u/Wolfpack48

So this has been on my wishlist for a while now, but I wanted to talk a little more about it.

A little history. One of the exciting things about getting a new vinyl album back in the day was opening the shrink wrap, checking out the full album gatefold, admiring the 12x12 art, reading liner notes, lyrics or other notes on the record sleeve. On a boxed set, sometimes there was a full-sized booklet with multiple pages. There was always some cool little tidbit or interesting art associated with the album, and you would read all that stuff while you played the album for the first time.

This was all miniaturized with CDs, but there was still some creativity with those booklets as well, some thicker with lots of pages for lyrics, art, photos, and so on. A boxed set could still come with larger pamphlets.

Digital Booklets in iTunes were an admirable attempt to reproduce that experience digitally. You'd get a downloadable Adobe Acrobat file (pdf) in iTunes that would open to some really nice full-screen art, lyrics and liner notes on the desktop monitor. You can still get these booklets with purchases from the iTunes store.

The pros of the format:

• The art produced is high quality, high resolution, nicely reflecting the experience of the paper notes and booklets of old.
• It preserves the liner notes in the original state nicely replicating and preserving the original layout.
• For things like classical music it often details key information and history of each movement in the piece.
• The format of the booklet is pretty much up to the artist, it's very flexible. and can produce many booklet pages
• The booklet is printable for those who want to handle a hard copy

The cons of the format:

• It comes with all that Adobe Acrobat application "cruft" that frames the booklet -- it's annoying and distracting. No, we don't want to subscribe to Adobe.
• The Adobe controls for zooming and flipping pages are arcane, tailored to a mouse and keyboard.
• There is no way to change metadata on a digital booklet, making it extremely hard to organize alongside the music in the library.
• It only is available on Mac/PC, limiting its portability and basically chaining us to an old mouse and keyboard model.
• All of above make the booklets feel clunky and ultimately add up to a powerful disincentive to use them.

The initial idea of the booklets was great. My proposal for bringing them back would be to make them more accessible and manageable.

1. Find a way to remove the Adobe "wrapper" and display simply the content on screen without all the app nonsense
2. Bring the booklets to iOS, Android, tvOS and make it easy to access alongside the album. You should be able to play the album while the booklet is open for view. I can imagine a toggle between the album cover art and the full screen booklet.
3. On iOS and Android, enable touch screen controls like pinch-zoom and swipe to flip pages. Booklets should still be printable on Mac/PC. On tvOS, add simple controls to the remote for zoom and flipping pages.
4. On Mac/PC, allow booklet metadata to be edited similar to the way music file metadata is edited, though it could be a subset of fields (album name, genre, year). Digital Booklets need to be organized just like any other music track. This metadata should sync to all devices same as any other music file.

It'd be great to see these booklets back. They really are an essential aspect of an album, and a way for artists to reach out to their listeners in parallel to the music itself. There was a whole artistic statement packaged along with the music, and I would love to see these booklets come back as value added to the album. Not to mention preserving musical history.

One thing I did not note was whether the booklets should only come with an album purchase, but my feeling is that these should come along anytime an album is added to the library, whether or not the album was purchased in the iTunes store or added as part of an Apple Music sub. Love to hear thoughts on all this and thanks for reading this long post! :)

Was thinking about songs that were absolute smashes in olden times, and remembering how a real hook could just jump the charts and go crazy. Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith, Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, Firestarter by The Prodigy, New Years Day by U2, Ballroom Blitz by Sweet, Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, even Karma Police by Radiohead, Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Newer songs are maybe more complex and intricate, but I haven't heard an irresistible hook in ages. These songs were perhaps 'simple' but damn they could capture you.

What's the most recent irresistible hook recent you've heard? Do we need more hooky melodies?

EDIT: I think i should differentiate brash/risky hooks with “standard” songwriting craft hooks.All songs have some sort of hook. It’s just that some stand out as memorable, and others blend in with the wallpaper. I’m looking for more personality.

So I've come across a few albums recently where old tracks I had as mp3s were matched to m4a/aac but still sound pretty bad (e.g. ELO's Time). I've since re-added them as lossless ALAC to my library and they are sounding better over streaming. I'm wondering if some of those older matched/upgraded to aac files might have been matched to an old master that is lower quality? Maybe the CD master was not as good, or it hasn't been converted by the label yet? Just curious.

Just saw Rick Beato’s YouTube on musicians mostly coming from wealthy families these days and wondering what folks think. I do remember music seeming to come from more lower and middle class kids in the 60s up thru 2010 but I’m less in tune with that these days. Do musicians practice in garages and try to get local gigs any more? I think traditional route was to play a lot of smaller local bars, get noticed by an agent and then get a record deal. Does everyone just record at home now and go straight to the internet? I’d think a more organic route would be to play live as much as possible but maybe that’s old school these days. Could there be a revival of that and music coming from any demographic?

So, I loved these guys when I was pretty young for Reaper and Godzilla but sorta passed on them until I was a bit older, then fell out with them until my 30s when I finally saw a show. It was at a pretty small venue but they completely blew me away, and I went back and picked up everything by them. I've seen them 6 times now (which is I know pretty low by some BOC fan standards) and they put on a great show every time.

I love their deep tracks, and they have so many of them. Burnin' for You, Veteran of the Psychic Wars more known more as hits during the Heavy Metal film days, but Astronomy, Dominance & Submission, Subhuman, Flaming Telepaths, The Great Sun Jester, Teen Archer, After Dark, and on and on.

What is it about the band? I think the different songwriters are a big part of it, but I guess I like that they fly under the radar while at the same time do these great performances. Buck is a wizard on the guitar, but the whole band rocks. They deserve to be in the RRHOF, but maybe the under the radar aspect hurts them here. Curious to hear other thoughts!