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The Future of the CD
Murdock037 writes "Nice read at the New York Times (free reg. req.) on the CD, and how it's getting crowded out of the marketplace by gaming and DVDs-- the basic conclusion is that music executives aren't rewarded for rocking the boat, and they wouldn't know how to do it if they were. (And included is a flabbergasting claim from RIAA head Hillary Rosen that only 3 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because prices are too high-- of course, you can come up with a statistic for anything, as 72.5% of all people know.)"
93% of all statistics are made up.
Why would the RIAA want to cite such a statistic even if it's true? It demonstates that price-driven piracy is not the thing killing thier profits.
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
Numers are like people. Torture them enough and they will tell you everything.
There are lies, damm lies, and statistics.
I guess that the RIAA has aquired all three.
Brought to you by the Artificial Idea Factory.
As long as people have a portable CD player, a CD player at home, and one in the car, CDs will keep selling.
The extra quality benefit of DVD-A and SACD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
If you think sound quality is important for most people, look at all the portable MP3 players that have recently come out and how well they are selling. Can anyone say iPod?
The restrictive SACD format will not be a lure to the majority of people. DVD-A on the other hand may get a foothold because of its association with DVD-Video.
People want convenience. And until the companies spearheading these formats realise that, their proposed new super-mega-hyper-ultra-quality formats will be dead before day one.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Man CDs cost less than 50c each compared to $25 plus for DVDs. Also cd-burners are less than $100, dvd-burners still cost shitloads and there is not a common std yet.
The cd will not die for a long time!
don't like the results of a poll, rephrase the questions.
I wonder how many times the RIAA did that to get the answers they wanted.
There's no wonder why people dony feel any compassion towards the RIAA, look how they attack everything they feel which threatens them! I dont have a single ounce of regret for the "loses" the RIAA thinks they have sustained, most of these "loses" are purely projections of what they feel they should have earned. I dont blame CD writers for the decline of music sales, I blame horrible artists and poor music for the reasons I dont buy music (along with the ridiculus price tag... $25 for a cd? Get real...)
As for Sony "losing" $132 Million last year, they didnt lose anything, they just didnt make what they promised the board of directors. They probably only pulled in $1.5 Billion and "lost" their 9% of that to people feeling like they finally have a way to get back at the bastards who runied rock-and-roll with boy-bands and Mariah Carrey (no offense to whomever loves Mariah, but you understand my point).
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
On some ages and places artists were respected for what they did, giving away art for free. that respect was earning them living. everyone knew in ancient Athens that actors were not paid but respected. everyone was alowed to go to the theater for free (not a zip) because rich people were responsible of artists and poor people because they _respected_ art and the need of poor people for it.
In other countries there were the "bards", that would play music for free to anyone and they were respected, paid and fed by people who had wealth.
So, this immorality of our age that only rich people can buy art should make us outrageous, not making us people feeling shame and guilt of not paying them!
They should feel ashamed of putting artists, good artists into this system for the sake of making themeselves more money.
People, wake up, we don't need to pay more the ones that are already rich.
Yes, I can see your argument. Let's transpose it to the 80's marketplace:
:->
As long as people have a portable cassette deck, a cassette deck at home, and one in the car, tapes will keep selling.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
If you think sound quality is important for most people, look at all the portable tape players that have recently come out and how well they are selling. Can anyone say Sony Walkman?
People want convenience. And until the companies spearheading these formats realise that, their proposed new super-mega-hyper-ultra-quality formats will be dead before day one.
Yes, I see what you mean
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
People just don't like change! The DVD was obsolete by the time it became main-stream - it doesn't use the best compression methods nor does it have the highest capacity out of all the Compact Discs, but it is mainstream now and it'll take a while for it to budge.
:P
Do you know how much it costs to replace something? Getting rid of something to replace it with something else just isn't within human nature, no matter how much it would help in the long run! What would happen anyway if they did get rid of CDs? They would just put the same amount of songs on a DVD and sell them at a higher price
We're probably better off with them - or is that my human nature talking?
Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future.
When did this happen? Industry executives actually acknowledging the obvious? Now where'd those pigs go...
The only domain left where cds are of value is recording information for consumers. Backups, archives and kind-of-floppy disks for people who can't yet afford writeable dvds. Sales are on the down, fast, and for good reason.
For software distribution, dvd just makes more sense. More and more software requires more than one cd. A dvd is similar in price to a cd, but can hold more information. Why not switch? It's happening all the time.
For music the case is less clear. The cd is still the "best" way to distribute it. The problem is that the heaviest music consumers, the teens and college students, know all about mp3s. Among the artsy college crowd that I hang out with, there are two camps. One says that mp3s are just as good as cds, and easier to get, so they use them. The other camp says that mp3s have low quality sound (either all mp3s, or to some people just the low bitrate ones they can usually find on the internet) so they buy cds instead. Interesting this cross cuts the whole other spectrums: into music or not, rich or poor, death metal or country&western, big names or indy artists, etc..
In fact, more people among the intellectual elite download mp3s then burn them to cd to listen to than buy cds. That's a bit surprising since most mp3s stay on hard disks and flash memory. As I said, cds are dead.
The only place I see cd use increasing is for personal data storage. They are the new floppy disk, and they are back with a vengeance. Comparatively this works also. Back in 1987 my xt had a twenty meg hard disk and floppies one sixtieth that size. Now many people have a forty gig hard disk and use cds one sixtieth that size. For casual storage and backup and archives for people who are too poor to get industrial quality solutions, the cd will stick around in a while in its writeable form.
There are lies, damn lies, and then there's statistics.
There are even books on the topic "How to lie with statistics". (Uses as course literature for to-be journalists).
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Give me a service where i can pay £5? per month and download so many songs 20? in mp3 no drm no watermarking or any of this junk. If i trade them with freinds so what, if i didnt they would just use p2p anyway.
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
Not necessarily - maybe the other 97% are buying less music, because they download it from the internet instead ;-)
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
The audio CD certainly has more advantages over the cassette than quality.
It offers a seekable audio medium you don't have to turn over to finish listening to. It also does not degrade the way analogue cassettes do.
Yes, the walkman was revolutionary, but it still brought over all the other disadvantages of the cassette.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Now, in 5 years, when everyone's done spending to get their 1000" HDTV plasma set with 15.3 dolby surround to watch DVDs perfectly, then a switch to a new music format may not be a big deal. But timing any forced media switch right now, with DVDs still fresh in most people's minds, is not the way to go.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
but I still argue that the only reason that DVD-Rs are high in price is because they aren't mass produced and there are three different formats still.
But again, you have a point.
If you want to listen to a CD, you just pop it into the CD player. If you wish, you can skip to a favourite track by pressing a single button. You can randomize the track sequence if you get bored with the default one. Remember that when the CD was introduced, all this was new. LPs had some of these features, but jumping to a specific track required some concentration and precision, and random play was out of the question. Cassettes were just hopeless.
The supposed quality improvements in SACD and DVD-A are likely not audible by the vast majority of people. In double-blind tests, very few people can tell the difference between ~200kbps VBR mp3s and the original source CD. And the difference between SACD/DVD-A and CD is even less than that. The point being that CD is already overkill -- you can throw out 80% of the information and almost nobody will notice.
And the things they're "better" at aren't really necessary. CDs already have ~44 KHz sample rates, enough to accurately reproduce frequencies up to ~22 KHz. Since most humans drop off hearing around 18-20 KHz, with 21-22 KHz being the absolute max, going to 96 KHz sample rate is certainly not needed (and the added frequency resolution isn't noticeable to anyone either). And as for bits per sample, 16-bit audio already provides enough dynamic range to in good quality represent far more than the vast majority of equipment can reproduce.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And then when you find an interesting CD in the store, there is always the suspicion that is it a CD after all. Last week I was at a store, found an interesting title (well the new best of Led Zeppelin or something). I tried to find any indication of any copy protection method used on the CD and did not find any. But I also could not find any indication that it is NOT copy protected. And the shopgirls were too busy handling other customes, so I wasn't going to stand in queue for five minutes just to ask "I this CD?"
That day the music industry did not get that CD sold just because the potential customer was so suspicious about their product. I hope that in the future the customer can rely on getting a quality product, but it is up to the music industry to stop this madness.
Did they poll people at the checkout lines?
the recording industry needs to keep making bigger and bigger returns every year on their investments. If they dont they need to find out what the problem is p2p sharing/warez is just a scape goat for the recording industry, so they dont have to change their ideals, just destroy someone elses. I personaly think it is very convenient for me to have to put a cd in just because I want to listen to one song (yea right!)
Money is to buy food, houses and hardware, not art neither software. Respect artists and programmers, they don't need your money, just your respect. Give them a way to live and let them create. Don't put them into the system of earning money, this is not our job, that's a job for CEOs and economists.
This age is so vastly dominated by rich people that need to make more money that already have that they act as BEASTS to artists and programmers. A program or a peace of art doesn't need to be paid by people that are already short in money, it needs to be respected, let the artists and programmers live by a small percentage
of rich people money and let people have the art and software for free.
You can keep you 34 houses, you won't be poorer. We can accept an offer of "take a house and a car and money to buy things" and don't ask if I charge the people, and I can accept an offer of "take all this art and software for free and tell me what you can do, what you can create for all these people".
This system is dominated by rich people, it's a tree structured network, we need a _mesh_.
only 3% have stopped buying CDs because prices are too high...
So, what? The other 97% also think prices are too high, but continue to buy CDs? The other 97% think prices are OK, but only patronize the used CD store? The other 97% think CDs are too low? Such a trite, convenient little statistic... what was the N?
100% of people surveyed (12 music industury executives in a quick boardroom poll), thought CDs were the bomb!
bah.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I bought zero CDs in the last 4 Years
If asked by Hillary Rosen I will answer "I dont buy less CDs since filesharing". When I bye a CD this year, I can tell her "I bought 35 (Don't want to exaggerate!) times more CDs than last year!"
My mother for example bought her last CD in 1995 what about her?
NoSuchGuy
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
CDs and DVD-video offered an immediately obvious improvement of sound quality on the equipment people either already had or could easily afford. If SACD can't do that, it's not going to take off quickly.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
3 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because prices are too high.
8 percent are not buying less music.
2 percent are buying less music because they would rather just steal it.
87 percent are buying less music because they already bought everything they want, and all the new stuff is garbage.
Seriously, I would guess the numbers to be about 50,5,10, and 35, respectively. Keep in mind that those citing high prices are doing so in a worsening economy (thanks Clinton!).
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Mp3s cost me zero or something very close to it. therefore, the cost of non-pirated CDs, at $1, is too high.
Well look, I'm not going to go out and buy A Flock of Seagulls' CD just because I heard it on the GTA commercial and now its stuck in my head, am I? Before mp3's, my only option would be to buy one of those awful compilations off of TV. If I could buy *just that song* for something approaching a reasonable price I might, just to keep A Flock of Seagulls in hair spray for the forseeable future. This is the bit that the RIAA doesn't want to understand, and I think it's interesting that this is exactly the same kind of all-or-nothing bundling of a product that we've seen (and complained about) from PC manufacturers and a certain software company that shall remain nameless.
I think the entire problem boils down to this: Compact Discs are just too expensive in terms of bang for the buck for today's consumers.
Let's face it: consumers will balk at shelling out US$18 per album-length audio CD; at these prices there is just too much economic incentive to pirate music, to say the least. Even at US$20 per disc, DVD's are usually a better deal because not only do you get a full-length movie, but often you get lots of background material on the production of the movie, deleted scenes, commentary tracks by the director/actors, and so on.
Take for example the four-disc Extended Edition DVD set of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which you can get for around US$30 at most discount retailers. You not only get superior picture quality, but two different top-quality audio tracks (Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES), FOUR audio commentary tracks, and two Supplementary discs with so much information it would take days to view them all even quickly. This is something no audio CD can hope to match, that's to be sure.
Now, if album-length CD's were priced at US$11 per disc, then the incentive for consumers for buy the disc goes way up and the incentive to pirate music goes way down.
Seriously though, music piracy hurts the industry - every year the record companies make less money, and every year they are forced to recoup lost sales buy launching yet-another-crap-boyband. We must stop the proliferation of yet-another-crap-boyband if we want to save our souls from a fate worse than death: listening to yet-another-crap-boyband. Yet-another-crap-boyband extracts money from unsuspecting pre-teenage girls who have not yet discovered kazaa, much like yet-another-crap-girlband extracts money from unsuspecting teenage girls who worship them as their role-models. Im not saying boys are perfect, they are taken in by a similar vice - yet-another-crap-football-video-game and yet-another-crap-console. We must stop this now, buy music and video games before they release something more deadly than Leonardo Di Caprio films on DVD!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
...only 3 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because prices are too high...
Consumers of what were polled...oh, don't get me started on polls...
I live in England these days and new CDs are roughly 13 pounds, which translates very roughly to about CDN$30 or US$18. But when I went home to Canada at Christmas I was astonished at the prices (i.e. cheap compared to Britain!)
Take the new U2 Greatest Hits as a comparison. The CD here is 14 pounds, the DVD 24 pounds (approx.) When I was shopping in Canada at Christmas I saw the CD on sale for the equivalent of 9 pounds and the DVD for the equilvalent of 14 pounds. i.e. I could have bought the DVD in Canada for the price of the CD in the UK!
