Someone has finally done it: a web app that embeds the SNL 'More Cowbell' skit into any song you upload.

Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic

Whether you know it or not, that compact disc you just copied to your MP3 player is only partially there.

With the CD on its way out and computer files taking over as the primary means of hearing recorded music, the artificial audio of MP3s is quickly becoming the primary way people listen to music. Apple already has sold 100 million iPods, and more than a billion MP3 files are traded every month through the Internet.

• [ MP3: Just because it's digital, doesn't mean it sounds good.] (podcast link illustrating the degradition in sound quality as file sizes are reduced) 

But the music contained in these computer files represents less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs. In its journey from CD to MP3 player, the music has been compressed by eliminating data that computer analysis deems redundant, squeezed down until it fits through the Internet pipeline.

When even the full files on the CDs contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording, these compressed MP3s represent a minuscule fraction of the actual recording. For purists, it's the dark ages of recorded sound. 

• read the whole article here 

Have you noticed some of your CDs sound terrible? Welcome to the loudness wars. Modern mastering is sucking the life out of music.

'The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry's tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to create a sound that stands out from others.

However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD is at a fixed level, the overall loudness can only be increased by reducing the dynamic range. This is done by pushing the lower level program material higher while the loudest peak sounds are either destroyed or severely diminished. Certain extreme uses of compression can cause distorting or clipping the waveform of the recording.'

The trend of increasing loudness as shown by the waveform image of a song mastered on CD four times since 1983.

 "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

Sound familiar? Read on:

• http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/xl/2006/09/28cover.html 

'The Death of High Fidelity' is another good article, from Rolling Stone, of all places...

• http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity/print 

 And another excellent article called The Death of Dynamic Range

• http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.htm 

Wikipedia has a good article  on the loudness wars:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war 

If the Loudness War struck the art world...

• http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/mv/msg/4286/0/0/0/ 

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

 By Chris Anderson, From Wired Magazine.

 Highly recommended reading to understand the changing world of the music industry:

• http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html 

• He also has a blog devoted to this topic. http://www.longtail.com/