How much do the general public actually care about music production quality?

[Zexila]

Exactly, people react on music, there's too many mixing engineers, plugin company shills and GAS driven individuals among us, we kinda lost perception on things.

[cron]

There's been a huge explosion of lo-fi music over the last 2 or 3 years and I wonder where this fits in. Loads of kids looking for ways to make their music sound 'worse'. A side effect of that means the music translates through $7 earbuds and mobile phone speakers very well.

This is probably my favourite techno track of the last few years and it sounds like it was recorded in a bin.

https://soundcloud.com/patriciaaa/i-went-on-holiday

So I think listeners often do care about music production quality. It's just not necessarily 'good' quality.

[Distorted Horizon]

As long as the song is good and sounds good.. It's good. Doesn't need to be the most hifi or the most clean etc etc.. As long as the bass is punchy I'm happy

[vurt]

with some of the music I hear in shops on the radio, if that's whats selling, im not sure the general public care too much about music.

[Zexila]

with some of the music I hear in shops on the radio, if that's whats selling, im not sure the general public care too much about music.

Folks who listen to that kind of music do care about production and notice when something isn't over produced, thanks to our own award winning turd polishers a.k.a Grammy nominated mixing engineers who endorse all this plugins we buy.

[foosnark]

One example I can think of in the last decade was Burial's early work, which was knocked up in Soundforge from soundtracks, found sounds and samples from old vinyl, so didn't even see a DAW, but hit people on an emotional level, even though it was written, arranged and produced "wrong".

Good example. I think the conventional wisdom about "the right way" to do things is trusted a little too much and applied to too many things. What Burial did was striking partly because he didn't follow those rules.

Music can be art, fashion, furniture, and probably some other things as well. I lean toward the art side of it and am not too concerned with the general public, really.

[shonky]

[dark water]

I'm sure we can all name a few songs with very ropey music production quality decisions and, more pertinently, tunes which just sounded bad compared to what was around at their contemporary time.
However, I've always been unsure whether this song by MGMT was intentionally messed up to become a too-heavy distorted mix, or whether it was an artistic attempt to fit the 'messed up' nature of the entire song lyrics with a 'messed up sounding record'!



Memorable as a mix, but perhaps not for the right reasons.
Either way, it became a hugely popular hit.

[t3toooo]

People love distortion.Production wise it's a matter on how and where you place it and how it's done.
Just because you rarely hear it anymore in public,it doesn't mean this has changed over the last couple of years.

[dark water]

@t3t0000, to be clear, I have no problem with distortion and often use distortion hardware pedals and also software in my mixes.
How does that MGMT song sound to you in terms of audio quality? (Notwithstanding Youtube's own issues with added distortion, I bought that MGMT album and that one song is out of character in terms of heavy rough distortion applied to the whole mix compared to the others on the cd: it is a moot point as I said above whether this is intentional given the lyrical content).

[ghettosynth]

with some of the music I hear in shops on the radio, if that's whats selling, im not sure the general public care too much about music.

I think that as with all empirical questions, you have to ask, "compared to what." So when I hear people talking about examples like Burial, i.e., collections of samples taken from things already subjected to significant production effort and selected for their sonic footprint, I don't think that it's really an interesting example of trying to argue that people don't care about music production quality.

Ok, then beyond that, I don't think that it makes sense to think about these things in terms of individual outliers either. The question has to be asked in aggregate which, as with any observational study, is generally a challenging question to ask. You will not have examples really of the population of songs that did have success potential in terms of songwriting and arrangement but that lacked production. So, any attempt to use population of songs that were not successful and had low production value may simply be criticized as also being weaker songs.

Someone else pointed out earlier that it makes more sense to ask this question in the context of a common genre and I agree. One thing that DJs will tell you is that often older vinyl doesn't fit into the production common today and if you play a vinyl rip that the audience will notice. At least in that context, I think that you can get some aggregate sense of what a sample feels about production values. I don't think that the minutiae will matter as much as it matters to us, but I'm not ready to dismiss the perception of gross differences.

I think though that an interesting question is related to how our long term perception is impacted by the fatigue of low production values. I think that we can tune in to bad production for shorter periods of time but that it can become fatiguing. The interesting question, beyond validating that point, is whether that fatigue has an aggregate effect on record sales.

So back to compared to what, "Jagged Little Pill" is often cited as having weak production, but it was rather successful. Would it have been more successful with better production. I guess the same could be said for "Nebraska" as well. Sometimes the bad production adds to the charm, sometimes it just sounds bad. I don't think that it's a win for the industry to throw production values in the can, but it probably is good to be open minded to substance over form.

[t3toooo]

How does that MGMT song sound to you in terms of audio quality? (Notwithstanding Youtube's own issues with added distortion, I bought that MGMT album and that one song is out of character in terms of heavy rough distortion applied to the whole mix compared to the others on the cd: it is a moot point as I said above whether this is intentional given the lyrical content).

Given the release date 2007 i'm almost sure that hardware was used for the distortion.The vocals are not much distorted,i think it is a good production and the intention is well presented. Doesn't sound bad.
Distortion using software tend to sound much more ugly but software got better.

Anyhow distortion/saturation it is still an art.

I guess i'm sensitive to clipping,if it's too much i can easily spot it and that's what i don't like.
I do like a bit of it though.
If you download a "hot" produced EDM mp3 from Youtube (for educational use) from some of the successful producers the waveform often shows a gain up to +5 db,it doesn't stop at 0.
That kind of clipping is driving/distorting your sound card chip and makes it much louder than the music actually is.
So there is that too but that's not the clipping/distortion what you get when using a clipper.

Slowly the streaming services are going to normalize but it seems this affects only new content and not what's already there.
Plenty of ways to distort/saturate in a good and a bad way.

If a bad produced song is getting success it won't last long,that's for certain.

[deastman]

It’s like asking if the general public cares about the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing of their manufactured goods. As long as you don’t completely screw up in a glaringly obvious way, no one cares about the details.

[ghettosynth]

It’s like asking if the general public cares about the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing of their manufactured goods. As long as you don’t completely screw up in a glaringly obvious way, no one cares about the details.

But, at the same time, people will go on and on about, e.g., the build quality of macs, or the lines of this brand of TV or that. In the aggregate, some attention to detail there will be appreciated even if people aren't aware of the detail that they're actually appreciating.

[jancivil]

Many interesting points in this thread, and I particularly liked the one by KBSoundSmith.

However, at the risk of being a party pooper, a better question might be ''how much do we as musical producers at KVR actually care about how much the general public actually care about music production quality?''

OK, I really could not possibly care less. The whole thing about a middle way between good and... what is passable, has no moment to me. I make music for myself and I'm going to notice all the problems. So I make things to last.

I'm reminded of 'the general public voted for Hitler and likes Coldplay', here.