Last week I bought my first three CDs in absolute ages because Virgin Megastore was dumping stock for 5 & 6 quid a disc...that's ~CDN$13/US$9 or thereabouts. And they were still all CDs to replace old LPs (believe it or not).
The price fixing the entertainment industries are engaging in is just costing them customers. I've just dumped the Sky Movies package 'cause it's just the same old crap over and over again...they claim to show new movies, but they come in, show a couple of dozen times and it's back to the same old filler every night. Booooooooring!!!
I kept Film Four though...gotta support the independent distributors.
Only 3% of consumers are buying less music because prices are too high?
The other 97% are buying no music because the prices are too high!
QED baby, Q E D.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
Clever, but the difference between CDs and tapes was a fairly huge leap. The difference between DVD-A/SACD and CD in most consumer minds is fairly negligible.
I don't think DVD-A or SACD will change the marketplace. I think DVD-Video albums may though. If you already have a DVD player, then the chance to buy an album with all the videos, an interview, and some basic interactive features will be more compelling than the chance to buy a version that sounds better if you can afford the Hi-Fi gear to be able to tell the difference.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
Actually, back in the 1980's there were a LOT of people looking forward to getting Compact Discs. You have to remember compared to LP turntables, CD's offered the following advantages:
1. It didn't require lots of finicky setup to get it working correctly.
2. Cared for properly, CD's way, way, outlasted LP discs.
3. CD's didn't suffer from wow and flutter, background hiss and low frequency turntable rumble.
4. The storage requirements for CD's was much smaller than LP's.
Sure, the early CD's did sound a bit harsh in the treble frequencies but careful mastering by recording engineers more or less overcame that issue.
It is that convenient size factor that has allowed DVD's to take off in popularity; the MCA/Philips Laserdisc and RCA Selectavision disc formats didn't become widely popular due to fairly stiff storage requirements, while in contrast DVD's same size factor as CD's made them very popular even though most DVD packaging is about 25% larger than CD's.
Not everything out there is a boy band.
Matthew Good makes his videos and singles available as a free non-DRM download from his website. Since free is good, you can take a look at his website.
Canadian artists really need more exposure in the states. Artists who embrace the internet also need our support. I suggest you check Kazaa for Matthew Good Band and check out the Beautiful Midnight album. You won't be disappointed, I promise.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I have said it before, and I will say it again...
I love Metalica. I have all their MP3s.
The RIAA has sucessfully made their own customers hate them, similar to Microsoft. When your customers think you are a schmuck, they don't feel too bad stealing from you. Of course, half the rappers ARE convicts. Don't be shocked if people break the law getting a copy of their latest songs. Its almost poetic justice.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Apple's R&D often notes that the optical drive is the number one bottleneck in data storage speed, reliability, and size reduction. (Not just for laptops, but desktops too) DVD burners, as Apple now includes in most every model of its computers, produce a lot of heat and add about $250 to the consumer cost of the computer.
I wish manufacturers could just agree on another new standard, such as some sort of Flash based storage. With the quality of Mp4 video and audio you could have relatively small capacity "compact flash cards" - the slot should be a combo drive as already seen in the majority of industry with DVD/CDRW combo drives. Be a flash memory reader and a videoFlash reader.
Now as for cost, if manufacturers would do this, Flash RAM (or SRAM) would start to plummet. These manufacturers would make money based on volume. I could see 128MB cards $1 + 512MB $5 1 GB $9 - these may be unrealistic at first, but WOULD come. It would reduce memory of all types for all the different uses there are.
It would also reduce R&D and reduce heat and weight concerns many Video Player/Laptop/music player manufacturers have at this moment. The XD picture card is promising 3 gigs by the end of this year. If they can put that amount of memory in the size of a postage stamp; imagine what they could do with a compact flash card size?
Of course, reasons are clear why music CDs are expensive right now - RIAA litigation costs MONEY - lots of it. Litigation expenses were nearly 33 million dollars last year. The music industry was caught for overcharging. Third, they don't understand that the cost of online distribution at a reasonable price would dramitically reduce print/ink/plastic/distribution (truck/air) costs.
My question is, are blank CD media pressing companies really making a lot of money?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Or... it's becaus 97% of people don't pay for there music :)
Cmon!
You can buy an old movie on DVD for under $10 dollars at WallyWorld, which blows away their cost argument. Which is cheaper to produce, a CD or a DVD? Then again theres the price fixing settlement that the major record labels are paying out on now. Their greed will be thier undoing. They should price CD's at $5 a pop, then they become impulse buys. It really galls me that if I go out and buy a CD that's been out for years or a compilation disk they charge through the eyes. As for piracy, only %20 percent of homes have high speed connections, so are the rest of us dial up users spending the hours to download some older stuff? I think not. Janis Ian pointed out that her sales went up over %300 after she posted some stuff and made it available for free!
Labels have made their profits from reselling the stuff from the 60s and 70s.
Fantasy just released a Creedence Clearwater collection, 20 great songs, $10 at WallyWorld. After WW gets their $5, the wholesaler gets $3, there's not a lot of money left for the label.
And for you whiners who won't register, replace www with archive and delete the first http. Don't worry, the article is just Clintinoid drivel, anyway.
About once every two weeks, we seen an article like this one from a fairly respected news organization.
A junior reporter gets a press release from the RIAA about the horrors of piracy and imminent destruction of the music industry, and copies it verboten, with the addition of the contents of a couple of phone calls to round things out, calling it journalism.
Unfortunately, fact checking seems to be a lost art. We should respond by ignoring their transparent ploy.
Admittedly the only CDs I've bought recently have been 'Complete works of $ARTIST' boxed sets, but they tend to be quite good value. The CD goes into my computer, ogg files go onto my hard disk and the CD goes back into its box. The only time I take it out again is if my hard disk breaks (Yes, this has happened). To me, the CD is a back-up, nothing more.
I recently asked a non-geek (yes, they do exist!) if he would pay 10p for an audio track and legally own it if he could, rather than getting it from p2p networks. He thought for a while, then said no. This same individual regularly spends £40 or more on concert tickets. When the music industry realises that recorded music is marketing tool, not a product then they will start having a sustainable buisness model. How many people pay to listen to the radio? None. Many people simply view Kazaa and friends as radio-on-demand.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Your sentence mentioning sound quality is comparing like for like in your example. This is not a valid argument against the original posters. Having said that, neither of you are allowing for the fact that technology is an unstoppable force that is first brought to the masses through so called "early enablers". A more representative way of stating your claim would be; "If you think sound quality is important for most people, look at all the portable CD players that have recently come out and how well they are selling. Can anyone say Sony CD-Man?"
From http://www.acronymfinder.com
Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Latin: Which Was to Be Demonstrated)
You think 14$ is expensive? What about 20 Euro (~20$) or more? That's what a CD costs in Holland!
This all sounds very nice, though to be honest I doubt its veracity. To be fair, some of history's most famous and beautiful works of visual art were produced at the behest of a patron. Of course, when the rich were the patrons of the arts, they also called the shots. That bard couldn't sing the song he wrote about how the feudal system sucked (except maybe in private) for fear of losing his meal ticket. Also, for a lot of art, access was restricted. The most beautiful paintings and sculptures resided in the homes of the wealthy and powerful, not in public galleries. To suggest a relevant comparison, imagine if a rich person paid your favorite musician to record a new album - but then kept all copies of the recording for their own personal listening pleasure?
Freedom: "I won't!"
100% of Slashdot readers think Hillary Rosen and the RIAA are full of shit. (Sample size of one).
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
If copy protection means I can't (easily) copy them to my Network Walkman temporarily, play it my xBox, play it on my linux box or play it at full bitrate on my laptop then the convenience has gone straight out the window.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
because you need to register at NYT to read the article, only 40% of people will register to read it.
10% will bitch about providing a link that doesn't require registration.
30% will post a comment even without reading it.
1% will be about first posts
1 % will be "In Russia" posts
2% will be about BSD or some celebrity dying
5 % will be about piracy
35% will be about bashing the RIAA
and...
30% will mod this as funny
30% will mod this as a troll
and 100% will go on with their lives even if CDs disappear off the planet.
Actually, modern CD-DA mastering is clean all the way up to 22050Hz. They'll be sampling at the very least from DAT, which is good up 'til 24KHz and the slope of the lowpass pre-sample filter will be completely cut off when they transfer it to 44100Hz sampling frequency using a "perfect" technique (wide FIR pre-filtering of 4x oversampled windowed sinc for example), yielding far, far less noise than an analog sampling at that frequency. And on the playback end, what you think would be square waves at the top end won't be, because your CD player has an IIR low-pass filter, usually cutoff frequency 20KHz with the filter hitting -90dB or so at 22048Hz or so - neatly cutting off any decimation noise, If you can reliably hear phase aliasing at 20.5KHz, I'd be very impressed by your cyborg ears.
:)
You're doing the tests wrong, by the way; they're not fair, they're biased by expectations. Don't listen to one then the other, because you're subconsciously expecting one to sound better.
Make sure they're of the same recording, at the same volume level - preferably mastered the same (very important, engineers working on both are told to deliberately make the CD sound subtly worse, which is often only a tweak of the EQ or master volume away - yes, quieter things almost always sound "worse"), and get someone else to play them to you in this order:
A: Either SACD or CD-DA
B: The one that wasn't A
X: SACD-DA
See if you can tell whether X is A or B. Repeat it several times. See how many you get right versus how many you would have by just guessing. It's called an ABX test. Try it with DVD-A vs. CD too, and with SACD vs. CD. Make sure you don't know which ones A or B are, and use the one you consider, objectively, will have the highest fidelity as the "original" (X). That will tell you if you can distinguish between the formats - if not, then they obviously sound just as good as each other.
If you can distinguish between them, you may be surprised by which ones sound worse. DVD-A in particular can sound worse than CD-DA because the watermarking (yes, they created a high quality audio format then screwed it up with watermarking that was already cracked before a single DVD-A disc was minted, or even the standard agreed on) is distinctly audible, at least to those with practice in checking for mp3 artefacts.
Because of the watermarking, CD-DA has greater fidelity than DVD-A, that's for sure. These formats could have had better - your ears might be able to hear 20-bits versus the 16 bits of CD, in compositions with a very high dynamic range that has not been compressed (i.e., definitely not anything from the charts, or even worse, a radio mix, which will have had quieter parts brought down or removed, been EQ-tweaked for a while, maybe with an exciter or two on some tracks, multiband compressed, limited, and possibly even slightly clipped depending on the style, thoroughly running it through the mangler just so it's LOUD and gets heard over an FM radio).
Now go and shock yourself - try the same thing versus Ogg Vorbis 1.0 - start with quality 5 (160kbps nominal bitrate), or quality 6 (192kbps nominal bitrate) and if you're feeling daring, quality 6 (224) or even 7 (256). Use any sound you feel like. Good luck.
Oh, and to check your sound equipment isn't too shit to do these tests at all, try it with CD vs. a 128kbps CBR mp3 encoding by Xing. If you can't hear the difference, forget it, you're wasting all the quality of SACD, DVD-A and even CD-DA on your soundsystem and/or ears.
One last thing - if it's a really warm sound, other than a closer, more true to the original sound that you're looking for, go with a good vinyl deck. It's fidelity sucks, but the artificial colouring it produces sounds very, very natural to the ear, warmer than the original in most cases.
Just download.
Case in point is the outcry over the survey that indicated that only 3% of consumers thinks the price is too high. First, if a survey is reported and technical details of the survey is not, then the survey is mostly a marketing ploy and must be taken with a grain of salt. We all know this. The interesting thing is that the number, in some sense, is probably not unreasonable. As the article mentions the value of music recorded on a CD is some small number approaching zero. Additionally the article states that some people will buy a CD, make copies, and sell the copies to their friends. I totally believe this. When I was in school, people would do this with computer software. There are clearly many people who still buy CDs, but we can assume that most of these are older people who traditionally have bought music, or younger people who will recoup the investment through piracy. From this we can postulate three groups of people: those that currently buy CDs, those that buy copy music, and those that do without because they cannot afford it. The last group is very small as the vast majority of people will copy or buy music they want. The second group is irreverent because to them the value of music on CD is near zero, and the labels would have to give music away. So, we are only left with people in the first group. Furthermore, we probably are only left with people in the first group that buy at full retail rather than value shop. This is conceivable quite a small percentage.
The article brings up several other good points. Consumers want to procure music online. It is not known if consumers will pay for music online, but the labels have done very little to effectively deal with this demand. The article states that the labels have dropped the ball on this, retailers are trying to figure out how to meet demand, but without label support it is difficult. In general, one would expect manufacturers that ignore entire areas of demand to fail.
There are other good points. Consumers are also disenchanted with hidden copy protection schemes that cause CDs to fail on standard consumer equipment. Labels are doing nothing to enhance the product to make it more appealing and increase the value to consumers. When they do increase the value of the product to consumers, they jack up the price far beyond what an average consumer can pay, and then complain that no one is buying the new technology.
