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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
Newsflash!
Not everyone in the world is a nerd.
Keep things simple. Buying CDs are simple. Hence, people will buy CDs.
Never in a million years. The music industry wants to give us LESS and charge us MORE. This scheme would mean them giving us MORE and charging us... well, who cares. They're not going to give us more.
So in other words, the format is WAV.
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
I mean, at first glance, I thought: "hey, this is a great use for FLAC". Then I realized that because FLAC takes so much CPU time to decompress, CD players that could play it don't exist (if they did, they'd be more expensive). Just give me a standard CD and I'll rip it myself, thanks.
Sounds good on the surface. But this is only another way for them to force DRM down our throats to the point that we have no other choice but to either accept it or not buy music. My choice? Not buy music...
I'm also willing to bet Microsoft conveniently has patents on whatever technology would be proposed to "secure" the digital file.
bash: rtfm: command not found
poor usage of an ellipsis in the submission ... I read it as ".no" format, thinking ".no" was some kind of new file extension.
Now indecisive people like me will be completely immobilized...
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?
the consumer would buy is a data file
you mean raw pcm data, kinda like a wav file, or CD audio.
and you could create whatever you need
so basically encode into whatever format you want.
can't we already have this for quite some time now? most players play only mp3 and wma, so for now, you're stuck with those formats.
the CD will very likely be surpassed as the album format of choice.
you still need some media to transfer the original data. the CD will remain.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
The music industry would *LOVE* to get rid of the music CD, so I see this as a trial balloon.
CD's are great because they have really good quality music in non-DRM format.
Keeping the CD's lets you rip to whatever new format or device that comes along.
Think it through...CD's are the consumer's best *and only* friend in the music business right now.
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing "Death of ..." articles?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
... 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.
The death of the CD will come from RIAA tactics. Leave aside their random lawsuits of 80 year old grandmas, the reason people will stop buying CD's is because they are made to pay $20 for 15 tracks from an artist when only 1-2 of them are good. Back in the day when LPs were popular, you could buy a disc with just the one song you wanted. Now you're force fed tripe from the industry pushing their flavor of the month, big breasted, tiny brained, diva wannabes. Why would I want to pay $20 for a Jessica Simpson CD when there's maybe one track on there that I might like. Much better to be able to pay a buck and get the one song I want and put it on my Rio. That's actually another point, media size. When's the last time you've seen anyone walk around with a discman?
The nice thing about owning the CD is it gives you proof of ownership (unless you physically stole it).
but, so far, all the major only music distribution has been in formats inferior to cd (probably all of it started out as the same bits as the cd release). .flac. I'd pay a little more than the cost of a cd to download the .flac out of a vast library including all the stuff I want and have yet to find. And it would cost the distributor far less as well.
I buy loads of music, and have a reasonably high-end computer-as-transport, headphone rig to listen to it. But I've yet to buy a single track online because of the quality issue (and drm). I buy and rip around 10 cds a month. Its a pain in the a$$ for me to find the music that suits my eclectic taste in CD form and then rip it to
If we could buy stuff in whatever format the artist wanted to output it in (pre-mixing/rendering even (opensource music)), the last remaining desire to have hard copy would be nullified for me:)
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).
Thats what we have right now. CD audio is uncompressed and sampled at 44100 hz 16bit. Wee can do whatever the hell we want with it.
The only improvement to be made is to up the sample rate and bit depth.
The increased sample rate would more accuratly represent the music especialy at higher frequencys. This is because the nyquist sampling therom (1/2 sample rate = highest detectable freq) is a minimum requirement for capturing a frequency at that limit -- it doesn't mean that it's at all accurate.
The higher bit depth would give us more dynamic range.
This will never happen though. They want to lock us into DRM formats which will prevent us from ever getting to the 'raw' data.
In preparation for the inevitable collectors purchasing "classic" CDs, I would suggest buying CDs now.
Store them in your basement for about 10 years and make a killing on EBay!
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
"If you just want to listen to music on your computer, think about what you have to go through to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song.
"There is a simplicity to the CD player."
Ok... So to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song on my computer using a CD, I have to either go to a store and buy the CD, or order it online and wait for it to get to my house. I also have to shell out $12-18 for the whole CD (depending on whether or not it's on sale), even if I only want that one song. When it finally arrives or I get home from the store, I have to break through the ridiculous wrappers they still use on CDs, pop it in my computer, and play it.
To do the same thing without a CD, I double-click on iTunes, click on the music store, enter Ashlee into the search box, scroll down to the song I want, click "buy now", wait a minute or two for it to download, then go back to my library and double-click to play it. If I want the whole album, I can click that instead for $9.99 and wait maybe 5-10 min for it to download, but if I just want that one song I can get it for 99c.
Where is the simplicity of the CD player again? Not to mention the fact that it first talks about wanting to listen to the music on your computer, then says the CD player is the simple part - but to do that, you go through the exact same steps listed above for listening to a CD on your computer, just putting the CD into the CD player instead of the computer.
Methinks the person quoted (a satellite radio exec) has no firsthand experience with this stuff.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
MP3s lose information due to their compressions scheme. So if you converted from and MP3 to OGG to WMA you'd end up with file missing all of the information from each round of compression. Using a lossless encoding format, like FLAC or WMA Lossles, would allow you to copy to whichever media format you prefer.
