Thursday 29 May 2013

Over the past 15 years, digital music formats have created a new generation of ‘mobile jukeboxes’, revolutionising the way the world listens to music.

The dawn of Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services in the late 90’s saw people bypassing traditional CD shops to copy and share MP3 files illegally.

Soon, legal ‘a la carte’ download services such as iTunes and Bigpond began to spring up, marketing individual songs and albums direct to consumer’s phones and computers – again in MP3 and other compressed formats.

More recently, streaming and various cloud services such as Spotify, MOG and Pandora have birthed. These services allow users to listen to music online on demand, flagging what many predict is, the demise of the compact disk (CD), at least as a means to hold and distribute music.

According to Darren Springthorpe from boutique label, Live At Baker Street, the fight back has begun with new audiophile vinyl, 24bit CDs, and high definition downloads, in response to a renewed desire by consumers to listen actively to music rather than just have it on in the background.

“A lot of people are no longer actively listening to music, they’re passively listening to it. And passive listening is where you’ve got the music on but you’re doing other things.”

“People use active listening for all manner of recreational purposes: meditative, as well as pure enjoyment listening to the recorded sound. They can hear the difference between a compressed MP3 to that of a CD and for that matter, that of a high resolution 24-bit 192kb download or stream, because the formats themselves have a change in the harmonics.”

Darren says the major labels have recognised the need and have begun re-issuing “best sellers” from their catalogues, and that includes some Christian albums.

“There is a particular organisation that has the high resolution files stored in a very large warehouse and they have been selling the low resolution mp3 files now with the recent developments of streaming and high resolution, they’re actually encouraging their clients to re-purchase the same material, but at a higher resolution because of the quality improvements, but even that doesn’t compare to vinyl.”

While I’m aware of just one Christian music title reissued on audiophile vinyl – that’s a recording of Gregorian Chant by the Benedictine Abbey – there’s a small number of high definition downloads available online: https://www.hdtracks.com

These include Skillet’s Awake, POD’s Payable On Death, Naturally 7’s 2012 Live project, Jason Castro’s Only A Mountain, Take 6’s self titled ‘a capella’ set from 25 years ago, and Francesca Battistelli’s Christmas.

These albums, along with music from major mainstream acts, are available in AIFF, wav and other lossless formats.

Click here to listen to more details with Cam Want on TRAA NEWS:

Top image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fourthfloor/385954000/sizes/o/in/photostream/ (through flicker CC license).