Probably the only big issue the article missed was that most download services, even if they had the music, are too complicated, the download formats too confusing. Furthermore, they tend to target people who currently get music for free rather than cosumers who pay for music.
Again, the article clearly lays the decline of CD sales on the labels front door, The article is balanced in the sense that it acknowledges that music executives have limited ability to make sweeping changes to business plan and product models. For instance, it would make a lot of sense to ship music on DVDs with additional content, but how can one justify the capital expenditure in a declining market?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I agree that disrespect for bad and/or unethical business practice might encourage unethical and/or illegal behavior on the part of the consumer, but it does not excuse it. For example, the RIAA and the Big 5 have been convicted for price-fixing. Because CD prices still have not appreciably come down, some consumers may feel justified in violating copyright, but that does not make such violations ethical nor legal.
I also take intense issue with your allegtion that 50% of "rappers are convicts". Even if such were true, violating copyright of their recorded works is not justified by that fact alone.
Finally, Pharmboy, you insinuate that you have illegally copied all of Metallica's mp3s, though it is allowable you may in fact not have. (Whether you actually "love" Metallica is also debatable since everything they cut after 1991 is complete trash.) Are you saying you did so because you perceived Metallica as ex-cons or schmucks? Basically, your argument boils down to: if someone is stupid or has been convicted of a crime, that person does not deserve equal protection under the law (i.e. with regard to copyright law.)
Though you seem (your argument seems) particularly schmucky and criminal-minded to me, I don't think it is OK to steal from you. Besides, your mp3 library has a bunch of crappy Metallica tracks.
(I am not an opponent of file-sharing or fair-use rights. I just don't like muddle-headed justifications for illegal behavior.)
blog
Taipei Times shortened version of the article.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
To make people pay for something you must first have a product that is as available, as good quality and as useful as the free alternative, right?
CD's used to qualify to two of these, their allot better quality than mp3's, it's as useful as mp3's in the meaning that you could play it in any CD player, on your computer, or on portable mp3 player.
Now what does the music industry do to make people pay for music. They release copy protected CD's that wont play in all CD players, wont play on a computer, can't be ripped to a portable mp3 player. What a great idea.
I believe people are willing to pay for music, but not a useless piece of plastic that they can't do what they want with.
In Hip-hop and R&B bootlegging of albums has always been rampant (you can usually find a cd for 10 bucks on a street corner a week before it officially comes out). So much so that there is a conspiracy that the labels themselves are doing it (as a way of making untraceable money off the back of a truck... and not have to pay the artists for it). P2P is then seen as cutting into this money stream and, as the theory goes, this is why the labels are so amped to stop file sharing.
Of course it doesn't make sense for folks like Dr Dre and Eminem to get into a twist about it (since they would be bootlegging their own material). Still, conspiracies like this run rampant in the industry.
What is music when you despise all sound?
There is an interesting book called 200% of Nothing: An Eye-Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Math Abuse and Innumeracy.
I believe it is out of print, but it is available from Alibris.
(The parallelism between 'illiteracy' and 'innumeracy' is interesting.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
"As long as people have a portable cassette deck, a cassette deck at home, and one in the car, tapes will keep selling. The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment."
The difference between a cassette player and a CD is not only a (significant) improvement in sound quality, but also a leap in convenience: track skipping vs winding tape, a forgiving medium when it comes to handling vs scratched, wrinkled and broken tape, a maintenance-free laser vs tape heads that need cleaning and degaussing. The same leap in performance and ease of use is what convinced the public to switch from video tape to DVD despite lack of a means to even record your own.
From tape and VHS to CD and DVD was a huge leap in performance and ease of use. Now that we have CD and DVD, what improvement can we expect in future media? 100-channel sound? It'll be hard to improve on convenience and ease of use, the only thing I can think of is reducing the size. A new format that offers easy and affordable recording capability might be interesting. But the last 5% of possible improvement in sound and picture quality will be lost upon most people. People see the difference between VHS and DVD, and hear the difference between a good tape recording and a CD. But there's no way people will want higher picture resolution or better sound, especially considering the dinky equipment they play it on.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
re your listing of CD's advantages over vinyl:
"It didn't require lots of finicky setup to get it working correctly."
I respectfully disagree.
"Cared for properly, CD's way, way, outlasted LP discs"
Just wrong. A properly cared for LP is much more durable than a properly cared for CD.
"CD's didn't suffer from wow and flutter, background hiss and low frequency turntable rumble"
Which are insignificant problems for good equipment. On the other hand, I prefer LP handling of less than mint condition disks (a few skips or pops, which can be electronically minimized, but the music still plays). Your CD will refuse to play, or will have dropouts.
I'd love to see a modern incarnation of the LP format. Frankly, I've got 30 and (almost) 40 year old LPs which sound better than any CD I've heard. A cranked up LP on top end equipment sounds and feels like a live recording. A cranked up CD on high end equipment sounds like a really good recording of a live performance. Some day some Stanford post-doc will find out why and will make a fortune off the new format. Perhaps it will be a cylindrical disk, and the circle of invention will be complete.
LET'S GO BACK TO ANALOG!!!
That'll show the bastards!
hi!
Ah, but the *reason* the packaging is 25% larger is so that your DVDs can be stored on the same height/depth shelf as you VHS casette tapes. This is what happens when technology meets currently existing furniture: a kludge is introduced. :-)
Babar
The quality of Cassettes was less than that of the LPs that people had been accustomed to. Cassettes have inherent defects as an audio playback medium for music.
CDs are 'good enough', in fact better than good enough for most people's enjoyment of music. The new formats are just 'more good enough' and that isn't something people can measure. It isn't anything people care about. So the new formats will just be for the 'elite' who need to feel important and buy the latest shiny-new stuff at the store.
This is a weird thread. CDs have only gone up slightly in price over the last decade, and yet there are people moaning about how expensive they are. You don't see the same people moaning about video game prices, though, or a dozen other "overpriced" things. I don't think that there's much of a real movement in the "real world" about the price of CDs, just that there is now a precedent for complaining about the price of them, most of this complaining is coming from students or recent graduates, and not coincidentally, students get "free" high-bandwidth internet access.
I've also been seeing the argument that MP3s are easier to obtain and manage than CDs. That's only true if you have high bandwidth internet access and lots of free time.
...regret for the "loses" the RIAA thinks they have sustained, most of these "loses" are purely projections of what they feel they should have earned. I dont blame CD writers for the decline of music sales, I blame horrible artists and poor music...
F -8&q=Courtney+Love
If you haven't already read it, Courtney Love does the math is about the most reasoned and articulate piece of journalism I have ever read. Check it out:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT
sig?
And this would absolutely destroy your cassettes after a while (and not a long while, at that). Basically, you're rewinding/fast-forwarding WITH THE TAPE HEAD ENGAGED. As the deck slowed down to play the next track you were looking for, it stretched the tape itself slightly - this lead to some pretty amazing popping sounds on a lot of my old cassettes. There's a reason this technology didn't become more widespread :)
:)
Personally I'm glad to be rid of my cassette tapes - I had over 300 at one point, and shudder to think of actually having to use one again (like the odd time I'm in an older model car). I'm darn close to that same feeling with CDs - just imagine only having 10 songs to choose form before changing the actual media! What kind of stone age is this?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
http://archives.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/business/yo urmoney/23MUSI.html?ets
old LPs which sound better than any CD I've heard.
It's the dynamic range of LPs - 60 dB - that forces the engineer to crank up the volume of faint sounds and ease up on loud. Plus, your LP was mastered for AM radio, the medium of choice for that era.
CDs have a dynamic range of 90+ dB, there's a whole lot more subtlety there. Listen to Karen Carpenter on vinyl compared to a remastered CD. Pick a better song, This Masquerade. Or some of the Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole stuff.
Maybe you need a hearing test. Van Halen will do that to you.
If you look at the majority of songs on P2P networks, and even the way they're organized - it's clear to see it's much easier to download individual songs rather than whole albums. Trying to download an entire an album, while it can be done, is rather difficult. Varying bitrates/encoder quality can ruin the continuity of the album. If the album has no silence between tracks, reassembling the album from MP3s usually results in audio dropouts between tracks.
If anything, P2P is an excellent promotional tool for the sales of albums, or at least you would think it would be. On the other hand, it can be used to reveal turkey albums that are mostly filler, while allowing you to get the hit songs that you just wanted. In a way, what the recording industry is discovering is that their cream of the crop songs that they pick for promotional use are what are most sought-after on P2P networks. It's a lot like having a sporting event that people just want to watch for the commercials. Except in this case, the sporting event is what the recording industry is trying to get you to buy.
The recording industry has no one to blame but their own short-sightedness for their lack of sales. If they had realized that their most valuable product is actually their distillation of songs from various artists, they'd allow you to build your own compilation CDs from a comprehensive catalog of artists for a per-track fee, rather than trying to milk an outdated distribution method for all it's worth.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
And you think Flash storage will improve data storange speed? Give me a break. Space usage might decrease slightly, but not much. A couple PCMCIA slots will use up almost as much space as a CD drive, and those cards put off plenty of heat when in heavy use.
Uhhh, you mean CompactFlash?
With the complex electronics required for Flash memory, there is no way they could ever get near the price of CDs/DVDs.
I was hoping I could replace my MiniDiscs with CompactFlash cards and Ogg. With "-q0" 64kbps VBR Ogg files (which sound good, but 128kbps would sound perfect, so would be preferable) I could stick an album on 32MB. So, I looked around and didn't find 32MB cards (let alone 64MB cards) for less than $15, compared to $1 MiniDiscs which would hold more, are editable, can be recorded onto in realtime, and have FAR better sound quality, less power usage, have caddies so they are more durable than CompactFlsah cards, and can be erased and re-recorded more times than CompactFlash... The point is that a small piece of electronics cannot out-price a hunk of plastic and tin.
The bare material costs alone wouldn't allow the prices to go that low. Meanwhile, 700MB CDs (which can hold MP3s, or whatever your preference is) are now only $0.25, and will no doubt cost even less by the time your plan could near fruition.
It would NOT reduce the heat output by too much, and CD drives don't weigh very much anyhow. Besides, the R&D cost would not be gone or reduced, they would be shifted to CompactFlash developers, which means the on-going costs would be high, rather than the one-time machine costs being slightly higher, and media costs being lower.
Don't get me wrong, CompactFlash is a very good media for a great many things, and I'd like to see desktops available with PCMCIA slots so that CF can finally replace floppies (CDs still aren't natively BIOS writable, so they're no good for holding an OS, or ANYTHING that needs to change frequently, which is why USB hard drives are popular). However, for bulk, hi-capacity storage such as movies, music, and system backups, nothing can beat optical discs for the price and capacity.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Probably the number one problem that most people had with LPs is that they didn't clean them. I'm not talking about the stupid brush with the stupid "fluid" because all that does is take off the really big chunks of dust and paper bits from the album cover.
Real cleaners actually dip the LP in a cleanser that removes the oil, dirt and all other manner of gunk that gets down in the nooks 'n crannies. Of course, the price is going to kill some people: $500-easily $3k for a good cleaner. It doesn't make sense if you are Joe Sixpack, but if you are going to be doing some serious listening (i.e., you're a audio snob :) ), then you'll want this kind of equipment. It makes a difference.
Yeah, right.
Oh, silly me. This was in the business section, home to as many fluff articles as the sports page.
Behavior that is unethical is behavior that is undertaken without regard for justification. As long as you are taking justification into account, you are behaving ethically, though those ethics may be bad. When you perceive that someone else is acting in bad ethics, you have justification to undertake war-type actions against them.
One reason for the declining sales may be that
though music is everywhere, it just isn't that important anymore to people's lives, especially that sacred 16-30 demographic.
The Best Buy spokesman in the NYT article pointed out kids are
more into gaming and other
techie pursuits.
I'm more into building my DVD movie collection
these days, especially since they seem like a bargain compared to CD prices.
One hardly sees any personal stereos (remember
Astraltunes?) on the ski slopes anymore. Everyone's into playing with walkie-talkies or cell phones.
Remember those movies/TV shows ("WKRP", "FM", "Airheads") where fans
and employees got really, really worked
up over music format changes? Those attitudes
seem as quaint as those in a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland let's-put-on-a-show movie from the 1940's.
John Reece
ALL consumers are buying fewer CDs due to higher prices. It's called the LAW OF DEMAND.
And to think, the marketing department is always trying to cut the economics requirements from their major..
The problem is, when CDs first came out,the prices were outrageous, and we were told: "Price are high now, but as soon as volume gets up there close to cassettes, production prices will drop, and CDs will be cheaper." What a load of crap. Prices have continuously gone up, despite the fact that now CD volumes are higher than ever, and have been for years. Fron $10-12 in the late 80's up to the $16-20 that they go for now.
I don't care about your karma, I don't care about what's hip. --Weird Al
Point is... there was an easy path for transition by allowing purhcased CD media to be transferred to an old format. SACD and DVD-Audio has no such upgrade path.
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
.40 a song. Bill me based on bandwidth - that's 5-10 cents per MB (assuming an average of 4min songs). The only real limit to my spending at this price is the availability of good music - better go find some talented new artists fast!
