This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners' brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn't there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured. Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. Or, as Young told me, you are left with '5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.' Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. 'It's gotten to the point where he doesn't want to write music anymore.'Īt ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had wiped out the existing planet of sound. 'He hates what digital technology is doing to music,' most of all, writes David Samuels in today's NYT.

Neil Young, described here as 'crankier than a hermit being stung by bees,' loathes Spotify, Facebook, Apple, and Steve Jobs, who it must be noted, is dead. He also believes it's literally harming our minds. Young appears not only to believe that the quality of the music is poor, which few would argue in comparison to vinyl. The notoriously particular audio purist explains why he believes the internet is killing music through poor quality streaming, and how it's harming our brains. There's an epic interview slash feature in the New York Times with music legend Neil Young. Spotify may not be literally damaging our brains, but he's not entirely wrong, either.

Behind neil young spotify fraught with