People are just beginning, it seems, to wake up to the fact that most digital music today doesn’t sound as good as it could. That’s because the most popular compression formats — including both the lingua franca MP3 standard and the standard Apple uses for its ITunes store — are “lossy”: To make the file size smaller, they trade off some loss of information (and therefore sound quality).

This latest round in the discussion seems to have kicked off with a Randall Stross column in the Sunday New York Times, but it dates back at least as far as Andrew Leonard’s early, groundbreaking coverage of the MP3 phenomenon in Salon. Stross points out that Apple’s choice of a good but still “lossy” compression standard for its music store means that — surprise! — you’re really not getting CD quality audio when you pay for your $9.99 album.

Continuing the thread, Tim Bray writes: “I used to think that if you were listening to music on headphones on a bus or train or plane or in a crowd, the MP3 lossage really didn’t matter much. But recently I’ve been listening to the Shure 3C phones, and it’s obvious that we really shouldn’t be ignoring these compression issues; in particular since lossless compression is available right here, right now.”

Well, yes. We have the technology! The problem here is not technical, it’s political, legal, financial.

The odd thing to me is that Stross’s column — which appeared in the Business section, after all — failed to mention the obvious: that the record labels are selling lossy versions of songs online because they still distrust the new medium, even when it is being used legally and when people are paying for their product. They’re more interested in propping up their sagging CD business than in quickly exploiting a new marketplace. So after years of dithering they figure, OK, we’ll sell our wares on the Net — but let’s only provide crippled versions. The crippling applies not only to Apple’s DRM schemes (lord knows whether you’ll still have access to that music, 10 years and three computers from now) but to the 128 kbps bit rate of the songs you buy. It was one thing to accept that tradeoff in 1998 when MP3s were underground, hard disks were smaller and most of the world was on dialup connections. Today, it makes no sense.

I don’t doubt that the DRM and bit-rate compromises were part of the horsetrading Steve Jobs had to engage in to get the record labels in the door in the first place. But it doesn’t make me want to sink my cash into purchases on iTunes. (At EMusic, by contrast — which I still subscribe to despite my hissy fit when they stopped offering unlimited downloads — I pay for music and receive it uncrippled by DRM and in a higher quality, though still not perfect, format.)

The prevalence of cruddy 128 kbps music in the online marketplace demonstrates that the music industry still doesn’t believe in online distribution: It still doesn’t trust us, even when we’re paying for the music.

The real issue for the recording industry has never been loss of profits due to piracy, because no one has ever proven that there is a direct connection between piracy and declining CD sales (in fact, quite the contrary). What the industry fears is loss of control. Individual consumers — like Andrew, who wrote a column about this last week — want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It’s what we’ve always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today.

There are audiophiles out there, of course, who turn up their noses at “CD quality” — which is itself “lossy” compared with higher-quality audio formats. But meanwhile, the vast majority of music lovers who are reasonably content with their CDs aren’t getting their money’s worth when they buy online.

So remember: when you rip your own CDs to MP3, use at least a 160 kbps rate, or higher if you’ve got a big disk, or a “Variable Bit Rate” if your ripper supports that. The added file size is negligible given how cheap storage is today, but your ears will thank you. And the next time you think of buying music from an online store, tell them you won’t settle for anything less.

If you were reading this blog earlier this year you may recall my recently kindled enthusiasm for the music of The Mountain Goats. This enthusiasm has not waned as I have explored the back catalog of this “band” of (mostly) one. It has, if anything, waxed.

As I wrote about my delight in this discovery I uncovered the existence of kindred spirits here at Salon, including our jack-of-all-trades editorial operations director Max Garrone, who swears by “The Coroner’s Gambit,” and our Renaissance-man IT support manager, Jim Fisher.

Perhaps you’ve read some of Jim’s in-depth reporting for Salon on technology and the environment, or some of his great poems that we’ve published. (I’m not the only one who thinks highly of his work; he has recently won a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.)

