By: Nick Ratcliffe

With continually dropping CD sales and the rise of mp3 streaming services, consumers seem to be forced to choose between recording quality and the use of a streaming service. Considering the popularity of iPod ear buds and music played on cellphone speakers, audio quality may no longer be a concern for the general listener.

An article in The Telegraph details an 8 year study in which Jonathan Berger found that there is a rising preference for inferior recordings.

In addition, Rennie Pilgrem, a dance music producer, said he mixed his tracks while listening to them through iPod headphones to cater to the less refined tastes of today’s youth. “To my ears iPods are not even as good quality as cassette tape,” he said. “But once someone gets used to that sound then they feel comfortable with it.”

Some quick research shows that Pandora for the iPhone uses between 64kbps and 128kbps depending on the type of connection. Rhapsody uses 64kps and Last.fm uses 128 kps. None of these are close to CD quality.

While a large segment of the music purchasing population is not likely to be deterred by issues of sound quality, it can still constitute a potential problem for artists. Why invest time, money and effort creating and polishing a recording if a primary means of promoting your music is through low bit rate streaming services? Another potential issue arising from this is that this may prompt artists to begin forgoing such things as high quality mastering services? Ian Sheperd of Mastering Media Blog seems to think so.

However, it seems as though these problems are only a temporary phase. Low bit rates and use of the mp3 format seem to be a result of bandwidth issues . I can only see the demand for high bandwidth streaming content increasing in the future. Keep in mind that streaming mobile content in general is still a recent development and as consumer adoption increases, ISPs and mobile carriers will be forced to remain competitive and implement greater bandwidth to meet demands. Even if the demand from the general consumer is not in the form of high quality recordings, there will likely be a demand for games and movies. Once higher bandwidth technology is in place, music streaming services can capitalize on them and offer higher quality audio formats. But will they?

An example of a case where things are looking up is Spotify’s use of Ogg Vorbis . Another example is BandCamp, a website creation service for bands that offers a chance to upload lossless quality files in a variety of formats such as FLAC , Ogg Vorbis and Apple Lossless. For those to whom sound quality is not an issue, there is a also an option to download a lower quality mp3.

Technorati Tags: compression, Ian Sheperd, Loudness Wars, mastering, music distribution, sound quality

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 10:07 am and is filed under Loudness Wars, Music Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.