Most ordinary people like the idea of buying something "real" - they will even collect the CDs/LPs of a band (sometimes buying the same recording again) just to have a complete collection. The most famous cover artwork is also a factor, an item people like to own, and have on their bookshelves. The old 33 LPs were superior in that regard- have a look at the prices people are paying for certain old vinyl LPs on ebay..
MP3/downloads-type purchases will saturate out at a certain level - the general public will always go for the "real thing", which will probably still be CDs for the forseeable future..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
VERY wrong.
Few things computerwise are increasing faster than the capacity of bandwidth. Hard drives are outpacing CPU's, but bandwidth smokes them both. Compression will be VERY undesirable in the future. Something like music subscription services will probably rule the future. Purists of course will swear by the viceral pleasure of having the CD, but the convience of being able to get whatever you want streamed directly to the players of choice as desired will carry the day.
If I were Cingular, I'd try and buy napster or real, and look at adding a $5/mo option with a new 3 year agreement seeing if that washed out.
Just think...a new public, open standard called Digital Music Markup Language. Then you can use a convertor utility similar to XSLT to decide on what format you need...only problem is converting digital music to text is very costly in terms of space requirements. 2-3GB per song, as opposed to 2-3MB.
Kidding aside, it would be cool if there was a public standard for a raw binary format, where you *could* use an XSLT-like translation utility to turn it into whatever format you want.
I see people moaning about how the record companies won't "give" this to consumers. I'm cool with that. It's just one more reason to keep me from "giving" them any of my hard-earned money.
It's just that you'd have to download it and either view it on your computer or print it out yourself instead of getting it physically in a store. In fact, an artist could put out multiple versions of liner notes, etc for the same album - and instead of having to by several copies of the CD, you can just pay a few extra cents to download all the versions. I think this could be great! Get the future version of the iPod photo, and you can view your cover art and liner notes (all ten versions) while listening to your music at the gym or wherever.
And as for boxed sets and double albums, did you see the U2 super-boxed-set on iTunes? $440 worth of songs for $150. People will always want to buy things in bulk for a discount (which is basically what boxed sets are for), and people will always want different versions of the same songs or exclusive tracks (which iTunes has plenty of).
I don't know, maybe some people absolutely MUST HAVE the physical item to feel satisfied... In the case of liner notes etc, you can make that yourself if you have a decent printer. In the case of boxed sets - well, I guess I just don't see the appeal so much. Again, if you really need it, you can make it yourself after downloading it all, but what's the point? They take up so much space anyhow.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
That's the country of DeCSS by the way.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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 ...
Thank god it is finally dying. Cutting down trees, trucking them across the country to a factory that makes paper out of them, trucking the paper to the next factory where they put ink all over the paper so the round piece of plastic (another huge process involved here) inside the case with the digital data on it will have a nice cover to go with is, then these pieces of plastic are transported all over the world into stores, where people have to drive their cars to the store to buy them, then take them home and make mp3s out of them. And most likely the artist already has the music in digital format on his computer and could actually sell it equally well from right there. We have the technology. Guess which one I prefer.
1. CD is a standard. An old standard, but a standard. A CD will play on any appliance that can hold the disc whether it be the first CD units that rolled off the line 20 years ago, or a brand new crappy thing from a big box store, or an audiophile-grade playback unit. It 'just works' with no additional fiddling needed from consumers.
Given the number of clocks flashing 12 in this world, don't understimate that value.
2. I've invested in an audiophile grade system--I've got two Macintoshes--one next to my desk and another powering my MLs. Trust me, you can spot the 192s bitrates each time. They're particularly noticable on string music.
CDs--and SACD if it goes anywhere--generally offer a nice minumum. There's a nice floor there and you really don't want to go beneath it. With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
That being said, there are a lot of bad recordings out there.
3. Repeat after me: not everyone listens to pop music. Stop equating the entire musical industry with top 40 crap. Lots of people listen to albums, not songs. Buying one track out of an album of symphonic music generally doesn't make sense.
4. Just to piss people off, I'll remind everyone that an iPod is not a particularly good decoder. Of course, the amount of money needed to get a good (I can tell there's a difference with my eyes closed) DAC is $3k, but I doubt many people really care and even I can't afford one. The point being don't spend forever telling me how much you love your music if you're listening to it on crappy mp3s, ripped god knows how, at 192, on ear phones that use cone drivers.
>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.
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.
There's a nice floor there and you really don't want to go beneath it. With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
Not really. In 1987, you could count on a CD having a certain level of quality. Lately, the MAKE IT AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE approach has taken over. Instead of trying to make the most of CDDA's dynamic range, recording engineers are bent on making their album is the LOUDEST DISC IN YOUR CHANGER, and in the process you lose half the dynamic range. Maybe you mostly listen to classical music, and they haven't yet converted to the AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE school of recording. Try listening to a rock album from the 1980s and one from the last 2-3 years. It's depressing how the new recordings, made with brand new computer technology and better equipment sound worse than older ones.
0 1 - just my two bits
That's nice except that according to Napster: You can't listen to NAPSTER-downloaded songs on an iPod.
So you won't really be able to listen to them via a digital music player such as the iPod.
more confusion for the consumer who doesn't follow this stuff blow by blow.
I like microcars
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.
So it's a data file... but it doesn't have a format? Huh?
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.
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