Anyway, I learned that last year Jim had written an in-depth critical essay on the music and lyrics of the Mountain Goats and John Darnielle. For various reasons the essay never got published in Salon. It is perhaps of more interest to those already hooked on this work than those not yet familiar with it. But the piece deserves a home on the Web, so I’ve published it in this blogspace, here.

Jim’s piece was written months ago, at the time of the Mountain Goats’ release of “Tallahassee.” Earlier this year saw the release of “We Shall All Be Healed.” I’m not sure Jim agrees with me on this, but I think that album fulfills the prediction at the end of his essay of an “all-studio masterpiece” from this artist, much of whose previous work was recorded direct-to-boombox.

Tonight I heard parts of Terry Gross’s interview with Neil Young. I’ve been listening to Young’s music since I was young myself. As an 11-year-old, in 1970, I’d bop around my room to those endless jams on “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.” As a 14-year-old I would cut phys. ed class and hang around outside the gym singing the lyrics to beloved obscurities like “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” I finally heard Young play live in the late ’70s on the “Rust Never Sleeps” tour. But in all those years I’d never before heard an interview with him.

The show is a shambling, illuminating ramble through the mind of this amazing musician, who belongs right up there with Dylan and Reed as a sort of deathless chthonic spirit of popular music. Here is the exchange with which it begins:

Misfitting becomes him well enough.

It’s been a long time since I posted on music. Last year I spent much of my limited listening time close to home, with old familiars like Frank Black, Tobin Sprout and Guided By Voices.

I’m finally out and about again exploring some new bands. My find of the moment is the Mountain Goats — a “group” that seems largely the work of one guy and his pals, though the current album, “We Shall All Be Healed,” features a band on many tracks. John Darnielle sings in an adenoidal clip — as if you took the voices of either of the Johns from They Might Be Giants and stre-e-e-tched it high and wide. The full-band tracks take tried-and-true Velvet Underground riffs and layer sharp, angry poetry over them, half spiritual yearning and half cold-water-in-the-face reality. The solo acoustic tracks push that poetry at you without the rhythm section’s consolation, in simple threadbare grace. (One song, “Mole,” begins, “I came to see you up there in intensive care — they had handcuffed you to your bed,” with the narrator repeating the chorus: “I am a mole, sticking his head above the surface of the earth.”) Sacred and mundane get thrown together even in the song titles, like “Palmcorder Yajna,” which weds its obscure name to an almost unbearably catchy tune.

Now I need to go explore the rest of the Mountain Goats catalogue, which, from what I’ve read, seems to feature a lot of solo-acoustic recordings made on a whirring boombox in a bathroom. If they’re half as good as “We Shall All Be Healed,” I’ll be happy.

Bonus find: If you loved the Feelies as I did, you’ll be glad to know that you can now get specially custom burned CDs of Feelies spin-off band Yung Wu’s solo full-length effort, “Shore Leave,” here. Different vocalist, same great guitars — and cool covers of Brian Eno obscurity “Big Day” (that bouncy song about Peru from his collaboration with Phil Manzanera) and Neil Young classic “Powderfinger.”

UPDATE: “Palmcorder Yajna” appears to be available as a free download on Amazon. Beware — it’s one of those songs that plants itself in your brain and stays there.

I found myself waiting on a long line at Fort Mason Friday night, one that stretched from the doors of the Herbst Pavilion all the way out the Fort Mason parking lot gate. You don’t often see a crowd that size at the warren of funky non-profits and arts groups. A man wandered up to the line at one point and asked, a little incredulously, “Are all you people waiting for the Annie Leibovitz exhibit?”

No way. We were waiting to hear Brian Eno, who was giving a free talk to kick off a lecture series by the Long Now Foundation. But the makesift lecture hall proved all too small for the huge crowd, so a lot of people had to listen to the talk piped in over a PA to the bigger room next door. You could mill around and look at Leibovitz’s homages to ephemeral celebrity while listening to Eno talk about the value of taking a 10,000 year view.

