Steve Jobs Awarded Posthumous Grammy

stop!theradio said:
Some of guys are so full of shit it's not even funny. Whether it was through his sensationalism skills, an idea he came up with on his own, or him sticking to his guns with a "stolen" idea - it doesn't matter - he changed many markets, plain and simple. To deny that is...well, blatant denial. And just stupid.
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Couldn't agree more. Just like at the next version of Windows. Windows is commercially the most successful piece of software in history and is really in no danger of dying anytime soon. But the vast bulk of work and changes in Windows 8 are in direct response to the success of Apple's mobile products, particularly the iPad. Who first invented the smart phone and tablet is irrelevant. iOS products have redefined computing, particularly in the consumer space.

Microsoft feels so threatened by iOS that it's making perhaps the riskiest and most controversial changes ever to a market dominant product to compete with Apple, changes that would have most assuredly not happened, at least not like the changes to Windows 8, had the iPad not been a phenomenal success.
 
Cube said:
Steve jobs was the antt christ and evil man that didn't do jack for anything since 1982 and all he did was make music sound like compressed mp3 crap and trick fucking apple hipsters that are dumb enough to buy his crap into buying horrible sounding .mp3 and mp4 formats music online.



you know rather than using the real fucking cd and ripping them your self on a mp3 player that did not suck as much as the ipod did.
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Yea, shame on him for giving people a legal way to purchase one song at a time instead of an entire album.
 
Cube said:
Steve jobs was the antt christ and evil man that didn't do jack for anything since 1982 and all he did was make music sound like compressed mp3 crap and trick fucking apple hipsters that are dumb enough to buy his crap into buying horrible sounding .mp3 and mp4 formats music online.



you know rather than using the real fucking cd and ripping them your self on a mp3 player that did not suck as much as the ipod did.
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Without him you will still be ripping CDs to any given format and complaining about how expensive CDs are.
 
Melon said:
Yeah, because iTunes and the iPod were what revolutionized the music industry? Puh-leeze, so sick of reading about this guy.
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+1000 to this.
All of these posthumous awards for Steve Jobs can blow me.
 
hahaha,

accolades to creative's nomad?
iTunes to blame for shitty mp3's?

you guys are so cute when you're confused and agitated by shit you don't fully understand

it's not your fault, at least I don't blame you, it's just that I think keiichi is forgetting he's talking to a group of people that weren't alive when tower records were around on every corner.
 
A lot of stupid butt hurt people on this forum...

Guess what? People were using MP3s LONG before iTunes and the iPod came out.
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People were yes... but it was people like you and me who took the time to sit around and search the internet long before it became common place. I remember downloading MP3s and burning my own custom CDs...then everyone at high school was just enamored with the fact that I was able to get a song before the CD was released in stores.

The time you are speaking of was when us nerds made up %75 of a small market for these things. Steve Jobs took that technology and made it so my grandmother could do it... he took it to a market that is so big now that us nerds make up less than %1.

...and before you say it... no it has nothing to do with people being stupid. Saying that somebody is stupid because they buy an apple product just makes you look like a butthurt moron... They chose apple because it works and they have better things to do with their time than "tinker" with different file formats and such.

Some of you need to get over yourselves, leave your mom's basement, and get out into the real world.
 
"Accepting this award means so much to me because music meant so much to him. He told us that music shaped his life...it made him who he was."

Yeah, a Jerk and a half.
 
jeremyshaw said:
"simply a convenient licensed tool," lol. I remember when people were expecting, knowing, Sony to create a new super walkman or Creative a new PMP and just kill off the iPod. No one in the tech industry gave any mind to iTunes back then, just as no one on this grumpy forum will now. Don't worry, as bad as the iTunes software is, no one has caught up, and I doubt anyone will.
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You're right, others have far exceeded apple itunes. Amazon especially.... quick, simple, and higher quality with easy one button song previews.
 
