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The Death of the Music CD
Rick Zeman writes "According to the Washington Post, the next new music format will be...no format. From the article: 'What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you could create whatever you need. If you want to make an MP3, you make an MP3. If you want a DVD-Audio surround disc, you make that.'"
...Until they DRM it every way but sideways.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
A file format will _allways_ have to be involved, even what this people call "no format", will be a format, raw audio is also a file format, The point is that raw, uncompressed formats are not really very usefull to transfer over the net, compression is fundamental, unleast you want to remix it, or do some quality job over the audio, in which case, you need the full, uncompressed, high quality original, people will want a compressed, small format.
ALMAFUERTE
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
But that uses digital sampling, forcing you to use 44.1kHz or whatever they use these days... I'd prefer a pristine analogue copy that I could convert myself...
Of course, that'd be ridiculously expensive and stoopid. A losslessly compressed non-DRM'd RAW/WAV file suits me...
so is this goodbye to analog? photography is saying goodbye too, but the 'artists' prefer analog there.. musicians don't seem to care
... maybe they will just be booths where you could have a CD/DVD/whatever burnt with the tracks of your choice and label printed out there and then.
It would certainly reduce the problems with shoplifting. Although you could do the same with a home PC if you had the bandwidth and a color printer.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
i think what the article was trying to say was that in the future, we wont own a cd, or a tape, or an LP, we'll own a limited license on a song that we can use with the format of our choice.
To prevent the industry (CD Retailers) from going entirely bankrupt though, perhaps the CD stores (current ones) could instead become "customizing stations", in which customers could request certain songs and have a professional (label, case, everything)CD made for them. Sure you could do it at home, but couldn't you always order a CD from Amazon? And since all the shop would really need is a burner, access to a database of songs, and a computer, it could be as small as a stall!
From the way I see it, the CD Retailers will:
A) Go out of business...
B) Take their shop online!
C) Merge with an existing online retailer (most likely)
D) Do the CD creation for customers by downsizing their shop to a music stall (in the mall).
It takes a high end 486 to a Pentium to decode MP3 files in the x86 world, yet there are MP3 players that last a long time on a single AA battery. All that someone would have to do is create a dedicated FLAC decoding chip.
Fine, as long as they still sell the lossless version for the same price as the lossy compressed one...
and to me even a high quality mp3 is lossy.
There seems to be no real "meat" to this article, they talk about how we will get "raw data files" which we can encode to anything we want. That's really nothing new to me, and I get the feeling that the article is written for people who are not techinically inclined and don't care about the details (which basically renders it useless to me). I mean "the new format is no format, what we will get is a data file"...but what format would the datafile be in?
One interesting thing that the article almost hints at is a change in ideas about how music is distributed and musicians make money. The say that artists will make lots of different stuff (different tracks, videos, album art) available and you choose what to "consume". They don't however, say how this will be distributed, and this is an interesting thing to speculate on. I, for one, would be excited to see the music industry move towards a subsription based model, where you pay a fee to subscribe to your favourite artists and in exchange you get to download tracks, see what the artist has been up to, etc. (I'm not in the business of marketing, somebody else can figure out the details here). This would reward bands that have a loyal following and can keep people's interest for years, and eliminate the hype-marketing that is responsible for convincing so many people to buy crap music.
You can either complain, or do nothing. You don't get both.
That's probably overkill. FLAC decoding is all integer ops so you could do it on some cheap ARM chip without any problem. The ease of it is likely why FLAC is already supported on various bits of hardware.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Hmm. Actually the theorem says that once you sample at twice a frequency, you can use the samples to exactly reconstruct anything at that frequency. So it's exactly accurate, if you do the right thing when you play it.
That's for unlimited precision samples, anyway.
But they only compress to about 50% so a CD full of them could only hold two albums instead of one
.75 of original size, and G'd up thuggin' west coast gangsta rap to .60 of original size. I assume that rap compresses better because it has much more redundancy, that is, "wut wut wut" and some bassline will compress better than your everyday rock song.