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which is blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no nastalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto appartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s resession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my mid 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $250 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
1. Save me time - downloading stuff on Kazaa is work: sifting through the crappy files, figuring out which songs I am missing from a given CD, and organizing the 40+gigs of it all - this stuff takes time and my time is worth money to me. Figure out ways to save me time and I will pay a price for it.
2. Selection - I am limited to what the masses are trading. I like obscure shit and am willing to experiment, but not at $15-17 (notice how this trended higher?) a pop - no fricking way!
3. Ease my concious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
So, how can the labels meet these needs? Again, simple:
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
This would keep me off Kazaa - I promise. I might give some of this to my friends for free, but that is usually stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
For physical media, I would pay 5-7 bucks for a CD if it came with a bandwidth rebate, and an access code to a spiffy band website with news, lyrics, tablature, special monthly download songs and a $10/year subscription to have access to every live show.
And labels, before you complain that your promotion budgets wouldn't be covered at these rates, you should know that I don't listen to ClearChannel, I don't watch MTV, I don't hang out in record stores and that wallpapering of downtown areas with posters just pisses me off.
So, in conclusion, my case is a clear illustration that the RIAA statistic is correct - I don't spend less on CDs - I couldn't buy less than none. Win me back - it's not that hard and it's not too late. I am the consumer and you are supposed to be serving me - make me a happy, full, fed and fat sheep and I'll open up my wallet for you, but treat me like your enemy, and I will be a wolf poaching your chickens with impunity - the choice is yours.
The problem is, when CDs first came out (1980 for you whippersnappers), the technology to produce them was in its infancy. As a result, the discs produced were absurdly expensive. However, as enough people had been willing to buy them, the music industry decided to continue charging not by what the CD cost to produce, but what they could get away with charging. Back in 1980, CDs cost approximately $30 to produce. In 1985, it cost approximately $20, and by 1990 it cost $5 per CD. Fast forward to modern times, and you can get an idea of what the price per disc should be.
Onto the second point: Besides the above, the secondary reason why most games cost as much as they do, is that unlike a month of bubblegum pop production paid at scale, software companies have up to 100 people or more working on any given title. As anyone with experience in the field can attest, a LOT more talent goes into a good game design than a Backstreet Boys album. In fact, most games out there take upwards of 3 years to produce, while top ten bands churn out music more times in a year than Gene Hackman stars in movies.
Additionally, as games continue their lifespans, their prices drop. As operating systems add new features and make others obsolete, the games are nearly unplayable, and join the "2 for $9.95" bargain bin. CDs on the other hand, are playable indefinately (well, except for that little nasty deal with Palladium), so there's not only a good chance you can find an album released on CD 10 years ago, but you can rest assured that it'll probably still cost $14.95-$19.95.
Now on the other hand, lets look at some numbers, 10 years prior:
Video game prices for CD based games (ROM based cartridges don't quite count, as chip prices contributed the most to the overall retail price) usually ran $59-$79. Production time usually ran 1-2 years for games.
CD prices usually ran $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually ran 1-2 years.
And now:
Video game prices for CD based games usually run $29-$49. Production time runs 2-4 years.
CD prices still run $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually runs 6 months to 1 year.
Note the discrepencies in price cuts VS. production costs, the music industry is ripping us off, while game manufacturers are technically working for sweatshop pay.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
As the distinction between a home stereo and the TV erodes, more music and DVDs are going to be played through the same system.
Imagine, convergence in our lifetimes!
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
CD's are expensive though, at least where I live. Not to sound horribly nostalgic but I do remember a time when most CD's were $15CDN a pop (I honestly can't remember the time frame, this was probably about 5 - 6 years ago). Now if I walk into a music store CD's are $18.99CDN. But that's not the whole problem, the problem is that the only music that goes for that price is the stuff that the store has decided to put on sale (Ussually top 40). Everything else in the store easily comes to $25CDN - $30CDN. So for everything that the store doesn't deem as a sale item, the prices have almost doubled. Like I said though, this may be just a result of where I live.
As for moaning about other overpriced things, I can guarantee you that students whine about the other things too, but that isn't played up as much in the media. I mean a bunch of students whining isn't a big thing, but a bunch of students whining and stealing music is news.
And personally music isn't the thing that I whine about most as a student. The thing that irks me is bank charges, and I'll bet that a lot of other students out there would label this as the most horribly overpriced thing that they have to deal with. Once again, we have no measure to steal from banks, so it doesn't make news, so no one knows it irks us.
The CD was not a replacement for the Compact cassette, it was a replacement for the Long Playing vinyl record, over which it has significant benefits.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
What I won't pay is a new format that can only be played in one particular program, can't be copied or burned to CD etc etc etc. If I pay for a song, I want to listen to it in iTunes, burn it to a CD, or download it to an iPod. Period.
If the music companies did this, would some people then immediiately upload that song to Kazaa? Sure, but they will anyway. At least this way, the companies would make some money from the initial download. That's a risk they need to take.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Step 1: Set components down. Step 2: Plug in components. When it was new you had to buy expensive cables; Now we have SPDIF everywhere, so grounding of your CD player is completely irrelevant as is the quality of cable between CD player and amplifier/receiver. Assuming you're using digital that is; But why would you use analog to carry a signal from digital media today?
You're right on this point. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people do not take good care of their LPs or their CDs. A CD which has received a bunch of light scratches is repairable, it can be buffed out. A record which has received a bunch of light scratches will be eternally damaged and never sound right again. In addition, if you are using a needle then you ARE damaging your disc every time you play it, where the contents of a CD are digital and bit-corrected to some degree.
The most compelling argument for CD over LP in this day and age is that data is forever. If you ripped the CD to a lossless compression format and backed up the data you could restore those songs an infinite number of times without loss of quality. Obviously this cannot be accomplished with any analog media.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, they do say the porn industry is at the leading edge of technology...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
3% of customers buy less "because of the cost of the CD". However, no statistics are given for the remaining 97%. Does this imply that the remainder buy the same or more CDs, or is there an even bigger made up percentage attributed to online file trading? The world may never know, but I'm sure she'll tell us.
Another interesting point, Bon Jovi put out a $7 CD, and people actually buy it. Hmm... interesting.
Sound quality on CDs?? I can barely tell the difference between a CD and an mp3, and only when I play them through a relatively decent stereo system, and I attribute that more to the noise created by a long run of unshileded audio cables, since a CD burned from mp3's sounds better on the same stereo system than the mp3's played directly from the computer. The point is, am I really going to tell the difference between a CD and something better? Am I going to care? Will anyone? Sure, on a DVD you could cram every music video, the making of every music video, the making of the making of every music video, the 12 hour documentary on the life of a overnight, soon to be gone popstar. Yes, you COULD cram all of this onto a DVD, but I'll bet you that DVD will still have only one hour of music on it. And seeing how I never watch music videos, even for the music I like, I can't assume that EVERYONE is going to want it. Now, if they want to cram 7 hours of music on that DVD, maybe they'll have something there, but I'll bet you it will cost a ton more than the CDs do today. Oh, I'm SURE people will buy it then. No more 3% drop, that's for sure.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
i couldnt have stated it better.
now i wouldnt go as far as saying the "new" artists are bad. some of them actualy have a nice voice and play good music.
I feel Soooo old writing this but it's all been donne...
earlyer today i was thinking about what identety this decade had i saw a lot of refrences to previous ones but exept for a few technological advances nothing... fin de ciqle hang over???
i wish i was born earlyer
now i'm gonna listen to some rap rape of a nice song
Well, Hillary - no, I didn't buy less music due to rising costs, but I certainly bought less from the artists you represent.
Nowadays, nearly all my music purchases are from used record stores ($3 or 4 an album) or direct from the band at a show ($10-15), or eBay for the collectible stuff.
I hardly ever go to a store like Tower or Border's anymore - and the $17 CDs are the main reason.
They flew down to hell to go ice-skating...
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
Is that you Bloomberg?
On this computer I have about 500 mp3s.
200 of those are from bootleg concert CDs.
30 of those make up two full albums. I own both of these CDs.
70 are from various CDs that I own.
200 from various albums that I don't own, and don't want to own.
I also own about 100 full length CDs. I like them. There's nothing like holding a real album in your hand, reading liner notes, etc.
As for the mp3s in question... if I didn't have them, I'd just be listening to the radio more. I buy just as many CDs now as I did 5 years ago, I just listen to the radio a lot less.
-.-- -.-- --..
One fish / Two fish / Red fish / Blue fish
ShyaOS - Think Differently!
I hate to be flame bait here, but all this talk of $20 CDs! Where are you people buying these things?! I usually purchase CDs from places like Best Buy and I would say the average price is between $12-$14. I have noticed that mall stores are usually in the $20 price range, but your paying for the store, not the CD.
Why does the RIAA not get it that entertainment is something that the general public does not NEED, just WANTS. The US, home of the RIAA, is dead smack in the middle of the largest recession in recent years; why will they not finally admit that the items that bring home their bread are simply frivolous, inessential goods? We don't have money to buy $20 cds, and frankly most of us are fed up with their incessant marketing ploys, and release after release of cacophonous trash. Segway knows that their recreational product won't fare well in this market, why can't the RIAA own up to the same fate?
--- What
Seeing a post like yours makes me want to cry. For years audiophiles blead for technology that would reproduce music perfectly. Lo and behold someone digitized the audio so that it would never degrade. Someone else decided that a good reasonable standard would be 2 channel 16 bit at 44.1 KHz for consumer audio. This was based on the costs and level of engineering everything together as a package at that time in history. 16 bit DAC's at the time were rather expensive. CD production costs were rather expensive.
In any case the majority of people came to love the crystal clear sound that came from CD's. Some audiophiles still lambasted the CD, but for the most part, the sound was clearly superior.
Great, now we finally have achieved what we wanted...great sound. Then look what happened. Some smart folks invent the Internet, but it turns out that the bandwidth offered is rather expensive. So you know what happened? Some smartass fool goes and creates a lossy compression technology that is clearly inferior to the real audio PCM samples. Yet, everyone flocks to it like lemmings. Next thing you know, hey, maybe we really didn't need audio as good as CD quality. Maybe just cassette tape sound is "good enough".
Now we've got people like you saying that MP3's are all you really need. It's people like you who are going to end up splitting the environment into two sets of people. One set, the low-end users are able to buy MP3 albums at a cheap price. The other people, the aristocrats, are going to have to pay gobs of money for the real thing.
Look, for one I WANT low priced real CD quality music samples. I want something that gives me the choice on how I rip them. So I want low priced music.
True, no one wants any copy protection, and what's the point anyway. You can sample almost any audio perfectly these days with a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 card at 24 bit 96 KHz. That's much better than CD quality. After the first sample, it's in the digital domain, uncopy protected. It's free to go out to the file sharing networks uncopy protected.
Please, PLEASE, don't say all we need are MP3's, you might as well say let's bring back the 45 because thats about the sound quality you get.
CD's cost too much! CD's cost too much! CD's cost too much!
+2 cents contributed.
and was instrumental in starting the ball rolling on the extensions to copyright. Thing is, so much of his work was taken from others.
Hypocrite.
I don't really know what is the future for CDs, but I know it has already a long past. Here is what I wrote on this subject about six weeks ago. After the Internet, the compact disc also will celebrate its 20th birthday this spring. But the CDs you buy today are essentially the same that you purchased 20 years ago. Paul Boutin explains. "This spring, the compact disc celebrates the 20th anniversary of its arrival in stores, which puts the once-revolutionary music format two decades behind Moore's Law. The IBM PC, introduced about a year and a half earlier, has been revved up a thousandfold in performance since 1983. But the CD has whiled away the time, coasting on its Reagan-era breakthroughs in digital recording and storage. The two technologies, the PC and the CD, merged not long after their debuts -- try to buy a computer without a disc player. But the relationship has become a dysfunctional one. The computer long ago outgrew its stagnant partner." He aso reviews the recent offerings from record companies, the DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and the Super Audio CD (SACD). But many people prefer to use MP3 players and CD burners "because they can archive hundreds of albums on a laptop and download them to portable players smaller than a single CD jewel box." Check this column for a summary or read the original article for more details.
the price is too high, the other 97% aren't buying because all new music sucks!
stuff |
A little off topic, but here goes:
Industry execs should realize, if they've not already, that they're merely pumping life into an already dead industry.
The need for third-party music distribution has clearly been supplanted by modern technology. With this being the case, any entity feeling that they have a viable market in the physical distribution of music media is chasing its tail; you're not needed anymore!
I would concede that back in the days of Elvis, the Beatles, et al, the music distribution industry did in fact play a viable, useful role. They sought, filtered, and disseminated information that we all wanted, and did so to rather successful degree
Today, however, this is no longer needed. A friend of a friend of a friend's friend can catch a show at any local establishment, pick up an artist-produced CD that same night, and have a copy of their favorite songs off to everyone they know by the next morning.
Do any of us think this really stands to hurt the only requirement for successful music distribution? (think artists) I sure don't think so.
The whole industry should take a close look at what their services really provide these days; nothing but feeding bland, over-popped garbage to gullible teenagers.
While that might be a satisfactory market for them, they should possibly start thinking like Philip Morris, and begin thinking about divesting into something we need. They have the resources, and would be wise in doing so ASAP.
