull between different lyrical and musical ideas expressed in the range of songs. A great album is greater than the sum of its parts, be it Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, or Nirvana's Nevermind.
Mp3s and the practice of downloading them as individual songs is – some would argue already has – destroying the album as an entity. When you pay for music by the song the first impulse is to have a quick listen and then just select the songs you like most. So the important longer song, the one that might once have been a rock in the middle of an album that after a few listens would grab you and become your favourite song, now gets ignored.
Thus music is being reduced from an artform with the richness and complexity of a great album, back to the three minute hit-song mentality where immediate impact and an impressive opening (for people listening to thirty second samples before they buy) is paramount
The second problem with mp3s is simply their popularity. Because so many people now get their music via mp3s, artists are actually mastering their albums so they sound better on mp3.
What do I mean by this? Well, mastering is the last step in the recording process, where tones and volumes (and other more subtle things) are adjusted. This step normally puts the 'gloss” on a recording and sets the volume. The difficulty with listening to music via mp3 (probably on earphones) is that the quiet bits tend to get lost. Just like listening to music when you're driving in a car. So now when music is mastered they try and avoid quiet moments by pumping up the volume on those bits. Basically it all gets squeezed (or, in technical terms, compressed), so the loud parts are pushed down, and then it all gets turned up.
You can hear it on Bruce Springsteen's Magic album or The John Butler Trio – a relentless wall of sound that never lets up. A solo passage by a bass guitar is just as loud as the full band. It's draining on the ears.
After his latest album, Modern Times, Bob Dylan commented that it didn't sound as good as in the studio. That's because it was mastered to be played on mp3, with all the life, the dynamics, squeezed out of it: a constant solid volume with no highs and lows.
And, again, there's the comparison with film. Blu-ray DVD are now offering brilliant uncompressed TrueHD sound, giving you the full dynamic range you would get in a cinema. Music is going the other way, getting flatter and having the soul squeezed out of it. All in the name of convenience.
watusi@thesun.co.nz