GoldenTiger said:
You're right, others have far exceeded apple itunes. Amazon especially.... quick, simple, and higher quality with easy one button song previews.
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Let's see

Quick: itunes is just as fast
simple: uh, yeah, see above
higher quality: no 256AAC>256mp3
Previews: 1:30>30

Nice try though
 
Also one more thing, if not for apple, you wouldn't be buying mp3s anywhere.
 
Ryan711 said:
higher quality: no 256AAC>256mp3
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Amazon's catalog is also encoded to wildly different standards. You really never know exactly what you're going to get when you buy from Amazon. This isn't usually a problem, but a point of interest, anyway.
 
iTunes (and digital music in general) pioneered the era of selling singles instead of albums, and using your iPod while multi-tasking, instead of listening to music for its own sake. All of this has caused record companies to compete to have the loudest music, with absolutely no consideration for dynamic range. Get any recent music and look at the waveform in Audacity and you will see that it doesn't look like the peaks and valleys of natural sound, it is a solid wall of noise. The loudness war was won in the 2000s, and Steve Jobs was at the forefront of it.

Why is he being awarded for this?

You can find more about the above by watching this very informative video by mastering engineer Bob Katz.
 
To add to the above, in my eyes, iTunes will deserve a Grammy if (hopefully when) it implements loudness normalization, so that all music has a similar volume, and the record companies don't compete to have the most solid wall of sound waveform possible.

The priorities are totally fucked up.
 
As the CEO of Apple, which has one of (if not the) the most influential online music stores, he could (and should) pioneer change, not just change for the sake of a bottom line, but one that will elevate music out of the shitty hole it's in right now (partly due to iTunes). Loudness normalization is a good way, but it's not a only way, and any way is better than what we have now. But he didn't.

Bottom line: the priorities of the American music industry are fucked up for giving this guy a Grammy, he doesn't deserve one.
 
XacTactX said:
As the CEO of Apple, which has one of (if not the) the most influential online music stores, he could (and should) pioneer change, not just change for the sake of a bottom line, but one that will elevate music out of the shitty hole it's in right now (partly due to iTunes). Loudness normalization is a good way, but it's not a only way, and any way is better than what we have now. But he didn't.

Bottom line: the priorities of the American music industry are fucked up for giving this guy a Grammy, he doesn't deserve one.
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I believe Jobs was trying to push for 24bit master quality music, but the combined fact that they're just too big to be able to bring a lot of music on a portable device, and, probably the most significant, 90% of people just don't care and are content with 256 AAC.
 
Yes, Neil Young recently claimed that he and Jobs were "working on" bringing lossless downloads via iTunes but died before that goal could be realized. I don't know if Young was being truthful about that or just bloviating: potentially the former, but possibly the latter.

That says nothing of loudness, but Jobs was apparently very passionate about the quality of music. Granted, he was apparantly a vinyl aficionado, so he couldn't have cared too much about quality, but he was at least pushing for the availability of archival-quality content. Not a bad thing, in my opinion.
 
Thanks for the info Ryan, this changes things. At least he cared about music quality to some extent (ironically while listening to vinyl himself). But I still wish he had done something to change the state of music as we know it. Keeping the producers from fucking up the dynamic range, in conjunction with 256k AAC, would give us 90% of the benefit of lossless music, music that is like the original master. I wish he would have gone after the 90% that is still sitting on the table, instead of being fixated on a pipe dream that would only help a handful of people.
 
You two are confusing me with your references to someone's love of vinyl as evidence that the person doesn't care too much about quality.

lossless downloads weren't up to Jobs. think about it.
 
mope54 said:
You two are confusing me with your references to someone's love of vinyl as evidence that the person doesn't care too much about quality.

lossless downloads weren't up to Jobs. think about it.
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Me too... vinyl is considered one of the best mediums.

And yeah, record companies didn't want lossless ;).
 
