By Iman Hersi
Apple Music, formerly known as iTunes, said it best. It was the on-shuffle era of music: Kelly Clarkson and 50 Cent, Taylor Swift and Limp Bizkit, The Strokes and LMFAO. The charts were absolutely on point. The melodic mash-up of genres and melding of subcultures and aesthetics helped shape the replay playlists that I listen to today, usually while working out or cramming for exams.
I’m an Apple Music loyalist. I’ve shared the same account since middle school, and it’s been amazing to see how my music taste has grown and evolved. It is a mosaic of every song I ever liked, every awkward phase I’ve had, and every scene I dabbled in.
Somewhere around 2019, iTunes had another rebrand to compete with Spotify, and Apple Music and iTunes melded into one behemoth. Enter Dolby Atmos. Better known as spatial audio, this need for parasocial intimacy takes away the key imagination and closeness that comes from the music itself when you sit down and listen to it through a CD player on the ground, blasting it in the car. Hot Virginia air lingers, and with a cracked iPod touch, you’re careful not to let the glass pierce your fingers and make you bleed onto your jeans as you stare out the window wistfully at the horizon.
Everything in Transit, an album I’ve listened to and owned on CD since middle school, got remastered by Maverick Records (parent company Warner Brothers) a couple of years back. A quick cash grab marketing off mid-pandemic 2000s-emo nostalgia, it was then remastered again by Apple Music. You can’t really hear the little bits and pieces of the album that made it an imperfection, being hastily recorded by the lead singer of Something Corporate, who was then suffering from a bout of leukemia. It sounds eerily polished through the power of Dolby Atmos and artificial intelligence. The guitar tuning, laughter, and chuckles are completely erased, and it’s been done time and time again to many albums—across countless genres, and across multiple decades. Effectively reducing dynamic range and the personal feeling that comes with diving into an album, almost like a summer swim, it turns the water shallow for a cash grab, finally sucking it out with a giant straw by random executives in suits.
Digital music was still a no-man’s land in the heyday of the 2000s. Alternative and indie rock, as well as the remastering and loudness wars, took a backseat to the greater music scene. Loudness wars of 2000s-streaming services turned a lot of songs down produced in the heyday of the loudness war. Think “Underneath The Cork Tree,” by Fall Out Boy, and Usher’s music, which was produced at the highest possible volume so it could be listenable by both iTunes, Limewire, mp3, and CDs, all to be blared by surround sound with speakers a la Pimp My Ride.
On the other hand, you had the remastering wars going on. Remastering was used for The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, officially released by parent companies to adapt music and make it timeless. Think mono, to stereo, to CD, then mp3: each transition was meant to make older music more listenable. However, there has been an oversaturation in the market of remastering analog to CD, mp3, and Itunes. Any album 10 years or older is fair game, which is kind of insane. Dolby atmos, however, is the wild west, and any album, if it falls under the big three music distributors, may have a Dolby atmos version that completely butchers the sound. From Future, to Marina and the Diamonds, to The Neighborhood, any album popular enough can be unnecessarily touched by Dolby atmos.
The Smiths sound too polished, too modern for the time their music was created: back in the age of Walkmans. So does Teenage Dream—meant to be listened to by an Ipod shuffle and half-working earbuds that you would twist to get the right sound, Atmos makes it sound like a sterile recording. One can hardly hear the music beyond the tuning done by artificial intelligence, making some voices inaudible, some crossfades odd-sounding, and ultimately, too futuristic for the time the music was released. It especially sticks out with 2000s music, representing a partial evolution and a part of the loudness wars. It works for older albums by the Beatles and Pink Floyd, which need to be remastered in order to keep up with modern technology, but one or two remasters is enough. It’s almost asinine to see seven versions of the Yellow Submarine available for listening, each one worse than the last. Putting the master into a limiter and reducing the graininess removes the charm, but makes it easier to play it on aux or on a cd player. Some albums were released in the age of Dolby Atmos (2021) and work well with it, such as Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft. However, anything prior to Dolby Atmos mixes with it like oil and water.
Dolby Atmos in a way is similar to the remastering wars that occurred with music popular during the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. To take a sound and to sanitize it for whatever technology is popular right now is what Apple Music and remastering software has done best, similar to the compilation CDs of an artist’s greatest hits that gets rereleased by a parent company of their label once they die or fade into obscurity.
The condensing of a discography to radio-popular tunes and the loss of muffled noise or outdated instrumentals whether made with a band in a recording studio or FL studio software, for a sort of concert amphitheater surround sound for songs that were just meant to be played on a record player or going on a run with half-working earbuds. When it comes to the debate of remaster versus not, I’ll take the latter.