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Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week
An anonymous reader writes to tell us Yahoo News is reporting that the last week of December turned out to be a golden week for music downloads. From the article: 'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports. In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm's one-week record for download sales.'"
Actually, many people feel prices won't be raised for some time due to recent antitrust investigations into digital music. Story here
I have to say that it doesn't seem out of character for the RIAA to just go ahead and demand higher prices despite the investigation. Personally I think it's rather obvious the RIAA is rolling in the dough, and even if antitrust practices are found the slap on the wrist they get will probably not even begin to make a dent in the money they made from inflated prices.
Whether or not CDs have "better" quality depends on what service you use. The CD format in and of itself is pretty low quality compared to some other digital formats available.
Where are you buying your music online from? Redbook standard is 2 x 16bit channels @ 44.1kHz = 1411.2kbit/s. Meanwhile itunes is compressed to 128kbits/s which is a compression of 11.03x. While it is argueable whether the average listener listing on average equipment will be able to tell the difference, the redbook CDs definitely are higher quality. Even flac files from allofmp3 are encoded from the physical cds and should be equal in quality, not better by any stretch of the imagination.
With online services, you buy only the songs you want and don't get railroaded into paying extra for the rest of the trash on the disc.
If this is a frequently problem for you chances are you don't really like the bands you are listening to. There is also a good chance that you have never bothered to actually listen to the tracks more than once (or even once) to determine if you actually like them. Note that I don't mean the parent poster in particular by "you", but any person who frequently complains that CDs only ever contain 1 or 2 good tracks and a bunch of bad tracks.
I own about 400 cds and a fair sized collection of vinyl and there are only a few songs in the whole collection that I will actually skip over.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
In no jurisdiction that I am aware of is it illegal to rip and listen to a DRM-unencumbered CD (or record, or tape) that you already own. I would not be surprised if existing music collections is actually the bulk of material listened to.
It is illegal in the UK though many people do it and the authorities seem to be turning a blind eye.
Most artists will make alot from CD sales at concerts (much more than buying from a retailer or direct from the label). If you're not sure, ask the merch people whether the band will make more money from CD or t-shirt sales. Depending on volume, and design, colour, and size of logo(s), the t-shirt probably costs between 4 and 10 dollars to make, while a CD generally costs less than 2 dollars (for materials - an album might cost $500 or $100,000 to record and master). As a fan of the group/performer, it serves your interest to buy the music, because it shows the group/performer that people want to hear more new music and are willing to pay to support it. If the band is getting a bad deal from the label, then shame on the label for their avarice and shame on the band for not thoroughly reviewing the contract.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
So, you think that "artists" should develop their ideas and put them into a form that can be seen and shared, but for free? And you think that all artists should have a "day job", perhaps working at McDonanld's, in order to live (food, shelter, etc.). Is there any room in your vision for artists that want to focus exclusively on their art and can do so because people find it worthwhile and are willing to pay for it? These, mind you, are not artists that do their work because they love money. I am talking about artists that can do their art because of money.