Well vinyl are good for pre CD era recording at least 1988 and lower. Most stuff after that will sound the same or worst on vinly. My friend have a 2500$ player with a 1000$ needle, said to me that it lspund better than it 300$ CD player well no s*** Sherlock lol

Nobody sit in front of a audio system and really listen to the music. Not since a good while. They did in the 70s or 80s but now... that's why people accept loosy as OK. For me a just listen to music as background noise or in the bus/subway so i don't really listen to it so iTunes is perfectly fine for me
 
I thought this sounded strange but then I checked and Leo Fender got a technical Grammy so I guess I can see the logic.

When solar flares take out computers and pro tools, and people start playing instruments again I guess we'll be awarding another one.
 
theres something to be said for being a master marketer

right now, iTunes is the #1 seller of music in the world. whats great about this, is that its much easier for an artist to get his music on there than it ever was to get music put on to cd's, books printed en masse, and then get them distributed to all the music resellers.

with iTunes, theres a lot of venues to just "get your music out there and start making money". this is huge because it cuts that worthless antiquated model of "labels" completely out of the music process. artists don't need labels anymore and iTunes had a huge part in that. for 2 grand you can record and master your own stuff, so you don't need a label for that. you can book your own shows via the internet. so you don't need a label for that either, and now thanks to iTunes, you don't even need those greedy bastards to overcharge you on an "advance" (which is usually a loan that carries interest these days, even for big artists).

being able to market that little music store to millions had a much bigger effect on music than you could even imagine.

speaking of marketing, I've worked for fantastic companies (and i work for one of these now) that offer great products, great customer service, at really great prices but somehow seem to drown because they don't understand how to market. working in a company like that is insanely frustrating when the boss doesn't see the value in buying pr, buying advertising, and buying exposure.

i can't hate on jobs for getting that right, and understanding great talent (johnny ives).

for a merit award, i really do believe, he actually earned this one fair and square.
 
christianw said:
theres something to be said for being a master marketer

right now, iTunes is the #1 seller of music in the world. whats great about this, is that its much easier for an artist to get his music on there than it ever was to get music put on to cd's, books printed en masse, and then get them distributed to all the music resellers.

with iTunes, theres a lot of venues to just "get your music out there and start making money". this is huge because it cuts that worthless antiquated model of "labels" completely out of the music process. artists don't need labels anymore and iTunes had a huge part in that. for 2 grand you can record and master your own stuff, so you don't need a label for that. you can book your own shows via the internet. so you don't need a label for that either, and now thanks to iTunes, you don't even need those greedy bastards to overcharge you on an "advance" (which is usually a loan that carries interest these days, even for big artists).

being able to market that little music store to millions had a much bigger effect on music than you could even imagine.

speaking of marketing, I've worked for fantastic companies (and i work for one of these now) that offer great products, great customer service, at really great prices but somehow seem to drown because they don't understand how to market. working in a company like that is insanely frustrating when the boss doesn't see the value in buying pr, buying advertising, and buying exposure.

i can't hate on jobs for getting that right, and understanding great talent (johnny ives).

for a merit award, i really do believe, he actually earned this one fair and square.
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I really agree with you on this one. I believe he did something great. I used to hate Apply and Jobs for a long long time until I realized what he did. Think about many great examples. This one is a little out of the ballpark but compare jobs to the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers brought the first flying plane into existence but other companies made it more accessible and now flying is the new standard. Jobs took music and the ipod and made it a standard. Granted the equipment was overpriced but when you make something as well as the ipod was made, you deserve to charge more for it.
 
ITT:

Lots of butthurt nerds looking with rose-tinted glasses on the days when downloading MP3s and playing them on shitty old DAPs made them the cool kids in school before Apple engineered and marketed digital music to the masses.

Fact: If it weren't for Apple, we'd still be buying media on CDs and DVDs, or at the very best purchasing overpriced DRM-loaded music directly from Sony et. all in proprietary file formats.

