Slashdot Mirror
Legal Music Downloads Increase in 2005
GraWil writes "The CBC is reporting there is marked increase in legal music downloads in 2005. American internet users downloaded 158 million individual songs from January to June 2005, compared with 55 million during the same period in 2004; during the same period, U.S. CD sales decreased by 7%. According to Peter Jamieson, head of the British Phonographic Industry, "the record industry has enthusiastically embraced the new legal download services ... and now we're beginning to reap the rewards". In the UK, sales of seven-inch vinyl singles were also up 87% on last year."
I have signed up to Rhapsody due to the advice of so many slashdotters. Well, not to mention my Napster trial sucked due to so many "buy-only" tracks.
I thought it would be crazy for me to keep the subscription service for more than 2 weeks. To my surprise, I am listening to new stuff every day for the 6 months. Subscription still going unbelievably strong. That's like $120 spent on music... I know I wouldn't buy 12 CDs in 1 year. My only worry is that I run out of stuff to listen to eventually.
I just tried Napster again yesterday for the first time in over a year, but it still suffers from all of the problems that I had with it last time.
The catalog is incomplete, to really replace Limewire, it has to offer ALL of the songs I want. That includes some pretty obscure songs. Basically, my personal library is 1,500 songs or so off of Limewire. Napster's whole library seems to show about 750,000 songs. The legal library is 500 times the size of my own, but I don't like one in every 500 songs, probably only 1 in 1,000, if that, so there are huge gaps.
DRM sucks. It basically turns digital music into something that can only be effectively used while sitting right in front of the computer. I want a standard format (MP3) that I can burn to standard audio CDS, use on my Rio MP3 player, and burn to data discs that will work in an mp3 cd player, or my set top dvd player. DRM makes much of this impractical. Of course there is the argument that everybody would just steal the MP3's provided by the service. But why bother. If they cost $1 each, and I could do whatever I wanted with them, and they were good quality, not to mention legal. I wouldn't hesitate to skip the Limewire hassle and just by directly from them.
And where in the hell is the quality that was supposed to be associated with the pay services. What is stopping Napster from offering up the songs at 512k instead of the paltry 128 that they seem to be using now (yeah, wma makes a difference, but I still want bigger files). I would be happy spending even $2 per song for 512 DRMless MP3's that are legal. Instead, the stuff Napster sells sounds the exact same as the MP3's that came off of Napster 1. Not what I was expecting. I want 14mb downloads at 5mbps+/second, and why not, except for the size I can get everything else off of Limewire.
Further, I have to boot into Windows to use Napster or itunes (not counting pymusique). I don't like doing that, and I really can't play drm'd wmas under linux.
Limewire is still the best option. It's fast for a Java Application, it runs on anything with a virtual machine, can easily max out my download bandwidth, and I can use the files however I want. Of course, most of the files aren't legal, but the legal files can't do what I want so what good are they?
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
"I'll be so glad when you vinylphiles finally all die out.
:)
...only on excellent vinyl playback equipment. It tends to be tougher to produce a mechanical device like a turntable cartridge with the same level of consistency that can be expected when producing ICs and the like. That (along with other factors like simple supply and demand) is why decent vinyl playback stuff tends to be quite a bit more expensive than decent CD players do. I have a reasonably high-end turntable and I enjoy using it tremendously... but I have to admit it wasn't cheap compared to digital gear in its league.
Hey, I tease.
But seriously... Nyquist and all that."
Nyquist and all that? All that the Nyquist theorem says on the subject is that a sampling audio system like PCM should, in theory, be able to reproduce signals with frequencies up to 1/2 of the sampling rate faithfully. But in the real world, there are at least two problems with that:
1) The low-pass filters used on the signal path are physical devices, not theoretical concepts. As such, they can't be absolutely perfect... they introduce phase distortions and begin attenuating at frequencies somewhat lower than 1/2 Fs.
2) Even if the filters were "perfect" (not attenuating or introducing phase distortion until 1/2 Fs, at which point the attenuation becomes infinite)... well, the jury is still out on whether 22050hz (the theoretical upper bound given the 44.1khz sampling rate of CDs) is really high enough. There's some evidence to suggest that even if we can't "hear" frequencies above 22.050khz, they can have an effect on the way we perceive lower frequencies that we can hear.
Just to be fair to both sides of the argument though...
"CDs are still far worse sounding than vinyl."
To return to the digital downloads aspect of the article a bit though... I have to completely agree with the poster who shuns download services for poor quality. The only times I've extensively used iTunes were the Pepsi free song promotions, and if I found any songs I really really liked... well I went on Amazon or to my local record store and sought out the CDs to re-rip as DRM-free Apple Lossless. Better sound quality and the ability to use the format of my choice will make CDs the clear winner in my book for a long time to come.
-Frank