Joe Duggan (Reporter)
MADRID is fighting back in the battle of Spain’s summer music festivals as Neil Young and the Prodigy head to the capital for Mad Cool.
The festival, in its inaugural year, will also feature Jane’s Addiction, Caribou, Stereophonics and Band of Horses between June 16-18.
The announcement comes a week after Barcelona’s Primavera Sound unveiled its stellar summer line-up, featuring LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead.
Mad Cool Festival will take place on the banks of the Manzanares river where there is space for more than 45,000 people.
The site at Caja Magica will have special five stages installed, three of them covered.
No time for Neil Young since he withdrew his music from Spotify, on the spurious grounds of poor sound quality. Something that is good enough for Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the Stones and endless other artists.
He is being pompous, precious and snobby,
stefanjo,
you obviously are content to listen to Lo-Fi but many of us are’nt. Every time young ones listen to my system they are shocked and realise they are being ripped off big time. Neil Young has made some fantastic music – listen to Live Rust on vinyl – that’s real Rock n Roll – as it’s meant to sound, if you had a half way reasonable sound system, you would never have made these comments.
As usual Stuart, you are right and ten million other people are wrong. Spotify and other services have provided listening opportunities to a huge range of music that most would never have accessed.
Take the blues for instance, how many neophytes of the genre would even know of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly etc. etc. let alone be able to find the original vinyl AND be able to afford stuff that they may end up not liking particularly?
I’m well aware of Neil Young’s output and talent, but am disappointed that he sees fit to deprive a new generation of the chance to sample his stuff in order to become familiar with it and, perhaps go on to form a collection of it in a more superior format.
Streaming services ARE the present AND the future, they aren’t going away. They just need pressure to up their game quality-wise.
Streaming services provide a crap sound, simple as that. The very best is a live performance, the kind that once was the norm everywhere is now virtually impossible to find anywhere. Now it’s all huge stadiums and ‘supersound’ which can be really good but that is’nt Spotisfy. look at 99% of earbuds – they are just bloody awful. How can you compare ~#?”^ to a pair of Senns. or any of the the top end can makers – so what they are hearing is effluent – the case stands.
Access to music over the years has increased year on year. So much is available from so many sources now that the youth of today get to hear so much more than I did at their age.
As for quality mainstream available was best from early to mid 70’s to mid 90’s. AT that point there was a massive drop in quality when mp3 format became available. Now since then streaming services are more and more sorting out quality issues but I can’t see quality ever getting near vinyl.
I’m happy listening on my old stereo to a lot of stuff nut I do use Spotify and amazon music to widen my music experience.