Apple pushed the industry to MPEG4.
Apple pushed the industry to higher bitrates.
Apple pushed the industry to DRM-free.
 
The only thing Apple did (Not Steve Jobs, but the company - Jobs WASN'T APPLE!) was create a market for the masses. The geeks were already using MP3's, downloading them, ripping CD's, and buying them legitimately online. Yes, there wasn't a huge market out there, but it was there. Apple brought it to the mainstream and made it popular. Car stereos, home audio receivers, and tons more make iPod ready features - not Zune ready. But, I don't credit Steve Jobs with that. I credit Apple. Not giving anyone else at Apple credit for it seems very wrong. Steve Jobs wasn't a one man team (although, he took credit for other peoples work since LONG ago, even at Atari). He's just the salesman.

Would Steve Ballmer get an award for Windows 8? Nope. He didn't make it, he was just the CEO of the company when others created something under his watch.

Apple took an idea and mass marketed it. The idea wasn't theirs, it wasn't new, it wasn't innovative. It was just marketed perfectly. It made people want it, and need it. And then, it got industry support to help it along.
 
Cobalt35 said:
What I'm more interested in is where Apple will be in 5 or 10 years time without Jobs at the helm.
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You need only look at Apple's patent litigation in Europe and the U.S. to answer that question. They really seem to be taking Job's "destroy Google" thing to heart.
 
Melon said:
Yeah, because iTunes and the iPod were what revolutionized the music industry? Puh-leeze, so sick of reading about this guy.
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Happyclam said:
Steve Jobs was actually very good at what he did.

He didn't innovate or come up with new things, but he did make it easier to use those things. One could argue that he is the poster boy for the way society is headed, which is not having to think about what you're doing because it's being done for you.

Everything Apple does, they keep control of, so that the user doesn't have to think about what's happening or why it's happening. They only have to do what they want and it works. And this is widely accepted because the populace as a whole because they want what's easiest for them, no matter the cost, because the cost isn't tangible. It's like the noose tightening around your neck without realizing it until you're already hung.
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I agree with this to an extent. I would modify it to say that Apple works because they make people think that they can do whatever they want and it will just work. I haven't met a person with an Apple product that hasn't had problems they can't explain. However, you don't regularly hear them complaining about those problems, even though they exist.
 
Ur_Mom said:
The only thing Apple did (Not Steve Jobs, but the company - Jobs WASN'T APPLE!) was create a market for the masses. The geeks were already using MP3's, downloading them, ripping CD's, and buying them legitimately online. Yes, there wasn't a huge market out there, but it was there. Apple brought it to the mainstream and made it popular. Car stereos, home audio receivers, and tons more make iPod ready features - not Zune ready. But, I don't credit Steve Jobs with that. I credit Apple. Not giving anyone else at Apple credit for it seems very wrong. Steve Jobs wasn't a one man team (although, he took credit for other peoples work since LONG ago, even at Atari). He's just the salesman.

Would Steve Ballmer get an award for Windows 8? Nope. He didn't make it, he was just the CEO of the company when others created something under his watch.

Apple took an idea and mass marketed it. The idea wasn't theirs, it wasn't new, it wasn't innovative. It was just marketed perfectly. It made people want it, and need it. And then, it got industry support to help it along.
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Umm hate to burst your idea of Apple during the second coming of Jobs, but. Everything Apple has done was because of Jobs. He deserves all the credit. He decided to switch to intel, he decided to make an iPhone, he personally negotiated with major record labels to get their content available on iTunes, he forced them to accept his pricing scheme. He released that silly ispeaker accessory, he decided to kill off their server line.

You simply cannot compare him to Ballmer. Apple wanted Jobs to come back and they gave him total control of the company. Ballmer inherited Microsoft. They weren't even sure they wanted him to lead the company in the first place.

Everyone who is someone in the Tech industry will say that Apple begins and ends with Jobs during his time as CEO.
 
