Peter Gabriel: “In terms of quality, music has gone back”

Genesis frontman speaks out about negative aspects of the internet on the music industry

Tom Porter, Fri 13 Jun, 11:34 am BST

Peter Gabriel

Former Genesis frontman and digital music pioneer Peter Gabriel has spoken out about some of the negative aspects of the internet on the music industry - naming low quality MP3s and "too much choice" as the main offenders.

It's probably no coincidence that Gabriel is currently involved in two projects - The Filter (an online discovery tool that filters music and movies according to your tastes) and Lossless Sound - a joint venture with speaker makers Bowers & Wilkins to supply a CD-quality, uncompressed album every month online.

"I think everyone thought that it (the internet) was going to democratise the music business, but it's done less of that than we would have hoped. A lot of the artists are losing one of the central sources of their income, i.e. record sales, they need to become smarter in building their own database as a means of accessing their own fans and learning and getting the feedback from their fans", said Peter Gabriel to Reuters.

"An MP3 has become the sort of new standard and it's a giant step backwards. Whereas in television now most of us are getting used to wide screen or high definition, and that's gone forwards in terms of quality, music has certainly gone back".

"I think in a world in which we are drowning in choice and have access to everything, we are going to rely more and more on good filtering".

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User comments (1)

alvaromrocha

12 weeks ago.

Peter Gabriel is hitting the nail here, indirectly speaking of what's of most value to artists today - getting people's attention, which in the midst of so much noise is increasingly harder.
As far as quality, I perform a simple test many times at my home studio, before guests and trained ears - a source at 24bits 96 khz, and then the same source at 192kbps (16 bits, 44.1khz, properly dithered and resampled).
No one can hear the difference, and the source is usually a mix that covers all territory. However, there's a strange phenomenon, if I leave the mp3 playing for long, once I get back to the HighDef source, they "feel" a difference, I put the mp3 back on - nope, sounds the same.
But they are right, it's more "felt" than "heard", and only when subject for some time to the mp3 and changing in a moment to HighDef, but for some reason, the brain adapts, and the mp3 is enough again.
My opinion is that the mp3 version "feels" sharp and matte whereas the high-resolution feels silky and brilliant - notice I use the word "feels", because I'm one of those who can't hear a difference too, around above 160-192 kbps, assuming you're using a good encoder and not "joining the stereo" or whatever encoding trickery to further shrink the file.
Back to Peter Gabriel, perhaps "filtering" will help people find what they like, but it has to be very smart, and the ultimate filter needs to have a heart, and the filter needs to find those things too, in the midst of all the garbage with excelent SEO strategies.
Kind Regards,
AMR
http://www.alvaromrocha.com

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