In the mid-1970s, when Eno’s still-amazing solo albums “Here Come the Warm Jets,” “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” and “Another Green World” shaped my teenage musical imagination, an Eno lecture might not have filled a small broom closet. So as I waited Friday night — while distinguished ushers Danny Hillis and Kevin Kelly handed out programs and warned us we might not get in — a part of me was thinking, who cares if I get in? I’m just glad to live in a time where Brian Eno has found a following, and a place where he is a bigger draw than Annie Leibovitz.

But I’ve grown a little old for that sort of in-group pride, and besides, the topic of Eno’s talk was one that deserves mass distribution beyond the narrow circles of the Bay Area art-and-science-crossover world. If you haven’t already encountered the Long Now perspective, this essay by Eno does a pretty good job of recapitulating his Friday talk.

Lit from below just a little demonically, Eno explained the Long Now Foundation’s aim of expanding our frame of reference in thinking about the future: What if we were thinking not just about tomorrow or next year or even “the rest of my life,” but about the next 10,000 years? (One thing the foundation does in all of its literature is add a zero in front of the year — for instance, it’s 02003 right now — to “avoid the Y10K bug” and keep that longer time span in the front of our minds.)

As a longtime devourer of science fiction, I’m probably a bit of a pushover for this vision. I remember reading Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” as a 14-year-old and savoring the sense of temporal vertigo its ever-expanding timelines induced.

But there are perfectly pragmatic and down-to-earth rationales for the Long Now idea — not just in the obvious ways, like fostering a (literally) more conservative treatment of natural resources and the environment, but in personal, psychological terms. While the kind of long-term thinking Long Now promotes certainly encourages activism today, Eno argued that it also “takes the pressure off” individuals — “it makes you slightly less precious and tight about your own time on earth.” Long Now projects, like the clock for which it is most famous, are inevitably collaborations across time between people today and future generations.

Eno outlined four misapprehensions of the Long Now ideal: “The Realist” sneers, “Do you really think you can predict the future?” (They’re not trying to predict anything.) “The Pessimist” snaps, “”What bloody future?” (”If he’s wrong,” Eno argued, “it would have been a good idea id we had done something about it.”) “The Optimist” takes a Panglossian, passive approach: “Everything is working out fine,” so why do anything? Finally, “The Designer” believes that “we’re smart enough to design the future for you — we can create a perfect world.”

Each of these responses misses the basic point here, Eno said — one of “encouraging a habit of thought”: “We are building the future, whether we like it or not. We can do it with our back to it, or we can turn around and look.”

For many people, religion provides a moral framework for this long view — but if, like me, you are simply not a believer in any organized religion’s tenets, the Long Now argument makes a great deal of sense. I’ll look forward to the rest of this series.

I’ve written rapturously in the past about the Emusic service, for which I’ve willingly paid for many many months, based on its high quality of unusual music and its smart policy on downloads.

Well, all good things must pass, and now it seems that Emusic has been acquired by new owners who’ve decided that it should become just like all the other online music services, limiting the amount of music users get for their money. It’s not all bad news; it sounds like Emusic will continue to offer real MP3s rather than DRM-crippled files, for instance. But the real value of the service as a place where you could get turned on to musical obscurities in abundance looks like it will vanish.

It’s tough to run any sort of business online these days and I assume Emusic is doing what it has to do to stay afloat. But I’ll probably be canceling my subscription, and something tells me a whole lot of other people are going to do the same.

My recent post comparing the RIAA to Richard Scarry’s “Pie Rats” occasioned some vigorous debate in the comments, along with a couple of interesting emails: Jeremy Schlosberg, who did some writing for me years ago when I edited Salon’s technology coverage, wrote in to point me to his Fingertips site, which catalogues freely and legally available MP3s: “Something that tends to get overlooked whenever the MP3 situation is debated is the fact that there are actually an amazing number of free and legal MP3s available online for discriminating music fans, and it’s not all amateur crap either. Discussion tends to focus on the illegal stuff people trade or the legal stuff people are tentatively starting to buy, but there is a rich middle ground of free and legal music that’s worth knowing about as well.”