I used FLAC for a while, and I found that it compressed rock to about
In terms of cpu draw, I found that ripping a CD was not CPU bound when using FLAC, but limited to the speed of the cdrom drive. Even still, PC cdrom drives can process the audio off of a CD on their own (See grey cable) which is a testament to how little processing raw PCM data must take.
I RTFA... the people being quoted are the ones who are not nerds
WTF does "no format" mean? analog? there is no such thing as data with no format. The article is talking about business trends, not techology and it is so light on facts that you can make up your own story about whether this unformatted "data" is lossy or lossless and otherwise just make guesses about the "stuff that matters", as we say. DRM, as it is implemented and embedded in various technologies is always tied to a format.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The habits of "most ordinary people" change with the generations. Many people still alive in the US remember when horse racing, boxing, and baseball were the three major sports that "most ordinary people" cared about. Today, only baseball hangs on to that claim ...
You can still find a number of musicians who prefer to record in analog.
>The music industry wants to give us LESS and charge us MORE.
/. comment appropriately modded insightful. At the same time it's completely wrong.
A tipical
Because all the music industry has rights to their content, there is nothing to "give you*", so it's stupid to claim they want to give you LESS.
* For example, they can simply allow you (i.e. make it legal) that you can keep downloading shit via P2P networks. They even don't need to provide download service as the content is mostly out there on the Network.
Do they want to charge more?
As profit-making enterprises, they should be trying to charge more, which is no problem if they offer disproportionately more in return. If you're currently a net-thief (i.e. you steal more than you buy), you'll pay "more" if you buy everything. Folks who pay for all their content will probably pay (relatively) less than they do now.
>They're not going to give us more.
They don't care - they can give you use-rights to everything they own as long as you pay more. For example, if you approach a studio and offer them $10K in cash for "all you can see" I believe they'd accept it as they know they now squeeze (say) $3K per lifetime per customer of your traits. The fact that the average $3K customer sees 1,935 movies for those $3K and you'd see 24,292 titles for your $10K is of no importance whatsoever.
The article is correct in saying that the format of the future is no format at all but not because you buy data (and convert it any way you want) but because you buy use-rights to a song and you don't even need to own the data.
Music can be played someplace else and delivered to your earphone's via GPRS phone or DSL.
The ideal:
"What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you could create whatever you need."
The real:
Napster's To Go subscription service allows buyers to essentially rent an unlimited amount of music for $15 per month. A subscription-based service will be built into the latest version of Microsoft Windows; for between $10 and $20, users will access songs for a monthly fee but will be unable to burn them onto CDs.
You'll get the data files, but not the "buy" or "create whatever you want" parts, because that would eliminate valuable business opportunities for people who never wrote or played a line of music in their lives.
From the FAQ:Other nice things about Magnatune are:
probably the indie musicians. Many of them are going down the path of downloads. Sooner or later, several of them will make it big without a label. Once that happens, the labels will be out of the loop.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1. MP3 is a standard too. It plays on all computers, all digital players (except the few old Sony players that noone bought), many cellphones and portable game consoles. And I bet that CD didn't become the standard it is today overnight.
2. I won't trust you, because it was proven time and time again, that audiophiles lose their ability to distinguish 128 from 192 and CD from MP3 as long as the testing is blind. 128Kbit MP3s are good enough for more than 90% of the people. And the latest OGG/AAC/WMA/MP3Pro are good enough for 99%.
3. That doesn't work. You are not an authority figure, so there is no reason to repeat after you anything. We can all think for ourselves and it is obvious that you can buy an album digitally just as you can buy a single track. In fact, right now I am playing an album (5 albums, to be more exact) and it is in MP3 format. BTW, I am quite happy that I don't have to change CDs...