Just my two cents...
Bootleg CDs may not be a big deal in other cities, but they're on almost every corner here in NYC. They even have standardized pricing: one for $5, three for $12. They sell like hotcakes because I think that's the price point buyers are comfortable with.
I think of bootlegs as preview CDs. If I like something a lot I'll buy the real CD in a store. A case in point is the Pink CD. I was pleasantly surprised, since it was so long since I bought a CD in a store, at the elaborate pink-themed packaging (bootlegs are blank with color xeroxed cover inserts). I think I'd buy more CDs in stores just for the packaging, if they were cheaper.
What about DVDs, then? At $15-25, they're priced just right for what you get. And from a $ per MB standpoint they make sence, too. At $4 for 700 MB of music on a bootleg CD, a DVD with about 4200 MB of music and video should cost about $24. And they do.
3% of consumers are buying less music because CD prices are too high.
The other 97% are buying less music because all the music out ther just plain SUCKS ASS!
You can count on any RIAA sponsored study to produce fudged statistics. I wonder what impact consumer boycotts are having on CD sales?
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Thank Bush. Maybe if he would stop looking for wars and focus realistic solutions for the economy, things would look brighter. Unfortunately he dug himself in to hole he can't get out. If Iraq doesn't make major concessions he is a failure, if the US doesn't go to war he is a failure. The economy has been a complete afterthought in the Bush administration, not to mention their ludicrous tax cuts. Tax cuts are great, but they don't fix the fucking economy, especially tax cuts for the rich. Defense spending and tax cuts will not help the deficit either, which the balance budget has went out the door and GW has resorted back to actions that got the US this far in debt in the first place.
"He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lightpost--not for illumination but for support."
Fuzzy math is the only way that the RIAA has come up with halfway-decent arguments against anything.
1500 randomly-selected people are necessary for a "scientific" study. I'm guessing the RIAA just grabbed 30 people in their office and asked them what they thought. One person accounted for the 3%.
Even for pornophiles and those addicted to downloading every Linux distro on the planet (quite similar fetishes, when you get right down to it), 650MB is still a lot of data.
Well, then, bootlegging must not be a serious problem -- since price is the only advantage illegal bootlegs have over authorized copies, and only 3% of the market is put off by the price of the latter, then 97% of the market will stay with you anyway.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
While I'm sure I'm about to be modded into oblivion for this, Courtney Love also is a nut.
Courtney
She's smart *and* has a hairless asshole. But she's still a nut.
That's true on most industries. Borders and Barnes and Nobles built their empires on having a diverse inventory (relative to what other book stories carry). Clothing stores used to be more diverse.
The problem is that real diversity is very expensive. It cost a lot to carry inventory in terms of:
a) economic value while the product is in stock
b) warehousing and shipping costs
c) insurance
d) physical infastructure / storage costs
Because of the internet people who buy diverse inventory generally buy it online. So its even harder today than it was 10 years ago to keep inventory customers happy. Further they are unlikely to pay a premium.
For example I used to work for WaldenSoftware (which had far and away the best computer book selection of any computer stores). We were often able to sell non mainstream technical books at 125% of retail because we were quite literally the only place to get these without a special order (which could take weeks). Now a "WaldenSoftware" type book selection would need to be much much larger and further customers would expect a discount after all they get the same book at amazon or bookpool for 30% off.
Similarly with music. How can a store possibly compete on variety with ebay, amazon...? I think retail more and more is going to be pushed into a wholesale mode of a so-so selection, or going back to 40's style shopping where customer service was truly fantastic. In every high school and college in the country there are kids who know thousands of albums, listen to music 6 hours plus per day, read about it all the time and would be wonderful sales people. For some reason record stores (with a few exceptions) don't hire these guys.
"3 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because prices are too high--"
:)
RIAA can say what they want, but what about the other 97%? I believe it's more like
"97 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because of high prices and the fact that a lot of music produced by artists and labels is garbage."
Ah well as long as RIAA tries to keep shutting down Kazaa and seemingly doesnt try to target *BETTER* P2P networks like WINMX...
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
> I wish manufacturers could just agree on another
> new standard, such as some sort of Flash based
> storage. With the quality of Mp4 video and audio
> you could have relatively small capacity "compact
> flash cards"
Flash is too expensive; always will be at the capacity you want, though maybe some burn-once equiv could be done for less. But the problem is that any new universal music format would meet tooth and nail resistance from Hilary and friends, who would want their business model protected at all costs.
Maybe once they are gone we can get back to new business models like MP3.com's 'all your albums online', again, and just sync up all my devices with my online music collection in the big server cloud out there
The problem is the same as it has been for the last 10 years. Good movie systems are not good sterios. They don't have the same requirements. The configuration generally needs to be different. The room (particularly furniture) needs to be setup differently.
Hez probably g.w.bush.
since 75% of the cost bloat is in the channel,
and the channel is most of the "industry".
Its not the rAaa (artists), it not the rLaa
(labels), it the rIaa the "industry", and retail
*is* expensive. The labels could charge $3
for content delivered over the net AND
make more money than ever, BUT the "industry"
can not politically allow that...
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Well, yes, we are complaining about how expensive CD's are. That's because they weren't supposed to get more expensive at all - they were supposed to get cheaper. Look at the cost of a CD player over the past 15 years. They used to be prohibitively expensive (as all new technology tends to be), and were toys for the yuppiest of the yuppies. Now, you can get a simple CD player for $20 - less than some CDs. I think this is merit for complaining. That has nothing to do with students or the cost of bandwidth.
CD's are also very cheap to produce. Yes, the cost of the master image that is used to press CDs is expensive, but that hasn't stopped AOL from real-world-spamming us, has it? They must be pretty cheap if AOL can issue a new batch as often as they do. The technology is virtually unchanged since it was first introduced (not counting the recordable discs). If I buy Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" tomorrow, and compare it to a copy that was sold in 1987, do you think there will be any difference between the two? Today's copy should not cost $5 more than the 1987 copy.
And, I'd like to point out that if you show a little foresight, and obtain a lot of your music by borrowing from like-minded friends, it is indeed much easier to manage than CD's. The key is getting a consistent filename/directory naming convention, and making sure you tag your music. This morning, I had the urge to hear "Wolfman's Brother" by Phish, but also to listen to some Soulive and Gov't Mule. Ten seconds later, Wolfman's Brother was playing, and five seconds after that, the other music was queued. How does that require high bandwidth and lots of free time? Maybe it requires a little intelligence and some initial planning, but I have no problem putting some effort into something I care about.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Reminds me of the old tube vs. transister debate, the oldsters always insisted that the tube type amp systems sounded better because the inevitable distortion that an amp inserts into the sound was more pleasing to the ear coming from tubes than from transistors. Eventualy as tube type equipment became more dificult to find the electronic mags started home-brew projects called tube heads, a tube type transistor pre-amp inserted into the audio stream to get that pleasing sound. A couple of 12AT6's are a lot easier to find than a couple of serious power amp tube that even the Rusians stoped making 20 years ago are.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The music industry's problems, if indeed they could be characterized as such, are because the industry is run by knuckle-draggers. Anyone who's ever dealt with them knows this is the case. That's why their sales are "down," and it's why they say stupid things -- because they're stupid. And even if they could be performing "better," these music mills are still cash cows.
They had a meeting, polled every one there, and the 3% came from the guy fixing the locked door to their money bin where they roll around on their fat sacks of cash.
"Apple currently has the thinnest/lightest laptop on the market with an optical drive." What about this notebook from Sharp? It's 4.13 lbs with a CD-RW/DVD Combo vs. 4.6 lbs for the 12" PowerBook G4. It's also about the same volume as the Powerbook G4 (110.6132 for the G4, somewhere between 103 and 113 for the Sharp). It also has an external PC card slot, FireWire, 2x USB, Integrated 802.11b, Integrated 10/100 LAN, TV and VGA out, An integrated modem, a P3 1.13GHZ, 256M of memory, 40G HDD, XGA secreen, etc. Very comparable to the 12" PowerBook G4, except perhaps for the GPU. The PowerBook starts at $1,799. The Sharp system starts at $1,799. So, when Apple says they have the "smallest fully featured notebook", the're lying. Unless a "fully featured notebook" has to be a Mac.
Yah wonder how much of that 132 mil tha Sony records lost was because of fees paid to Sony Distributing? When the bands pay expenses there isn't too much incentive to collect bids from competitors, rather than another subsidiary of your parent company.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Rockstar Games sells the compilation CD's of all the radio stations in GTA: Vice City.
I was listening to "Laughing Vampire's Dance" reggae for a while after GTA.
The Boston Globe reports Five years from now you'll see virtually no CD stores
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s.
Do you realize *why* there's such a big mess of various (read: crappy) encodings on the net, in a shitload of different bitrates, encoders and settings? Because there's no "original" mp3. The instant they offer mp3, there'll be mirror FTPs with _only_ original mp3s.
For any user with access to high-speed internet (the kind who'd like it the most) it'd be *even more* convienient (no cc card and whatever) and *cheaper* to download it off someone else that has shared it.
In short, your solution would work if it was competing with the P2P nets of today. But it would also wastly improve the quality of P2P trading.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The industry desperately wants us to buy into a new format to replace the already perfect CD, for two reasons:
- music industry can implant its DRM schemes
- consumers have to buy all their collections over again, the present market is saturated
- equipment manufacturers would love to sell new players to everyone, the CD player market is saturated as well
In order to make consumers believe their lies, I would not be surprised if current CD's would be mastered suboptimally on purpose. So they can prove that SACD or DVD-A is better.Please, don't believe it. For 15 years they sold us CD as 100% perfect for human ears, which is true. New formats are unnecessary and even harmful. If anything, the CD is already overkill even for audiophiles (I consider myself to be one, mainly listening to classical music).
What needed to be improved for easy of use is the swapping of disks. This has already been solved: HDD based players (which currently mainly use MP3 compression but that is a side matter). This is already happening, HDD MP3 jukeboxes for livingroom or car use are starting to be mainstream devices, and for video there are already HDD based recorders (some digitize real time into MPEG, some records the MPEG stream being broadcast by satellites DVB-S).
Next step would be a DVD-jukebox where you insert a DVD, which is ripped and stored on the internal disk. I expect this within 1 or 2 years when MPEG-4 is being established.
The record industry wonders how they can compete with "free". Evian seems to do it quite well. They do it by providing a product with more percieved value, convienence and quality than the product you can get for free at home.
If you could take one Evian bottle, and magically make more and share with everyone around you for free, that wouldn't work that well. The problem for the music industry is making a irreplicatable value - something you only get from them, not from a copy you make yourself. Like e.g. a good looking cover/liner notes/picture on cd. (I know you _can_, but not at a reasonable time/cost)
Providing their consumers with a "more percieved value, convienience and quality" doesn't help if that allows every P2P host on the net to provide the same (e.g. encoded mp3 with id3 tags). If fact, since you don't have to deal wiht payment, you probably have less convienience and higher cost with an online retail solution.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's many precedents, most notably CDs. CDs are 10x 'better' than vinyl (sound quality, production cost, resistance to scratching, size, etc) and easily replaced vinyl once the price of recorders came down. DVDs are 10 times better than pre-recorded video cassettes (production costs, quality, access time, size, etc).
Personally, I think Minidiscs are 10x better than tape (which they were intended to replace), but they haven't taken off so well.
However, are DVD-A/SACD 10 times 'better' than CDs? Audiophiles might think so, but I doubt regular joes will consider it worth the investment. Does it sound significantly better than CD? Does it offer many new features over CD? Then regular people won't buy SACD/DVD-A players.
What will happen is that the cost of add SACD/DVD-A to a regular CD player will come down, and it won't be such a big deal to buy a SACD/DVD-A equipped CD player. It may take a long time, but eventually CD will be phased out, and it'll be there in backwards compatibility mode only.
>We were told: "Price are high now, but as soon
>as volume gets up there close to cassettes,
>production prices will drop, and CDs will be
>cheaper."
Yes, we were given that understanding in editorial opinions in hi-fi magazines, not in writing from the production companies.
The companies tested the market, found the limits of what the market will bear, proved they could ask a certain price and get it, and they continue to get that price. If volume goes down, they should adjust the price according to the demand curve. If that is not possible without costs overtaking revenue, then they should stop producing the product.
The big thing that throws a monkey wrench into the natural balance of the system is the widespread accpeptance of the idea that "internet piracy" is the key factor affecting the demand curve of the CD. If there were some way to eliminate that variable and still show that the CD is not in the same demand as it has been historically, then the production companies would have to look at their business model and adjust.
As long as the general public continues to believe that widespread copying of media is to blame for the decreased demand, we can expect "Them" to try any and all methods of eliminating copying as a variable, including of course, lobbying for harsher legislation.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Maybe I'm just missing something that's obvious to everyone else, but the connection this article tries to draw between rising DVD sales and slipping CD sales seems ludicrous to me. It's like claiming that fewer people are buying Dodge pickup trucks because Dreyers ice-cream has become more popular; DVDs are used for movies, where is this supposed competition coming from?
