Neil Young speaks out about digital music – ‘die’.

Neil Young is one of music's veterans, a man who has released more albums than I can remember. He isn't a big fan of the digital era. He said MP3's should die. I can't disagree.

I remember when music was important, and the release of a new album really meant something. In the digital era, music is disposable and the sound quality? Vinyl is still popular, and there is a reason why.

Neil Young said that digitally compressed music, both the CD and MP3, should be destroyed. After reading the Steve Jobs biography, he clearly felt the same way, which is ironic because Apple make so much money selling compressed music files online. Some experts claim that AAC, the format that Apple use has better resolving capabilities, especially in the low frequency areas.

Young said “Piracy is the new radio, That's how music gets around.”

He was speaking to MTV news, and he told the reporter “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? “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.”

AllthingsD reported that he said “It's not that digital is bad or inferior, it's that the way it's being used isn't doing justice to the art, The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn't have to make that choice.”

We all know that MP3 data is compressed. This compression strips out some of the sound quality, regardless of the compression level used when encoding. The nature of the algorithm is to strip out data that the creators believed the person couldn't hear.

Young added “Steve Jobs as a pioneer of digital music, and his legacy is tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl. And you've got to believe that if he'd lived long enough, he would have done what I'm trying to do.”

Other artists have said similar things about compressed music, such as Brian May, Queen guitarist and Jon Bon Jovi, lead singer in Bon Jovi.

Kitguru says: Is compressed music really that bad? Do you long for the days of vinyl?

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