|
Audio Reduction
To save costs, the music industry is using MP3s to deliver songs to radio stations via email. They're called "reference" copies, but they often end up on the air because it's the fastest way to get hold of a hot new title. I'll confess: we do it ourselves to help stations get a jump on new music. We emailed MP3s of the recent Jimmy Buffett release to country clients and Counting Crows to rockers. Our intention, of course, is to provide a temporary copy until the CD version is available to load on the hard drive. Technical guru Jim Loupas tells me this is a bad practice and that it's about to get worse. Sony Music in Nashville has decided to service radio MPEG-1, Layer 2, files at 384k (compared to an MP3's size at just about one meg). "This is easily less than half the data available from a CD," Jim told me. "It's like having a photo, not a real person. There's just too little data in the file.". Larry Pareigis at Sony told a PD that their MP1s will "sound great." That's probably true for a reference copy—a way to hear the song and evaluate it—but what happens when it gets on the air? Loupas knows audio, especially radio audio chains. He's invented processing equipment and developed consoles that the industry considers standard. That prompts him to say this about MPEG technology: "This is reduced data. Coupled with IBOC data reduction, hard drive data reduction, STL data reduction, and processing, this means a reduced-quality product for your radio stations." Loupas expects other labels to follow suit and worries that it "trades off the quality of your product for record company cost savings and convenience." He recommends that we continue using CDs and stay away from what he calls "schemes that reduce the quality of the music product that you put on the air on your radio stations." To reach Jim:
Return to Main Page. This article first appeared on July 12, 2004, in Shane Media's Tactics Trend Letter, and is reproduced here with permission. To subscribe to the Shane Media Tactics Package, email Ed Shane at or go to Shane Media's Home Page.
|
Last updated 7/19/04
©2004 James Loupas Associates Inc