~SL
I'm perfectly willing to pay between $14 and $20 for a decent CD. However, I'm not willing to give the majority of that to recording/distribution companies. If I felt at least 50% of my money was supporting the artist, I'd be a lot happier.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
and not about to give up... My collection is somewhere over 4000 records and continues to grow, and although my CD transport and D/A converter are as good as it gets, the Rockport Sirius (no, I'm not making this up) leaves them speechless... Many listening sessions start with CD, but once the records start playing it's all over as the air bearings of the platter and linear tracking tonearm and the active air suspension make LP playback about as quiet as CD and at least as dynamic but with the ease and naturalness you don't get with digital... analog forever... SACD may die on the vine, although this isn't wishful thinking...
In a head-to-head comparison of SACD/DVD-A versus CD, many people will hear a difference, but this is almost certainly because of the better mastering DVD-A and SACD undergo. Modern CDs are mastered terribly (on purpose), with a high level of dynamic compression so that all tracks sound "loud enough" to grab attention on the radio. The result is a pretty horrible mess. Obviously, since they're targetted at an audiophile audience, DVD-A and SACD aren't subjected to that. However, if you took a properly mastered recording, and pressed SACD/DVD-A and CD from identical source material, then I'd be willing to wager that almost nobody would be able to tell the difference (and on most music, absolutely nobody would be able to).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Exactly. LPs sound like LPs and CDs don't. The way to make a digital recording sound "warm and alive like an LP" is to step all over it -- dirty secret, yes; rocket science, no, which is why it's a dirty secret.
People will even TELL you! "I love old LPs. The older they get, the warmer they sound! There's something about a weighted diamond point 'gliding' over a piece of plastic several hundred times you just can't reproduce digitally."
I love the super-hi-fi rig that reproduces sounds better than a U.S. Navy transducer, yet somehow makes 'pops' disappear. Hey, that's what you get when you spend $10,000 on an LP rig in 2003, you're buying pure magic.
people moaning about how expensive they are
From the article:
Interscope recording label gave a DVD to the first million buyers of "The Eminem Show" as an incentive to buy the CD.
The price of the CD is so wildly inflated that they can throw in a DVD as a "freebie". Buy our $600 dictionary and we'll throw in a free encyclopedia. Buy a bike we'll toss in a free car.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
lol
---- oh no - it's the RIAA and their $100000000 fine. I'm gonna take that so seriously...
... reposting The Register's articles for the last year...
I hate sigs...
MP3 could have (and should have), revolutionized the way the record industry did business.
Music stores should have had burning kiosks with 80+GB drives running by now, with software that allowed you to pick and choose what went on your CD.
Think about it: you'd have both near-infinite variety and infinite resellability. No 2 customer-selected CDs would be the same, and I bet you many customers would end up buying some songs 2, 3, 4, or more times to put on various mix albums.
It would be dirt cheap to burn CDs. You wouldn't have to pay for shelf space for each CD. Packaging would be cheaper, as you'd only have to pay for blank jewel cases and paper to print on.
Had the RIAA jumped on the mp3 bandwagon and truly utilized the format for the good of consumers, I'd probably still be paying for music. Had the RIAA immediately embraced online sales of high-quality mp3s, I'd gladly have subscribed to the service.
Instead, they shun the idea of these kiosks, chastize anyone who chooses to keep their music in mp3 format, and proclaims every customer a theif. By all rights, this industry should be dead by now.
No business should be able to survive the criminalization of its customer base.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The same goes for CDs. I will buy them, but only the ones I KNOW are very good and I KNOW that most(2/3s) or all of the songs i atleast somewhat like. I am NOT going to pay 20-friggin-dollars to buy some pop cd with ONE questionably "good" song on it, and 8-12 other songs that are halfass at best. My expectations of a cd is that I can put it in my car, or discman and listen to it straight through and be happy. 20 bucks for anything less is utter crap, and i won't pay for it.
You don't see the same people moaning about video game prices, though, or a dozen other "overpriced" things. I don't think that there's much of a real movement in the "real world" about the price of CDs, just that there is now a precedent for complaining about the price of them
To a certain degree, you are correct, Computer game prices have gone up and people don't complain about. Yet a CD's price remains the same. The thing that I think your missing is that
When you defy the natural laws of supply and demand, you have the economic system rigged. People see that and just don't have any sympathy.
Hi ...
Today's (2/23/2003) Boston Globe has a good article on the front page of the "Arts and Entertainment" section: Five years from now
It's a speculative view of the near future with (a fundamentally different) RIAA, or no RIAA at all. It fails to mention that the time and money spent by RIAA collective was an utter waste, and perhaps is a big reason for their demise, but nonetheless is an interresting perspective of what's to come.
The G4 867 processor is the same processor used in the 867 desktop units.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Wil you Shut The Fuck Up already, and learn to spell stereo!?!? Fuck, you're annoying.
First, PC Card slots put of very little if ANY heat; that is heat from INSIDE a notebook. Is a flash card reader even warm to the touch if you use it or transfer lots of data too it?
Flash storage, if made less of a commodity could get to the price point I'm speaking of. The key would be making it ubiquitous. CDRs were a dollar at first, now they are beyond your price point of 25 cents, they are in most respects; free.
The R&D is already done for interface, it would take minimal effort.
A company called www.ADTRON.com has a 2.5" IDE/ATA drive that has 4 gigs of SRAM (high speed, high rewrite/write limit) - usually used in blade servers. If enough people were using these drives they would be as cheap as 4 gig ATA 2.5" drives are today - about $25 - a lot more R&D, and manufacture / material costs goes into a spinning disk than a solid state one.
As I mentioned in the original post, Olympus and Fuji are promising that their XD picture card (which is a type of SRAM by the way) will be at 3 gigs by the end of 2003. This RAM card is smaller than secure digital, truely the size of a 37 cent stamp. That would place a compact flash sized capacity at somewhere around 12 gigs; a 2.5" notebook drive at at LEAST 60 gigs.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Is it true that the greed is on the retailer's end and not labels' ?
Uhh, well the SLOT doesn't put off any heat at all, it's the card that puts off the heat.
Most certainly. The Flash cards get fairly warm after just a few (eg. 10) minutes of active use. Although, that would be the PCMCIA slot on my notebook, not precisely a "flash card reader" per se.
I'm afraid not. Like I said, just the bare materials costs are more than you suggested the cards would cost. That doesn't even take into account the cost for R&D (even if minimal), assembly, etc.
Like it or not, CompactFlash cards are like hard drives... You can't get a 1GB hard drive for $1, but you can get a 250GB drive for $250! I'm sorry to say that we are NOT going to see flash cards for $1, and that is a key price point.
CDs have become such a popular media because I would be happy to give you a program on CD, and not give a damn if I get the CD back. The same goes for floppies, and other mediums. It's the same reason Zip drives were never able to replace floppies, the media costs just couldn't decline to the point (around $1) where Zip discs could be given away.
The INTERFACE is done, but there will be continuing R&D costs to get more memory in the same spaces. Again, it mimics the Hard Drive industry.
As I said, this is one-time cost versus on-going costs. With a hard drive, you have to buy the motor, the read/write heads, the electronics, the metal casing, etc, with EVERY hard drive. With CDs, you pay for that material in the CD-RW drive itself, then the media is the lowest common denominator.
Sure, all things being equal, it would be better if your storage was solid-state... Guess what? All things aren't equal. Maybe if someone comes up with a disc format where a laser can read the entire disc without having to move anything, solid state might become a viable solution. Until then, the only solid state devices we have are memory chips, and memory chips cost FAR more than plastic and a sheet of tin used to make discs.
Yes, I don't doubt it, but I don't care either. Solid-state storage may replace hard drives, since the inital price (regardless of capacity) on hard drives is high. The inital price of solid-state memory would not be a problem in that situation. However, as removable media, it is preferable to have a high one-time cost, and lower media costs.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
But that kludge actually came out okay because the larger box meant more space for better artwork on the front of the box and better blurb information on the back of the box.
Based on the music industry case study that was posted later indicates that the industry reduces the amount artists are paid by 25% based on "packaging deductions". I'm sure that there are other ways that they pass on the cost + get an additional profit. I suspect that they don't really want to reduce packaging costs.
You said it all. They had a new business model screaming in their face and just DYING to give them more money than they'd know what to do with, and they've done everything in their power to kill it, just because they're afraid of any little loss of control.
But the loss of control that they REALLY fear is NOT of the music itself. It's loss of control over the ARTISTS. If every artist can sell his stuff on-demand, with no need for the "star-making machinery", then the RIAA business model becomes completely obsolete.
Remember that the RIAA's major members also have a nasty habit of signing bands to what amount to lifetime contracts, with absolutely NO intention of EVER recording or releasing any of their material -- just to keep them 1) out of the hands of rival distributors, and 2) out of the way of whatever bands they've already *decided* are going to be the big money-makers. Online and on-demand distribution also totally breaks that business model, because it finally gives *everyone* a fair and equal chance to have their music heard and sold.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
While LP's do sound great on the first play, you do have to remember that by definition LP's are a physical contact music storage format, which means both the LP disc and phono cartridge needle will wear out sooner or later even if you use very expensive cleaning methods mentioned by other posters.
Besides, you have two other issues with LP's--the signal-to-noise ratio is at best 65-68 dB (while CD's are in the 95 dB range), and left-to-right separation for LP's is at best 30 dB (while CD's are more like 92-95 dB).
The limitations of the original 44.1 KHz sampling frequency for the Compact Disc format is the reason why we're seeing the advent of the Sony Super Audio CD and Panasonic DVD Audio formats. Since both SACD and DVD Audio digitally sample at vastly higher rates than the CD format, the result is vastly clearer reproduction of musical instruments with lots of treble frequency energy such as pianos, woodwind instruments, trumpets, coronets, chimes, and cymbals. I've heard SACD discs and the sound quality is nothing short of amazing, with sound quality so clear you'd swear you listening to a live band or orchestra.
it looks like that;)
Or are we talking about the audio content itself? CDs are fine as a delivery format but if the typical album contains a ratio of, say, 2 good tracks to 10 crap ones, therein lies the problem. I've been buying CDs for maybe 17 years now, and before that, LPs. In all my music-buying years, I have never once bought an album which contained all the tracks that I wanted. Sure, some tracks that I thought were "crap" initially, actually turned out to be cool later. But the point is that I didn't go out and buy the album for those "crap" tracks; I bought it for the "good" ones, which only account for a fraction of the album that I ended up paying for.
If, for 12 bux or so, I could pick and choose 12-15 tracks myself from a variety of artists on a variety of labels, then have them burned to a single CD and delivered to my doorstep Amazon-style, I'd be happy to splash out. The technology is there, the channels are there, and the industry has the resources to deliver. The will is missing.
Ok, lets look at things from a marketing drones perspective (not that I'm a marketing drone). So, years back some bright and talented marketing department took a look at the demographics and statics of the market base. Looking at the bell curve, one realizes that the percentile from, we'll use nice round numbers, 33% to 66% made the fat/mean part of the curve. This represents the buyer base that is likely to buy music CDs for around $7 to $10 bucks a pop. The upper 67% to 83% is likely to pay about $12 to, say, $17 per CD. Now, the record companies figured out that if they price CDs at around the $12 to $17 price range, especially after the records were dead and tapes unrealiable, that they could "drag" about ~10% to 15% percent of those people in the fat/mean part of the curve into the area of people willing to pay about $17 a pop. This, from all indications (reading certian recording business marketing publications) seems to have been what they did.
.com boom is running, people are making money, and times are good - especially for those with expendable cash and a love of music. Now - NAPSTER. People that don't have expendable cash have a way to get cheap/free music, the demographics shift just a bit and a hint of revenue loss (but not nearly what the record companies claim) and the record companies see the writing on the wall. So the campaign beginnings to crush those that venture into and/or interfer with the market - especially that socialist idea of file sharing (no knock or praise of socialists per se).
.com boom and high economic times becomes the .bomb, and over the next couple 3 years the market keeps tanking in one way or another. People lose their jobs and replace them with less lucrative positions, as well as the rise in the general unemployment figures. Pair this with companies and corporations being not as profitable and it all adds up to far less expendable financial resources. The record companies are feeling the pinch like everyone else and are still erked by that damn file sharing internet bullshit thing (can you see the execs taking double doses of Zantac and Maalox).
Now, this worked fairly well, considering there was little alternative if one wanted to buy music (pre-Napster). So, the have managed to "force" a shift in the market demographics and increase the popluation of those that will pay the price their asking by not offering alternatives and locking in the market (hints of price fixing?).
So, the
But wait, the
So, an investigation of the market statistics shows not only the fat/mean part of the curve shifting back to those that "might" be will to spend $7 to $10 a pop, but the shift of those that won't/can't pay $12 to $17 (now in the range of $15 to $20) and the books don't show those nice big "black" numbers they used to. Now, how to get control of the will of the buyers, especially in light of hard economic times and file sharing - "Hey don't we pay annual dues to the RIAA lobbying group" (say someone up top thinks), "why not put them to work and use this tool to force the market demographics back to where they were previously - if we make file sharing illegal and bring down anyone trying to market for profit in this arena as well we get a lock back on the market and gain price controls again".
The problem is that once the consumer base gets a taste of something they want for less they usually won't pay more later (standard economic inflationary forces withstanding).
