The Future of Recorded Music

Just because I'm an Apple customer doesn't mean I see everything Apple's way. (MS software is the bane of my existence, however.) And I certainly agree that free is cheaper than $.99. I don't think the Apple model itself will stop the theft. It may begin to supplant the purchased disk, however, and as it does it will have an effect both on what is recorded and on how it is marketed.

Regarding MP3 compression, every non-audiophile I know says they clearly hear the difference between 16bit/44KHz digital and the various compression schemes. As audiophiles we shouldn't completely discount the publics desire for good quality sound.

The question isn't whether they hear it--it's whether they care. I've yet to meet anybody who listens to MP3s, but thinks they're inadequate (actual audiophiles excepted, of course).

I don't think the question of quality's importance to non-audiophiles is so black and white. What seems to have been fully determined is that non-audiophiles don't care about quality MORE than price. Free downloads that sound so-so beat better sounding CD's at $12.99, which beat better sounding SACD's that cost $18.99. Very similar to the popularity of so-so tasting pizza that's conveniently and quickly delivered to your door vs. the much better pizza you have to go to the little shop to pick up. If it were as easy and (almost) as cheap, I'd take the better tasting pizza every time. But since it's not, I eat the so-so convenient pizza way more often.

I can scarcely begin to express my contempt for the idea of any essentially profit-driven entity succeeding in becoming a leading repository of any media, be it music, images, text, or whatever, in virtue of information storage in proprietary format.

There is a well-known institution which has been around for well over 2000 years which does function as a repository of (in modern jingoism) "experience". That storage used to be restricted to the textual, and extends in modern times to also include the aural and visual. As everywhere, increasingly under pressure to self-finance, its general spirit remains to serve as a public good. Its existence is even a measure of humanity: its burning/disappearance is always a sure sign of our depravity. It generally gives its users unrestrictive access to wholes, not stray tidbits, and if its service has a subscription fee, it is reasonable. The institution I speak of is a public library.

Anything which needs to trade on its future now to survive today, is much less likely to survive than anything which already has a -- deservedly -- celebrated past. Needless to say, i or eTunes/Images/Books/Films and the like will never be the apple of my eye.

If the issues involved were only banal, about sliding scales of cost/quality, frankly I wouldn't care much more about these things than about any other barterable good. But it's also about control/freedom. The M$ phenomenon is but a minor consumerist appearance of how the slippery slope of the apparently trivial can be much steeper than anyone ever imagined. So how did it all begin? In the beginning there was convenience.