An Overview Of Present, Future of Music Technology

prostoalex writes "IEEE Spectrum magazine is running a feature article on the state of music and current digital formats. They point to an interesting phenomenon in the digital music world that Steve Jobs emphasized as well: for the first time in music history, the next big format was not about better quality (SACD and such) but about better portability (MP3). 'It was only five years ago that the music industry was facing a civil war over the next-generation disc-based music format -- the successor to the wildly successful CD. At that time, hardly anybody doubted that the music would be encoded optically on a round plastic disc the size of a CD.'"

Comments

MP3 vs the rest: Is file size really an issue?

[Simon]

There seems to be an assumption by the technologists and music industry that people are dying for a better format to replace MP3. Better quality, smaller file sizes. I don't believe that is so.

Filesize: But when a new computer comes with a 200Gb harddrive do most people these days even care that MP3 maybe isn't the most effective compression algorithm? I mean, you've got plenty for space so who cares if the typical music collection is 5Gb or 10Gb?

Quality: Most people are happy with CD quality. 192Kb MP3 pretty much gives you that quality. Most people are more than happy with MP3, especially on a portable device where listen conditions are 'suboptimal' shall we say.

Portablity vs DRM: This is the killer feature of digital music. The music industry wants to stop it, for everyone else it is all about being able to move music around. This is the one 'feature' that people do not want to see go.

What I've trying to say here is that people are more than happy with MP3 and the 'problems' with MP3 really aren't an issue for the majority of people, while these replacement formats kill the one feature that people really care about.

Good luck marketing your new formats, music industry. You'll need it!

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Simon