So, blame the file sharers. Ignore the new market sector, ignore the economic factors. Put a face on the problem and call it P2P, get the RIAA to earn it's money in D.C. to get this crap shut down. This stance seems particularily true in light of the RIAA faithful suing Bertlesman regarding that system Napster they took down and now want to use as a market tool.
I mean really, the business model that the record companies are apparently holding to baffles me in light of their behavior to something you might think they would sieze ahold of, make their own and run run run. But, instead they seem stubornly obstinent regarding this unrealistic fixation of holding on to an out dated, and now out paced, business/market strategy.
They are going to lose. The question is - what damage will the do to themselves, the market, and Information/computer technologies and innovations in the process.
Frankly their just scape goating to explain away their incompetence in the "new economy".
Do some more research on memory putting off a lot of heat, even remotely compreable to 120 degrees + of a DVDR laser. Also, internal firewire interfaces for compact flash SIZE (not necessarily CF itself, but a higher quality SRAM) is already done. Capacity makes no difference. CF cards from 2MB to 2 GIG fit in ANY CF slot ever made! To illustrate my point again. Compact Flash cards 1 gig capacity (not microdrive) were $900 last year about this time. This week I have seen them for as low as $208 shipped. 1 gig capacity is not in high demand, but as soon as it was you would see that price around $25. 4MB of memory 30 pin in 1984 for my Mac SE cost almost $1200, now you can't even give 4MB away of anything, not even flash RAM or smartmedia.
One more illustration. Do you think anyone thought in the 50's or 60's that TV's would eventually be $30? (the equivalent of $5.50 then) Walmart has a 5" B/W w built in FM Tuner for $29.99 this week, and to top it off they HAVE to make making SOME money on it. Do you think anyone in the 80's thought they could get an entite walkman, with headphones, binoculars, flashlight, digital camera; also at Walmart for $20!!! What about a 20" TV with a built in VCR for $99. Just four years a go, most VCR's were $200+. Even a Sanyo 20" FOUR years ago was $399!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The problem is, when CDs first came out,the prices were outrageous, and we were told: "Price are high now, but as soon as volume gets up there close to cassettes, production prices will drop, and CDs will be cheaper." What a load of crap. Prices have continuously gone up
Not true. The bulk of CDs are still in the $16 range, which is where they were in the late 1980s. If you adjust for inflation, that's a net *decrease*. Even if you put the average CD price at $18, then that's still not an inflation-adjusted increase.
You can complain that CDs are too expensive, but you can't complain that they've been continually going up--period.
So I can't use infinitives, but it's perfectly correct and alright when you feel like using them.
Well, no I don't see that. Pricewatch doesn't have 32MB CF below $14. However, that was not the point. I NEVER said that CF cards could not get to $6, and I NEVER said that the prices of CF cards would not decrease. I will say that you will NEVER see a CF card for less than $1, even a decade, or more, from now, unless, perhaps, there is monsterous inflation, or perhaps some manufacturer has some reason to sell below their production costs. I would say the same for hard drives.
This has got to be a joke. Your specific examples are the fact that more manufacturer's are making larger, memory-based storage devices. That is not an example of how low the price of compactflash can get.
Well, I'll give you the fact that Zip drives were propritary, but the rest of your comment would describe CF better than Zip.
Well, I can't speak for DVD burners, but I can safely say that memory cards put off more heat when I am copying data to them than my CD-Burner does when I am burning a CD. The most ironic thing about that fact is that the CD-Burner is transfering data orders of magnitude faster than the CF card is.
I'll just ignore that incoherent second-to-last paragraph there.
Yes. Everything drops in price gradually. The difference is that TVs can be very flexible. The ones we have now are entirely different than what was available in the 50's, and 60's, and there's nothing wrong with that. With CF, the interface cannot change, the commuication cannot change, the form factor cannot change, etc. TVs have not gone below the price of the raw materials used to make them, as they never will. CF will never get below $1, because the materials needed to make a CF card aren't even that cheap (not even taking into account assembly, labor, R&D, etc).
It's quite possible you will see 1GB CF cards for $15.... It's quite possible you will eventually see 100GB CF cards for $15... However, even when 1TB CF cards are $15, manufacturers will STILL not be able to make a 1MB CF card for $1.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
CDRs are an example of sellers selling below manufacture cost already. The point of the sale is to sell readers not media. CDRs from Staples, OfficeMax, Circuit City, and Best Buy are free for 50 and 100 packs often. Floppies are free, as are a lot of other electronics because they want people to buy other stuff, the high margin stuff. Why couldn't flash ram be the same? Memory (256MB PC 133) this week at Officemax is $14.99.
I also think you have YET to read and comprehend my initial post. I didn't say compact flash necessarily, but CF SIZED media that was flash based.
You are also discounting the internet sales prices, wholesale prices on mass market and retail prices. Even ebay prices have a large impact on retail prices.
Saying that a TV requires less of anything than a memory card is absurd.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Personally, I think CD sales would take off if, included on each music disk, was a data track which contained an unprotected (eg. MP3, OGG) encoded version of each song on the CD. For one thing, this would be back-wards compatible with all existing CD Audio players. For another, it would be forward compatible with the emerging CD players capable of decoding encoded audio. Mostly, though, it would make the process of "ripping" a CD practically instant... just drag the already encoded files off the CD. Finally, to add even more value to a CD's purchase, bonus tracks from other artists, or even all the tracks previously released on other CDs that are no longer on sale for this artist could be released in encoded form only. Other types of bonuses that could be included would be interviews with the artists, live performances, karaoke versions of the featured tracks, etc. Basically the idea here is that mainstream CDs almost never store 80 minutes of CD-Audio, leaving plenty of space for all sorts of encoded content extras that would give the CD value to the consumer above and beyond what they cold easily find on sharing networks, and the level of convenience would be similar or greater as they would get all sorts of content right away rather than having to meticulously search for and download each track and each bonus-feature one-by-one. I think many people in America would still like to support their favorite artists at least once in a while by purchasing their album... but copy protection is exactly the wrong solution. Sharing music with one's friends is the new killer app of music, and trying to limit it is just simply missing the boat. Record companies should be looking for new and innovative ways to make music sharing easier and for new things to put on CDs to increase the value to the consumer. --Shon
Now, some may ask what my previous post has to do with the article? Well, it has to do with monopoly practices.
Consider this. Before CD burners, where could you find blank recordable CD disks? You couldn't! Why? You had no use for them. Now recordable CDs have existed ever since there have been CDs because the music we bought was placed on them - the only one' that used them were.... Yep - the record companies. They alone introduced the "Compact Disk". They did so to circumvent the use of cassete tapes. I often wonder if they saw the advent of the PC and the CD-R/RW drive.
Now, in steps the CDrom drive - no big deal. And you can listen to music on your computer - ok. Then comes the CD-R drives and shortly after CD-RW, so no hint of any disention from Hollywood and the RIAA faithful. Ok, bring on Napster - Now EVERYTHING CHANGES. As is well known you download of Napster, Convert to MP3, and then "burn" these to a CD-R and voila - you have free and portable music, just like you used to get at the store and essentially the same that made the Billions for the record companies.
Now, CD-R/RWs are a big problem, and everyone is familiar with the push to kill P2P and lock in the market again by passing legislation in the name of security (Palladium and TCPA, et al) and more stringent enforcement of copyright laws.
Now, does anyone honestly think for a minute that RIAA and friends want the 10x capacity of DVD-Rs to take off? Not on your life. Let's see, a DVD recorder, writable DVD media, and, will take Led Zeppelin for example (disbanded 20 years and selling a million/year), can you see where this is going. Two DVD-Rs and the complete (or nearly so) collection of Led Zeppelin written to these two disks! Ya, that's the ticket.
Now, take fat internet pipes. Be it DSL or Cable. Market analysis shows that this sector is increasing at a steady rate with no sign of slowing.
So, I have my P2P software, my DVD recorder and disks, and a 1.5Mbit pipe. I'll never need to buy another CD again if I don't want to. So, based on this assumption I don't see the adoption of recordable DVDs being helped in anyway shape of form by those in the recording industry.
Those in the recording industry doesn't just mean the recording companies themselves. It also includes the advertising, distribution, and the actual makers of the CDs themselves. Which puts another wrinkle into possible attempts to thwart the adoption of recordable DVDs. Let's say I own a very lucrative and successful company that makes CDs for Sony Corp and all their subsidiary music companies. Do you think I want to see a mass market for DVDs? Maybe in the future. But that means retooling, and alot of expense. My profits are down as it is because I'm not making as many prerecorded CDs as before due to the economy and lower music sales.
So, it's just not the RIAA music companies but a whole infrastructure built upon the current market strategy that feels threatened by DVDs recorders and disks, and the terror of mass acceptance and utilization by the consumer base instill in this infrastructure. I don't see them switching over DVD for music. I do expect to see a harder push to limit comsumer choice and doorways to new techhnologies in the form of more legislation and the mandate to people like M$ to further hasten their development of Palladium, TCPA, and other such technologies.
The only time these market entities see fit to endorse a given technology is when they feel confident that they can control the "keys" to the kingdom (or in this case the technology) and at this point they really don't even understand it and have shown that their ability to forcast the effects and impacts of these technologies on their markets is poor at best.
So, expect the CD disk to be around for a while at least - the powers that be will do their best to keep it so.
I don't know how you got that idea that I said that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Twilight of the CD? Not if It Can Be Reinvented
By LAURA M. HOLSON
LOS ANGELES
TONIGHT in Manhattan, rock stars, divas and rappers will descend en masse on Madison Square Garden, arriving at the Grammy ceremonies in a parade of glamour and attitude. But the excitement they create will only mask the growing anxiety in the recording industry about the future of its fundamental product, the CD, which is threatened with the same obsolescence that it long ago foisted on the LP and then the tape cassette.
Introduced in the United States 20 years ago, the CD is losing its allure. From 2001 to 2002, some 62.5 million fewer of them were sold -- a decline of 9 percent to 649.5 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Online swapping of songs is growing at a crippling rate, forcing almost every corner of the music industry to try to divine exactly what role, if any, the CD will play in a future dominated by Internet delivery and competition from popular new technologies like the DVD.
Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future. But they say it will take at least two years for companies to devise a business plan for it that makes financial sense. In the meantime, the CD will remain the biggest source of revenue for both music retailers and recording companies, who will try to squeeze as much profit as they can out of each and every sale.
As a result, the CD is being rethought, repackaged and, in some cases, repriced.
Experiments to resuscitate this ailing product are growing. In January, Bon Jovi created a compact disc, with eight previously unreleased songs, exclusively for Target stores. Priced at $6.99, it was intended to help bolster sales of other Bon Jovi albums, including the newest, "Bounce."
Best Buy, the No. 1 electronics chain in the country, is selling prepaid cards good for 10 downloads that allow consumers to create compilations to play either on discs or on computers. And last year, the Interscope recording label gave a DVD to the first million buyers of "The Eminem Show" as an incentive to buy the CD.
All this is happening as the economic underpinnings of the CD continue to deterioriate, endangering the music business altogether. With the rising popularity of online music, much of it available free, technology-wise teenagers, the industry's most voracious buyers, can easily use CD-burning technology to make bootleg copies and sell them at school for as little as $1.
Companies are showing signs of cracking. Two industry veterans have recently lost their jobs: Thomas D. Mottola, the head of Sony Music Entertainment, which lost more than $132 million last year; and Jay Boberg, president of MCA Records. The music retailer Wherehouse Entertainment announced in January that it was filing for bankruptcy protection, partly because of lackluster sales. And the EMI Group, based in London, the only major music company that is not a part of a media conglomerate, is struggling with debt and is believed by analysts to be considering merger prospects.
"Large companies tend to wait until they feel pain to act," said Dan Hart, chief executive of Echo, a recently formed consortium of retailers that hope to sell music online. "Now they feel pain."
DOUG MORRIS, chief executive of the Universal Music Group, said: "We are definitely in the middle of a transition. It was always a packaged-goods business, but that is changing. We are slowly moving forward."
Compact disc sales have slipped for several reasons, not all of them related to piracy or online music swapping. Critics complain that there is a dearth of blockbuster acts these days and that those with hits, like Britney Spears, often have short-lived careers. And with the average price of a compact disc at $14.21, they contend that music is simply too expensive for frequent purchases.
But Hilary B. Rosen, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, countered that a recent study by the association found that only 3 percent of the consumers polled said they were buying less music because prices were too high.
Still, there is no question that other activities are taking up listeners' time, thanks to the growth of electronic games and multichannel cable and satellite television. Perhaps most threatening is the popularity of the DVD, which emerged in the mid-1990's. By 1999, DVD players had gained mass-market appeal, and they now cost as little as $50, about the same price as a portable boom box. In some retail stores, DVD sales have surpassed those of CD's.
"The DVD is moving into the bedrooms of the next generation of young kids," said Gary L. Arnold, senior vice president for entertainment at Best Buy, which announced in January that it was closing 107 stores. The next generation of young people has no affinity for the compact disc. For them, he said, "it's about gaming and PlayStation."
