Music vs. Music?

Will music from the 00's be any different from the music from 2011-2020?

How will it change? 

How will technology advance, stay the same, or regress?

Some of these questions have different answers, others have very deep ideas behind them.

Music has already drastically changed from the 00's to now, from the way it is made to the way it is consumed. In the 00's, music production was just beginning to switch to digital from analog while the consumer was switching to a different medium.

In this video, Trina Shoemaker gives a short description of analog vs. digital. She suggest that they are technically the same. Analog is the type of wave and digital tries to copy that into the computer. Analogous waves are a continuous wave that the ear hears, where the digital copy are a series of snapshots pieced together to make a wave.

Why is this relevant to music today? Do you remember the days of walkmen and vinyl?  In those days, there was no digital interface. You had the studio and your board and everything was recorded on tape. The process was from the microphone to your tape into the board for you to mix the channels accordingly then to a machine that would write the vinyl tracks.

Now-a-days, the process is slightly different. In digital recording, the process is from the studio through the preamps, into the recording software where you mix and edit the sound using an interface similar to the old analog boards and after you are pleased with a mix you export to a CD, .mp3, .mp4, or other various forms of audio.

On a personal note, I enjoy recording via both mediums. On one hand there is analog where you have the true sound of the instruments and only have five options to alter the sound; four EQ adjustments and an overall volume fader. On the other hand we have digital where there is essentially an endless amount of possibilities of what you can do with the sound such as auto-tune, adjust the faders, EQ, compressors & limiters, the list goes on and on.

How might this change? I am firm believer that both methods will persist. If you forget where you come from, you don't know where you are going. If the industry forgets about analog recording and completely relies on digital recording what happens to the local studios that have not switched over? What happens to the true fans of analog, they aren't going to stop listening to music.

There is a distinct difference between something recorded on tape vs. completely digital. It's the moment of joy when you drop the needle and here that famous "record player scratch" versus the feeling you have when you click  >>|  on your iPod. Something feels different emotionally and without both mediums of recording available, we will lose one.