4. You can't piss people off with that. We will just pity your stupidity. You can eat your placebos as much as you want, of course, but everyone else knows that there is no way to tell iPod playing MP3s from your super-dooper $3k device playing 48bit DVD-audio or whatever else, as long as the testing is done blind.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I love Slashdot, where nonsensical flights of logic with absolutely no supporting evidence can be considered gospel. The music industry has supported CDs heavily for a long time, digital music is still mostly a matter of piracy and money-losing (or at least, loss-leading) business plans. The music industry would love to stop piracy, but seems pretty content selling shiny discs at $15/pop - wouldn't you?
They sure have a difficult time understanding that the old 20th century way of buying music is pretty much over.
The old way being you pay them 30-50% of the hourly minimum wage for a three to five minute recording on a stable physical medium.
They keep squeezing their heads to come up with new ways to keep this old form of business going, but it's fading every day.
The new music transaction format is much different. There is a completely different amount of music that the consumer gets for the same amount of money.
Now you buy an old hard disk that has 10 to 100 Gigabytes of MP3 or OGG compressed format audio of hundreds of albums in a certain genre or era of music. Some of it you keep, some of it you discard, some of it you will never listen to, some of it you pass on to others, some of it you alter, sample, or mix, and some of it you never know who the artist is.
Of course, you don't buy or trade these old hard disks full of unknown music from the music industry companies. It's not their business model. They couldn't even conceive of selling music in this way. They are doing everything that they can think of to actually put people in prison for selling or tranactioning music in this format.
But it doesn't matter. There has been a fundamental change in the nature of the distribution and storage format for audio in the past ten years. The music industry, which is a contradiction of terms in this new era, will have to come to terms with it.
Our terms.
One last thing, guys, don't put anyone in prison for listening to music. It will have long term nasty consequences, even including bloodshed when the penality for copying and listening to illegal music begins to approach the penality for kidnapping and killing music industry executives. And it won't stop or change the transformation that is happening in the entertainment industry. the new technology is a marketing challenge, not a criminal act that requires inprisonment.
We'd like to think that you won't let all this tough talk and macho posturing about putting people in jail and conficating their life savings for listening to music get out of control. But, frankly, we're losing our confidence in your ability to think rationally.
After all, it's only rock'n'roll.
Most of the rational side of me says that I really don't want to see CD die. But yet, there is a small part of me that does.
Online shopping has given us stores that can specialize in extremely niche products, because now one location with one stock of items can service everybody in a particular country, or more. I am a fan of Japanese music, and if I want to buy a CD, I certainly can't find anywhere locally to purchase one. Thanks to the internet, there can now exist America-based J-music stores because their customer base can be everybody in the U.S., not just people in their location.
(Here's the point I'm getting at, coming up.)
In the same kind of way, if music becomes digital instead of physical, because you don't have stores with a set amount of space, and locations that must survive on the local customer base, music companies have far more freedom on what they can offer to whome. J-pop and the like will never be huge when it comes to physical CDs, because there aren't enough people to go to each store and purchase them. But once you don't have stores, but instead just bits of data on a server somewhere, you can offer every kind of music to people anywhere in the world, and as long as one person purchases a song, you've made profit.
If we get away from a physical medium for music, and suddenly the entire world becomes a possible market for the music, then hopefully things will get better for both sides. Music companies don't have to worry about expensive physical media, and they can very cheaply offer their wares to the entire world. Consumers get a huge increase in the amount of music that is available to them, and they can purchase that music more easily and cheaply.
Seems like some people equate "no format" with wav file. I had the impression from the article that what he means is you'll effectively be buying a *license* to a song. After that I'd expect to have options to download a song in a variety of formats, or even just stream the song to my hearts content.
I could see an initial charge for a license (eg: $1) and possibly small downloading charges for the track in different formats (10c). That way you could own a song for the next 20 years and as newer formats and storage mediums come out you keep "upgrading" the song.
I can get free music from the radio (all rock, all the time...) and TV (VH1, MTV , SOME of it is good). Why would I PAY for musc? Listen live , record, playback... It's all I need.
And of couse the MP3's I ALREADY have...