I normally wouldn't send you an email so soon after a Masterdisk newsletter, but I wanted to touch base about a topic that has become very big in the audio world in the past month: Mastered for iTunes.
Mastered for iTunes is a perfectly normal development in the audio industry. For every other format created since the 60's mastering engineers have always come up with ways of helping producers create the ultimate experience. There are some historical facts to consider here.
Early digital encoders were quite simply bad in all respects. It was so bad that many mastering engineers gave up any hope that they could possibly sound good. The attitude of "don't use mp3 files -- they aren't good enough" is pretty much what you heard from mastering engineers. And what happened was the young music producers heard that and thought "well, our release format is mp3 - if mastering engineers say the format is awful, I'm not going to bother using a mastering engineer." They began to feel that mastering was not worth the time and expense and a generation of producers asked "why can't we just crush it ourselves? We can."
But times change, and technology along with it. Digital encoders have improved. And internet bandwidth recently went through a very quiet revolution. Download speeds passed the 1meg/sec mark for an average consumer and the portable device now has a lot more memory for audio, video, and apps. But it has taken the pro audio camp a little while to react. The consumer has started looking for quality over quantity and the future of music over the internet is looking better.
The sales figures make clear that Apple's AAC format is currently the dominant format in the marketplace. CD sales continue to fall, and though vinyl has had a miraculous resurgence, it's a small fraction of the pie. Basically, music producers, labels, and artists are adjusting to the new reality on the ground, and have found that it's time to recognize that the market's dominant format -- AAC -- has unique mastering needs, just as CD, and tape, and vinyl did before.
Though there's some confusion in the press, Mastered for iTunes isn't just a promotional opportunity. The surge is being driven by Apple, but the concept would apply to any digital format, just as it did for analogue, optical, and magnetic formats before. The bottom line is that experienced engineers can -- and do -- make noticeably better sounding AAC files than you get using the standard, automatic encoder.
We compose and produce music to get people to react, to feel, emote, move, think, love, grieve, relate to each other and learn more about who we are. As lifelong mastering engineers we are the stewards of this amazing resource and personally I am thrilled to hear that the music business is taking a serious look at quality digital distribution.
So Mastered for iTunes isn't really anything new. It is fundamentally exactly what we have done for years as new formats have emerged. We train ourselves to be experts in the intricacies of any new format, and when there is sufficient interest and value, we sell our services to those that want to sound the best they possibly can.
