That may seem a melodramatic way to start a column, but since Christmas I've been overcome with despair at the degradation of an art form I love.

It seems that for just about everyone I talk to, Christmas involved an i-something. An i-phone, i-pod, i-pod touch, whatever it was it was all about i. And I can't help but wonder, what did music ever do to deserve such a fate?
Because all I can think of when I see more and more folk with their mp3 players is the death of music. For a while it was just a few sets of earphones at bus-stops and around town. Now, any party you go to, any sunny deck you sit on for a balmy summer evening is likely to come complete with music from an mp3 player handily plugged straight into the stereo system.

And let me say it right up front: mp3s are the McDonalds of music, the KFC of quality sound, disposable, easy to consume, fast food for the ears, that strips away all the essential goodness, dulls your senses and smothers your soul. Mp3s are the spawn of the devil.

I grew up in a time when people, or at least people who loved music, used to go to great lengths to hear it in all its full glory, in a time when people would discuss the quality of their home speakers. It might have been a bit poncey, all that talk of tweeters and woofers and whose amp had the best sound, but ultimately it was about the quality of the music.

The same thing is happening now in the audio-visual world. Everybody wants their movies to look fantastic at home so they're buying bigger flat screen televisions to go with their DVD players and surround systems, so that when they watch an action movie they can hear those bullets whistle by in 5.1 sound. Home movies never looked and sounded so good.

So what happened to music? When did music stop being about how good it sounds and start being about how convenient it is to listen to? When did it become more important to have fifteen thousand songs at your fingertips than to hear any one of them properly?

Because, bottom line, mp3s sound like crap.
I was at a friend's place recently, a well respected musician around town, sipping a few chardys on his deck, when the mp3 discussion ensued. He was playing mp3s through his deck speakers ('they're so convenient, they plug right in to the system, etc…”). I mentioned that they sounded like crap, he said no one would know the difference.
So we found a CD that he had been playing on mp3 and directly compared them. Within literally seconds everyone listening – and I mean everyone, none of whom were professional musicians, just a random scattering of friends – could tell which was which and said the mp3s didn't sound nearly as good.
It's not hard to spot, you just have to listen.

But now everybody loves mp3s. The record labels have, in particular, grown to love them. Consider this news item for 2008:
'Music sales have topped 1.5 billion units for the first time ever in the USA.
Despite the perceived drop in the music biz, digital sales have fuelled the most successful year ever for total sales in the US music industry. 1,513 million sales were tallied during 2008. That was up from 1,369 million last year or a 10.5% increase. While overall album sales were down 8.5%, digital album sales were up 32%. More people bought albums digitally than ever before last year. Digital albums accounted for 65.8 million sales.”
Digital albums. That's mp3s. And why do you think the big players would be so happy about this? Consider the manufacturing costs of an mp3. What a brilliant product, one you can sell over and over again without making any more of them. Never mind the quality, feel the profit margin.

Most worrying of all, is that mp3s are now so popular that artists are changing the way their music sounds, so that it makes better listening on mp3 players. Oh sure, it'll sound mind-numbingly worse on any other sort of hi-fi system, but it'll be great on those earphones at the bus stop.
What happened to music? (More next week…)
watusi@thesun.co.nz