And Shuman Ghosemajumder emailed to tell me about his Open Music Model proposal. Many readers may already be familiar with Terry Fisher’s proposal for a royalty system for file sharing. These ideas and others like them floating around are evidence that the RIAA’s critics are not simply saying “to hell with the artists” or “to hell with business models.” We’re saying, online distribution — and redistribution — of music makes sense and is here to stay. So what can we do now?

There’s more good stuff on this over in Salon Technology: a point/counterpoint on the RIAA lawsuits, and some letters, and some more letters.

My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled “Pie Rats Ahoy!” (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)

I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers — and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry’s price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.

As the RIAA slaps lawsuits on 12-year-old girls, while industry executives admit to the Wall Street Journal that they are unable to keep their own kids from trading MP3s, one of the most ludicrous figures being tossed around is the amount that the industry has supposedly lost thanks to piracy. A conservative guess by an analyst in the New York Times placed this number at $750 million. Music industry lobbyists have put the number in the billions.

These numbers are reminiscent of the old software-industry complaints about software piracy: They assume that each illegal copy of a program or a music file represents the loss of a sale — that if the alternative of piracy were not available, most or all of the pirated stuff would have been bought fair and square at full price. (By this logic, every time Free Republic members rip off Salon Premium articles and post them on their site, Salon could claim that every single Freeper reading them represents a loss of a $35 subscription fee.)

This is self-serving nonsense. First of all, it treats the digital realm — in which each additional copy costs essentially nothing to make and does not limit the original’s availability to its owner — as if it were the physical realm, where copying carries costs and stealing involves depriving the original owner of his goods. Even more importantly, it ignores the essentially transitory nature of much or most file-sharing — which music lovers use to sample music, to see whether they like it, and frequently just to listen once or a handful of times. Each download does not and cannot represent a lost sale. But the record labels have an incentive to artificially overstate the size of the pie-slice that online piracy has cut out, and they have done so with all the scurrying zeal — and comical ineffectiveness — of Richard Scarry’s rats.

I get all my online music these days legally from the great Emusic service. But back in the days of Napster I used the software to listen to bands I’d heard about and see whether I liked them. I bought more CDs as a result. This year for the first time in my life I have consciously decided to cut my music purchases way back. I won’t support the pie rats!

Haven’t had time to test drive the new Apple music store. I’m glad that Jobs & co. seem to have broken the logjam in getting the big labels to find a reasonable way to distribute their music online.

The one drawback of the Apple service many users have complained about is the absence of a wide selection of independent and alternative music. I can imagine the organizational explanations for why this is, and I’m sure it’s not Apple’s preference — after all, in the world of mainstream personal computing Apple has always been an “alternative.”

Still, it underscores how happy I continue to be with the Emusic service, which I’ve now had for a good year and a half. $10 a month; unlimited downloads without annoying DRM mechanisms. Since in any month I find at least a half-dozen CDs I want, that’s a bargain; plus I get to sample lots of artists without having to negotiate stupid streaming-only limitations. If your musical taste runs to obscurities anyway, this is one of the best bargains on the Net.

So you’re the chief censor for the Chinese Communists, looking at the Rolling Stones’ set list for the forthcoming tour (drawn from their “40 Licks” hits collection) and deciding which songs Mick and Keith can or can’t play. Do you –

(1) Ban the incendiary “Street Fighting Man” and the nihilistic “Sympathy For the Devil,” songs with genuinely subversive and violent messages?

or:
(2) Ban “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Beast of Burden” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” because they’re somehow lascivious (though lord knows why they are considered more objectionable than other Stones hits like “Under My Thumb”)?

China chose door number two. I guess trying to fathom how the censor’s mind works is a hopeless undertaking.