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Barenaked USB Drive
CryptoKnight writes "The Barenaked Ladies are releasing their next album via a reusable 128 MB USB flash drive. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: 'Rather than distribute via CD, DVD or download, the Barenaked Ladies are making their newest selection of songs, videos and exclusive material available on a USB flash drive. Nettwerk Music Group is releasing Barenaked on a Stick beginning today, says the Hollywood Reporter. It plays on PCs, Macs and any other audio product with a USB port -- like some car stereos -- and costs $30.'"
A USB stick is more expensive to make than a CD, whcih you can just stamp. Either is more expensive than just sending bits over the wire.
For a one-album set of songs, I don't see this working except for the novelty, unless it's billed as "128 MB USB stick (with Barenaked Ladies songs)" instead of "Barenaked Ladies songs (on a USB stick)." It reminds me of school fundraisers where you're selling tickets to an event with candy. It's always easier to sell people candy with a ticket as a bonus than to sell them a ticket with candy as a bonus.
On the other hand, for 29 songs, the cost should really be compared to a 2-CD set. At that point, $30 isn't that much more than $25.
RTFA:
"This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
Reusable. MP3 format.
I may actually get it. Granted, 128MB isn't nearly large enough for my BNL boot collection (~2gb or so), but I could use a memory key and $30 isn't too bad a price.. Here's hoping _McDonald's Girl_ and/or _Lovers in a Dangerous Time_ are on there...
This is interesting to me because I think it's a glimpse of music distribution in the near future. No, I don't mean that USB sticks will be the medium of choice in the near future, I mean that music will be released *without* CDs or even DVDs. There's a certain camp of DRM apologists who say, "but I can always just buy the CD and rip the songs myself if I don't want the DRM from the iTunes music store/Napster/whatever, therefore the DRM on those services is OK." Those people don't seem to understand that in a time when CDs are painfully hard for music companies to control (just ask Sony), their sales are plummetting, and iTMS has shown that people are willing to buy DRM-infected music online in large numbers, the days of getting new releases on CD are numbered. If I were a music exec (eew, slimy!), I would be just itching for the day I could do a full-DRM release without releasing CDs at all.
By the way, I *do* understand that in TFA the tracks are unencumbered MP3, but my point is about the limited future for CD distribution. No slight against BNL is intended, though I'm not thrilled that they're only distributing lossy encodings.
-DA
Oh, and by the way, here are a few stores where you can buy unencumbered music electronically:
www.magnatune.com (lossless even!)
www.bleep.com (lots of great electronica, including Boards of Canada)
Are you sure you're talking about the same meaning of "compression?"
I know there are two different kinds of audio compression (as evidenced by Wikipedia's disambiguation page), and they can sit at various points in the production chain:
The Barenaked ladies have always been at the forefront of using tech to get their music out there.
I've bought their last three CD's online (including a solo project by Steven Page) with great ease and little expense. The last two were available in flac format so no lossless problems there. They even came with all the album artwork and lyric sheet info available in PDF format.
When 'Maroon' was released they were one of the first bands to provide dummy versions of the song on file sharing networks. (You could download a 40 meg uncompressed file where the song started up but then to band members came on and started shilling their CD in a good natured way over the top of the tunes)
When 'Everything to Everyone' was released a few years ago, I recall trying to get a copy of it from a file sharing network because here in Australia I couldn't get my hands on the CD for months. They flooded the network with all the tracks from the new album without the vocal tracks, so I had to wait. Now, because of their embracement of selling on the web, I don't have to.
The reason I don't buy from online services is I refuse to pay money for lossy codecs.
Then you're just being silly. "Lossy" refers to the data stream, not the sound. "Lossy" does not mean that the sound is audibly inferior or that you could hear the difference in a blind test. In fact, I've administered such tests to a few fellow audiophiles and proved that I could create a "lossy" MP3 that is audibly indistinguishable from the original recording. (The tests I conducted involved skilled listeners in their 20's and 30's using a Rega Planet CD player through Sennheiser SR-325 headphones and a Creek headphone amp. They selected the music. I encoded it to MP3 and then brought it back to WAV. I recorded a CD with several copies of each track - encoded and virgin. They were unable to detect the difference and their results were, statistically speaking, no better than a coin toss.)
That said, most of the online services have substandard, low-bit-rate recordings which do sound audibly inferior to CDs. That's the reason to boycott those services, not because the codecs are lossy.
Right now I have about 20 racks full of CDs I've since digitized. A CD takes up WAY more room than a puny nerdstick. So if the choice is between a rack full of CDs which are completely useless (since I have a copy at my fingertips, and they can't be re-used) and a semi-useless-and-smaller nerdstick (which can be used for trafficking data from work to home without the fuss of emailing it, or worrying about losing an expensiveish memory stick), then I'd choose the nerdstick.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive