The Daily Swarm

AP:

Rocker Neil Young plans to release his entire music archive on Blu-ray discs, a sign that the discs’ capabilities are building appeal among musicians as well as movie studios.
art.disc.afp.gi.jpg

Most of the Blu-ray discs manufactured so far have been used for high-definition movies.

Blu-ray discs hold much more data than DVDs, are easily updated over the Internet and offer better picture and sound quality.

Young revealed his plans Tuesday at a Sun Microsystems Inc. conference in San Francisco.

Santa Clara-based Sun makes the Java technology that gives Blu-ray discs their interactive menus and ability to accept updates over an Internet connection.

The first installment of Young’s archive will cover the years 1963 to 1972 and will be released as a 10-disc set this fall on Reprise/Warner Bros. Records.

Young said the archives will be released chronologically and include some previously unreleased songs, videos, handwritten manuscripts and other memorabilia, in addition to the high-resolution audio that Blu-ray technology is known for.

CNET:

“The recording business as we know it is changing. As an artist I try to remove myself from the business,” Young said. “I steer myself away from that…the commerce of distributing music will work itself out.”

He added: “We are trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as much as you want, we just don’t want our name on it.” People are taking music and doing whatever they want with it, he said. “The laws don’t matter. These are people in their bedroom doing what they want. It’s the new radio.”

Young said you can’t be “scared or paranoid about trying to survive.” Sure, when the digital revolution came along, it was “like getting hit with icepicks.” Now, he said, the ice is tiny, maybe a little like snow.

That said, he’s clearly not a fan of MP3 quality: “Putting on a headphone and listening to MP3 is like hell,” he said.

Of course, digital and multitrack recordings in the ‘80s didn’t sound so great either. The sound was shallow, he said. Now, he said, audio quality is climbing, though he still makes all his recordings in analog. “I plan to dumb my analog to the higher level so masses can enjoy it,” he said.