TO thwart online swapping, several music companies, including Sony and Universal, have experimented with copy-protected compact discs, much to the ire of paying consumers, who complain that they cannot listen to some of those discs on their computers. The industry does not use a standard copy-protected format, so consumers do not know what kind of disc they are buying. Fearing a consumer backlash, the industry has slowed down those copy-protection efforts.
Software makers are trying to come up with alternatives that address the needs of both consumers and recording companies. At a recent music conference in Cannes, France, Microsoft said it had developed technology to allow music companies to record two sets of identical songs on a compact disc, one that could be played on a home or car stereo and the other, called second session, that could be copied to a personal computer. The second-session songs would have limitations, perhaps barring consumers from sharing files or copying songs onto another disc.
Recording companies probably placed too much hope on super audio CD's, which are said to have superior sound compared with regular CD's. The technology, introduced two years ago, has not taken off because super audio CD's cost nearly four times as much to buy as regular CD's -- and they require a special machine to experience the full impact.
And super audios, championed by Sony and Philips, are not alone in offering sound quality that surpasses that of the typical CD: a dueling new technology in DVD audio, supported by Panasonic and Pioneer, is setting up a battle reminiscent of the VHS-Betamax wars.
Until all these new technologies are sorted out, recording companies and retailers are betting on promotions and marketing deals to increase sales. Bruce Kirkland, a member of Bon Jovi's management team, said the album that Bon Jovi put together for Target had also increased sales of the "Bounce" album in its stores. In the first week of the promotion, Target's share of the market for "Bounce" for all retail stores jumped to 26.1 percent from 15.9 percent, he said.
"I think the onus is on the retailers to take care of this because the recording companies always shoot themselves in the foot," Mr. Kirkland said.
Mr. Arnold of Best Buy said he believed that DVD's could well replace the CD in the future because they play not only music but also video images. In the last 12 months, sales of DVD's have surpassed those of compact discs at Best Buy, he said.
But before they can become a new industry standard, he added, they will have to more adeptly meld music and video.
MUSIC distributors and retailers, battered by the slump in compact disc sales, are embarking on their own efforts to give consumers more and easily accessible music. Last month, six music retailers, including major outlets like Best Buy, Wherehouse and Tower Records, said they would form the Echo consortium to sell music on the Internet through their retail Web sites. As recently as a year ago, that would have been unthinkable, as retailers and music companies were at odds about how best to tackle online distribution.
In another joint effort, Anderson Merchandisers, one of the largest magazine and music distributors in the United States, bought technology from Liquid Audio, an online music pioneer that distributes 350,000 songs through retailers, in the hope of exploiting the growth in digital music.
"It has not been the norm that retailers should be the ones helping us rethink our business," said John Esposito, president of United States distribution for the Warner Music Group. "But retailers are telling us the current model does not work."
Best Buy has been one of the most active retailers in this regard. It recently began testing a program in 30 stores that allowed consumers to buy a card with a preset value that could be used to buy downloads to a computer or disc. Scott Young, vice president for digital distribution at Best Buy, said the experiment had had limited success and was under review.
Mr. Hart of Echo said retailers would primarily seek to sell downloads over their Web sites that consumers could call up from their homes. But as well as selling digital downloads, partners of Echo are likely to explore several options, including the use of store kiosks where consumers can make personalized compact discs.
Such a venture, like any in the digital music world, is fraught with risk. In 1999, Sony Music Entertainment tried a similar strategy but consumers did not respond, analysts said.
There are, of course, other problems facing distributors and retailers, most notably acquiring the rights to distribute whole catalogs of music online. The music companies faced that issue early on, when starting their own Web sites. Competing companies declined to offer all their music on both PressPlay, a joint venture of Sony Music and Universal Music, and MusicNet, which was formed by Warner Music, EMI and BMG. It took months for them to begin sharing music, leaving consumers disillusioned and frustrated.
For all of these ventures, companies will still have to grapple with why consumers would pay for music they can easily get free. One major retailer, according to a music executive, has suggested to several recording companies that it might put a cap on the price of any compact disc it sold in its stores. Only a store like Wal-Mart would have the strength the pull that off, he added.
"I think the biggest problem is, the industry doesn't know how to get started and take steps where you get an incremental gain," said Phil Leigh, a digital media analyst at Raymond James & Associates in Tampa, Fla. "If compact disc sales continue to drop and there is no increase in online sales, then artists will be mad and your bosses are mad, too. There is an old expression that pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs. The one thing executives don't get paid for is rocking the boat."
E000-VB14-G8RY
OK, no superdrive. Most desktops don't have a DVD-R, however.
And, yes, when SpeedStep kicks in the P3 does scale back considerably. That can be disabled. And don't give me the "PowerPC kills Pentium" argument. The architectures are so different that any comparisons are questionable at best.
My point was not that this Sharp computer was better than the PowerBook. It isn't. But calling the PowerBook G4 12" the "smallest fully featured notebook" is a pretty big stretch.
Apple always makes statements that have no meaning. The G4 "Crushes Pentiums". It has a shorter pipeline that accomplishes tasks in "12 fewer steps" (huh?). They provide a Photosop benchmark but don't tell what filters and operations were performed (other than saying that they were "nine commonly used operations", what the configuration of the Dell system was, what OS was used, etc - how are we supposed to believe their benchmarks if they won't even give the details? They give a wonderful diagram of squares piling up in a Pentium - comparing SIMD to single instructions? Huh? What are they even talking about? They used BLAST to test XServe, but they used completely different products to compare XServe and the PC systems. On their Apache tests, they don't show what type of content was served, what version of Apache was used, whether the XServe had 1.5GB of memory or 256M, whether the Dell system was a single or dual P3, whether the XServe was single or dual PPC, whether the systems were RAID0, or any other important details.
Apple's website is filled with charts and graphs and promises that mean absolutely nothing.
Depends, of course, on what definition of Obsolete that you use, and I was exaggerating a tiny bit :P
:P
:P
None-the-less, that still gets back to what I was arguing in the first place, that people don't like changing things because it's expensive and mostly not worth the bother.
And btw, I really wouldn't mind surround sound music to go with my surround sound system
And no I don't listen to Human Nature either, but that was on a CD for charity where popular bands and artists played something as humanly different to their norm as possible - it was made and promoted by a Rock radio station. here's a promo. I'm a fan of charitable stuff
What would stop me from refilling my water bottle with tap water from home, and giving it to my friend? Sure it diminishes the value, but the "Product" is still there. Well not really, the "purity" is not there any more. However if your thirsty and have no choice you will drink from this refilled bottle of water.
Now think you go running to corner store, if there was a free bottle of refilled water in you hand that you brought from home and there is a nice cold "new" bottle for $1.00 in a store fridge right in front of you.
Ill spend the buck for the new one. Kinda stupid but I buy new cold water all the time. Would I buy water for 20.00$ no - way, I would cuss the store out and never go back.
Now why would a real MP3 from a "Media Company" be less appealing than a news feed MP3. If could get it any time I wanted as an inpulse buy and the price was right and I could find it, cool.
Now I dont want to purchase my Media over and over again. I have had cd's stolen and even lost a few. With the current "Legal" digital music plans its even worse. I reformat my computer every 6 months. I do not want to have to re purchase any Media, ever again. It seems that Media Companies latest attempts at rights management dont care about this at all.
Its a fundamental flaw in their logic.
cra451
Here's a list of other features that laptop doesn't have: integrated Wifi, integrated GIGABIT ethernet, firewire 800, no backlit solid feeling keyboard, most likely a Sharp LCD (lowest quality) vs a Samsung or Philips LCD (highest quality).
Also, there is the website www.barefeats.com that DOES give real world tests.
There is a lot to say about being productive in speed to. The Apple GUI is clean and consistent. Whether slow or smaller percentage of market, more people get more things done faster on a Mac. That's based on real world tests.
Further, NO PENTIUM LAPTOP EVER compares to an Apple laptop. As for desktops, Yes, the high ends beat Appl's high ends. But anything that has a dektop Pentium processor in it lasts a max of 45 minutes. At least Apple can squeeze 3 hours out of their fastest laptops. This is due to the fact that Apple uses the same processors across the board.
It's obvious you hate Macs, so no matter what benchmark or statistic I threw your way, wouldn't matter. I, on the other hand, use both, I prefer Macs, but really am not that bias towards them.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
That is just outright STUPID.
The sad thing is that that you think anyone gives a SHIT what you think! That's ridiculous! I have much better ways to spend my time.
That lapdoes have integrated WIFI, and the 12" PowerBook has neither the gigabit ethernet, the firewire 800, nor the backlit keyboard of the 17" powerbook.
The Alienware desktop P4 (3.06GHZ HT) powered laptop runs 2 and a half hours. It's a tank, but it's still laptop.
I don't hate macs. I think that the're cool, actually. If I had $1800, I might get a PowerBook G4. I instead got an Athlon XP 1600+ notebook with a DVD/CDRW, 256M of DDR, 40G disk, integrated LAN and modem, and Windows XP for $1100. It's not as cool as the PowerBook G4, but it gets the job done.
"Further, NO PENTIUM LAPTOP EVER compares to an Apple laptop."
That's bullshit. Go look at a P4-m 2.4ghz laptop and come back and tell me that.
"This is due to the fact that Apple uses the same processors across the board."
My laptop has an Athlon XP in it. A real Athlon XP. It has power management features and smaller packaging, but it is otherwise an actual Athlon XP.
Your source for benchmarks was also
"There is a lot to say about being productive in speed to. The Apple GUI is clean and consistent. Whether slow or smaller percentage of market, more people get more things done faster on a Mac. That's based on real world tests."
That, my friend, is also bullshit. That test was done several years ago by an agency contracted by Apple. Unless you're talking about a different test. I really don't know since you didn't bother to provide a source.
"So is EVERY OTHER PC website. (Filled with meaningless benchmarks)"
Yes, but they document their hardware and their software. Look at AMD's benchmarks on their webiste. They give hardware and software details. Apple does not.
"Sharp LCD (lowest quality) vs a Samsung or Philips LCD (highest quality)"
Ok, so the LCD sucks. I agree that Sharp LCDs suck. But that doesn't mean that it's not "fully featured".
Look, I never said that the Sharp notebook was better than the PowerBook G4. It's not. For one, the graphics on the Sharp are crap. I admitted that. And I'll agree that the mobile P3 is not the fastest CPU on the block.
But Apple didn't say that their laptop was the "best". They said that it was the "smallest fully featured notebook computer". I would say that the Sharp notebook is "fully featured". It may be a piece of shit. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether it's "fully featured". Maybe Apple argues that it doesnt' have a "desktop class" processor. I would argue that the 12" PowerBook G4 doesn't either.
My problem is not with Apple's hardware or software. I personally think that it's overpriced. But there's nothing wrong with that - that's what free enterprise is all about. Apple clearly offers a premium product and prices their products accordingly.
My problem is with Apple's continued spread of bullshit about their computers. If they would market on the merits of their hardware and software (instead of a bunch of "horror stories" about how PCs are bad), I would have a lot more respect. I'm a PC person - I love building my own systems. But even I'm attracted by their hardware. But the claims that they make are neither documented nore conducted scientificly. Look at AMD's website and their benchmarks - that's what Apple should be aiming for, not a bunch of empty claims about Macs "crushing" Pentiums. And not the same Altivec illustration that they have been using for three years.
I think that the problem is that Apple's hardware is not competitive from a speed perspective. Say what you will about the PowerPC, but it's just not as fast.
That's not what Apple should be marketing. They have a lot more to offer than raw speed. That's what they should be marketing.
I diasagree with the price/performance issue - it is very true, if one were to go configure the exact same computers on the Dell website you would get a $50-$75 difference in favor of the PC. But what you don't get is the versatility of the Mac OS. The PC can not emulate the Mac very well.
Please don't quote anyone and then say it's bogus. Again you're Mac Bashing without justification. I don't bash or biasly speak favorably about Macs.
I gave you actual examples, without links because I can't remember where they are. The website www.barefeats.com is a good start, so is www.xlr8yourMac.com.
One example I don't know the link to involves workflow and another ease of use. Chiat Day, a large advertising firm behind a majority of the good commercials on TV, was given a test on workflow. On average, the Macintosh side of their division, using the same programs on PC & Mac - got the job done with the exact same jobs 20% faster. Both sides had motivation to "be the better of the two". Similarly. 10 Macs and 10 PCs of equivalent hardware are taken into a retirement home boxed up/sealed. 5 Men / 5 Women (all elderly/computer illiterate) - they are told to, "With no help whatsoever" See if you can get this machine on the internet, here is the only advice, both machines have had wireless cards installed so you will not need to plug it in for the internet."
Well, the Mac works driverless out of the box, no selection of even the base station. The PC, any PC or Linux box, needs at the very least drivers for the card and then selection of a network. Further 8 out of 10 Seniors got on within 30 minutes on the Mac - all 10 before all 10 of the PC Testers. 2 PC Testers, never got on, one wasn't able to get the machine turned on. One crashed the PC straight out of the box.
I thought this test had to be rigged. I tried it a year and a half ago at a Mac User's Group meeting. Random sample, no MUG members, no previous retired IBM employees) - the same results!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The funny thing is, if AOL stopped sending CD's, CD sales would go to nothing ;-).
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don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.
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