The Future of Recorded Music

This is a major step in the evolution of music distribution. It brings legitimacy to downloading music. Unfortunately, since the songs are in a compressed format there really isn't much in it for the typical audiophile. However, as technology evolves (larger HDs and greater bandwidth), it's possible that uncompressed versions could become available. Regardless of the future, the ability to legally download songs from major label releases is a positive move.

This is a logical next step for the music industry - give the customers even less at a greater cost. We have been paying $15 per cd (too much) now we'll be charged 99 cents per track for inferior quality recordings and the industry can run to the bank with the money they save on pressings, packaging and distribution. The only thing that is hard for me to understand out is why the industry is having trouble figuring out why sales are decreasing.

A few more details: Full albums will apparently go for $9.99, a definite discount over current retail. And Apple does plan to open this to the Windows world by the end of the year. Also, the majors seem ready to put much of their catalog up once the bugs are worked out.

I agree with Flex that this will have greater appeal in the pop market than elsewhere. (And I plan to stick to store-bought CDs for now.) But who knows what impact it might have on jazz, classical, and other genres? For one thing, it will be easier to bundle samplers, which may be the way to introduce new artists.

I think the demand for redbook and better downloads is relatively limited. The only people who hear a difference between MP3s and redbook are the people (like us) who listen for one. So even with more bandwidth, we might not see a lot of uncompressed downloads available.

Still, this is going to affect how music is marketed in ways that we can't really predict yet.

This is not the future of recorded music. Those who download want to download for free, legal or no, and with freedom, i.e. platform independency. You are an Apple user, so you naturally see things in an Apple light. But Apple is a sideshow (to wit, the biggest developer of Apple software is iirc MS, and that only for legal purposes: to mitigate monopolistic appearances). On the operating system front, the really interesting conflict is between proprietary (meaning M$, not Apple) and free operating systems (again, not Apple). With regard to downloaded "software" including music, the conflict is between any number of legal proprietary models fighting for a piece of the pie and the much larger gray area created for example by p2p (peer-to-peer) clients, whose first well-known incarnation was of course Napster, but now appears in many other guises. I trust in the durability of the basic (base?) human instinct to own. And as far as I know, ownership is not a concept meaning "only on 3 computers" or anything of the kind.

There are two issues. The first is the music industry battle against p2p downloads. On that, I agree with Aganon that this and other floating ideas (like 'weed', which is a paid version of a p2p) will have a difficult future. It's hard to defeat "free, unlimited access, and grass roots".

The second issue is the question of fusion. This is the idea supported by the computer and multimedia industries that music distribution becomes networked and electronically distributed, and your pc or nettop receiver stores data to disc, and pipes music all over the house via your home Lan (ethernet, 1394, whatever). If this idea succeeds, Apple's music service might be one of the early successes, platform specificity aside.