Pretty sure music execs are really happy with Steve Jobs contribution in the decline of CD sales. That deserves a grammy for sure :D
 
InorganicMatter said:
ITT:

Lots of butthurt nerds looking with rose-tinted glasses on the days when downloading MP3s and playing them on shitty old DAPs made them the cool kids in school before Apple engineered and marketed digital music to the masses.

Fact: If it weren't for Apple, we'd still be buying media on CDs and DVDs, or at the very best purchasing overpriced DRM-loaded music directly from Sony et. all in proprietary file formats.

Apple pushed the industry to MPEG4.
Apple pushed the industry to higher bitrates.
Apple pushed the industry to DRM-free.
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DRM free, are you serious? MP3s were DRM free long before Apple came into the picture. If you think the MP3 existed only after the iPod was created, you're sadly mistaken.
 
Melon said:
DRM free, are you serious? MP3s were DRM free long before Apple came into the picture. If you think the MP3 existed only after the iPod was created, you're sadly mistaken.
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The point was that Apple forced the Music industry to go DRM free, not a bunch of nobodies. FYI people have been ripping/sharing/etc music well before MP3s existed.,
 
heatlesssun said:
Couldn't agree more. Just like at the next version of Windows. Windows is commercially the most successful piece of software in history and is really in no danger of dying anytime soon. But the vast bulk of work and changes in Windows 8 are in direct response to the success of Apple's mobile products, particularly the iPad. Who first invented the smart phone and tablet is irrelevant. iOS products have redefined computing, particularly in the consumer space.

Microsoft feels so threatened by iOS that it's making perhaps the riskiest and most controversial changes ever to a market dominant product to compete with Apple, changes that would have most assuredly not happened, at least not like the changes to Windows 8, had the iPad not been a phenomenal success.
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Just like how Apple responded to a lot of pther people's success with several features that weren't around until a year after other people had them in their products. It's simply the developmental cycle.

iOS products have hardly defined anything. It simply made it more accessible to the mass public, at the cost of privacy, cost, ability to modify, and ease of use beyond what Apple wants you to use. However, it is not the great achievement people make it out to be. It's not original. It's not unique. And just like everyone copies features from it, it copies from it's rivals as well. That's simply how things go.
 
Melon said:
DRM free, are you serious? MP3s were DRM free long before Apple came into the picture. If you think the MP3 existed only after the iPod was created, you're sadly mistaken.
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Are you joking, or did you not even read the context of my post?

Apple single-handedly pushed the big four labels to higher resolution and DRM-free music purchases. There was no way to acquire totally unlocked "you-own-it-free-and-clear" music from all major labels before the big iTunes Plus push.

By the way, since you keep going back to MP3s: MP3 is a shit codec and inferior in every single way to MPEG4-AAC. Who made the big industry push to bring attention to AAC and get it into mainstream use as an MP3 replacement? Oh yeah, right...that would be Apple, when they announced iTunes would be going exclusively MPEG4.

Happyclam said:
iOS products have hardly defined anything. It simply made it more accessible to the mass public, at the cost of privacy, cost, ability to modify, and ease of use beyond what Apple wants you to use.
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I hope you aren't alluding to Android being superior to iOS in the areas of privacy, cost, and ease of use. Especially privacy, seeing as how Google is one of the few companies out there that's a bigger big brother than Apple. :p
 
MajorDomo said:
At the Special Merit Awards portion of the Grammy presentations held on Saturday, Steve Jobs was presented a posthumous award for his contributions to the music industry. The award was accepted in his behalf by Eddie Cue, Senior Vice-President, and longtime friend of Jobs.
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If you mean his contribution of turning the music industry into a big lumbering pack of lawyers that blame piracy for their non-changing sales figures, and shutdown/sue anything that tries to revolutionize the industry (Megaupload), then yeah...well done Mr Jobs.
 
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