Neil Young has expanded on his recent comments lashing out at the sound quality of digital releases.
Neil Young isn’t happy. In a recent interview with MTV, the legendary songwriter made a number of controversial observations about digital releases. “If you’re an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 percent great, but the consumer got 5 percent, would you be feeling good?” he asked.
“I like to point that out to artists. That’s why people listen to music differently today. It’s all about the bottom and the beat driving everything, and that’s because in the resolution of the music, there’s nothing else you can really hear. The warmth and the depth at the high end is gone.”
Now the artist has expanded on his views. In an interview at the All Things Digital D: Dive Into Media conference, Neil Young said: “We live in the digital age, and we are – unfortunately – we only have 5% of the content we used to have in the mainstream. It’s not that digital is bad or inferior. It’s that the way that it is being used is not sufficient to transfer the depth of the art.”
Later in the interview, Neil Young revealed that he had actually met with Steve Jobs and discussed his concerns. “Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music,” Young said. “His legacy is tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl. And you gotta believe that if he lived long enough, he would have eventually done what I’m trying to do.”
Watch a portion of the interview below…
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