The Next Track

A podcast about how people listen to music today.

About the show

Doug Adams and Kirk McElhearn discuss music and musicians, and how we listen to music, whether it be analog or digital, downloaded or streamed, audio, or video.

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Episodes

  • Episode #163 - Lewis Shiner on His Novel Outside the Gates of Eden

    November 20th, 2019  |  32 mins 32 secs

    Lewis Shiner's latest novel Outside the Gates of Eden is a saga that begins at a Dylan concert in 1965, then follows a musician and his friends as they age, up to the present. This novel has a huge scope, with moving scenes about music, and about a generation growing up. (Apologies for the sketchy Skype audio quality.)

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    Episode #162 - Apple's New Improved macOS Media Apps

    November 6th, 2019  |  32 mins 47 secs

    Doug and Kirk spend a half hour or so discussing Apple's new apps that replace iTunes on the Mac. They rant, they praise, they shrug, they laugh, and they reminisce on what was, while imaging what could have been. It was a very good year.

  • Episode #161 - Philip Thomas on Morton Feldman's Piano Music

    October 23rd, 2019  |  34 mins 32 secs

    Philip Thomas has recorded a 5-CD set of all of Morton Feldman's music for solo piano. We discuss with him one of the most interesting of 20th century composers and the unique nature of sound in Feldman's works.

  • Episode #160 - Golden Years

    October 9th, 2019  |  28 mins

    Ginger Baker has died, and we reflect on older musicians and how they keep on performing, even without any new material, until their golden years.

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    Episode #159 - Has Lossless and High-Resolution Audio Finally Come to the Masses?

    September 25th, 2019  |  33 mins 9 secs

    Amazon announced a new lossless and high-resolution music streaming service. Has high-res music finally come to everyone? We talk with Chris Connaker, of Audiophile Style, to try to understand Amazon's logic.

  • Episode #158 - What We Did this Summer

    September 12th, 2019  |  29 mins 34 secs

    Doug and Kirk discuss some audio-related projects they carried out this summer, new Sonos gear, streaming audio in the home, the iTunes visualizer, and more.

  • Episode #157 - Fake Fur-Covered Streams: Everything About CD Packaging

    August 28th, 2019  |  36 mins 52 secs

    Andy Doe joins us to discuss CD packaging. The types of packages used, such as jewel cases and digipacks, and the marketing behind those Big Classical Box Sets.

  • Episode #156 - 10 Ideas About the Future of the Music Business

    August 14th, 2019  |  35 mins 30 secs

    We discuss the future of the music business, and come up with at last 10 ideas about how things will change in the next 10 years. Because 10 is a good number.

  • Episode #155 - Running a Small Record Label: Another Timbre

    July 31st, 2019  |  36 mins 46 secs

    We welcome Simon Reynell, who runs Another Timbre, a one-man record label that releases experimental and contemporary music. Simon tells us how he started the label, and what it's like to run a record label in a niche of this kind.

  • Episode #154 - Remembering the Walkman and Cassettes

    July 18th, 2019  |  25 mins 43 secs

    The Sony Walkman was introduced 40 years ago. When it first came out, it was the biggest change in musical listening since the record player. It ushered in an era of personal listening, and, with the popularity of cassette tapes, changed the music industry.

  • Episode #153 - John Lysaker on Brian Eno's Music for Airports

    July 3rd, 2019  |  33 mins 21 secs

    Philosopher John Lysaker joins us to discuss his recent book about Brian Eno's Music for Airports. We talk about the idea of ambient music, and how Music for Airports defined a genre.

  • Episode #152 - Flogging a Dead App: Is it Really the Death of iTunes?

    June 19th, 2019  |  23 mins 54 secs

    "iTunes is dead!!!" claim a number of websites and publications. Even on the TV news they were saying that "Apple has discontinued iTunes," that "it's the end of an era." Apple made big announcements at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference in early June. Did they really kill off iTunes? We look at this subject, yet again, for what will be the last episode about the future of iTunes, at least until the next one.

  • Episode #151 - The Latest Trends in Hi-Fi

    June 5th, 2019  |  39 mins 9 secs

    We welcome back Chris Connaker, who tells us about the latest trends in hi-fi at the Munich High End audio show.

  • Episode #150 - Ambient Music

    May 22nd, 2019  |  28 mins 11 secs

    The problem with the genre of ambient music is that most of it is not ambient music. No one really agrees on what exactly ambient music is. We discuss the genre, and the music, and how we feel about this type of music.

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    Episode #149 - In Which We Discuss the Potential Breakup of iTunes Yet Again Because We Really Didn't Have Anything Else to Talk About This Week

    May 17th, 2019  |  22 mins 29 secs

    We discuss the potential breakup of iTunes yet again, because there is some new information about what the future of iTunes will be.

  • Episode #148 - Spoilers

    May 10th, 2019  |  23 mins 36 secs

    We don't often talk about TV, but this week we discuss some TV series, how people watch TV, and in particular the disappearing experience of appointment TV. And we link this all with iTunes, at least a bit.