On 26/07/2011 23:34, tronbros wrote:
The main difference in all this is that within rock and pop you have a definitive recording, be it Strawberry Fields or Nights. Nobody really wants to hear a copy, there is no score, it was captured once in a particular way.
I dunno. It depends on the band and their
modus operandi. Some of the more adventurous might record the song in the studio but then radically rework it live, or in a radio session, or whatever. Depressingly, rather a lot tried to relive their studio effort by playing a thinner version live but just beefing it up with a couple of thousand watts behind them. That's where live albums tend to fall over big time.
Classical music is realised through the interpretation of scores, modified endlessly by the vision of conductors and the sonority of individual orchestras.
...and of the concert hall acoustics, of course. The differences between one performance and the other tend to be pretty subtle though, maybe because there is a lot more 'information' in a symphony than in a song.
Therefore the audience for pop will diminish as you move away from the time of it's original creation. Okay, the Beatles defy this theory a little.
They defy it a lot. What will help is the sheer amount of the product about, physically. Michael Jackson will last without a doubt because there is just so much of his music everywhere. I suspect it will have a lot less to do with actual quality and have more to do with quantity.