Rethinking criticism about lossy compression: Sound fidelity, large-scale production and audio capital in pop music

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Although digital music streaming and downloading practices highlight a preference for portability over fidelity among pop music consumers, for some ‘high fidelity’ continues to be a crucial component of their pop music engagement. This article examines the political dimensions of audio preferences. It considers comments by Neil Young and those within The Distortion of Sound who claim that the lossy compression encoding process – used in digital downloading and streaming – significantly degrades the quality of recorded sound and compromises valuable pop music characteristics. In 2015, these claims were followed by the development of the ‘hi-res’ music player device and digital download store ‘Pono’. This article argues that some criticism of lossy compression can be understood as ‘audio capital’. Rather than merely exchanging aesthetic preferences, or a reliable metric of the audibility of high fidelity, audio capital describes the reconversion of celebrity status and economic capital into a class divide structured by an appreciation for large-scale music production.