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The State of Digital Music in 2006
wh0pper writes "Designtechnica has an excellent article on the state of digital music in 2006. Digital music accounted for only six percent of total music sales in 2005. Yet even that is a massive increase over the year before, a whopping 194 percent, which is fiscally valuable as the sales of CDs continue to decrease (although even with digital sales, the record labels experienced another downturn in 2005). While the young, usually the first to adopt and adapt to new technology, have been downloading and swapping music for quite some time, there's been a ripple effect into the older, warier area of the population, one that will only increase. Thank--or blame--Apple and its iPod, or any of the many other makes selling like hotcakes in the stores.
I prefer CD's only as I want quality and freedom. I like to have the right to rip them to FLAC and put them on my iAudio X5. DRM and compressed downloaded music just does not make sense. Quality over Quantity I always say.
And they did all this without OGG support. AAC all the way!
Since most all the "other" services are subscription, I would think that Apple's iTunes store is the source for this increase.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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This is the Apple story for their 30th anniversary? Kind of a letdown if you ask me. No real press release... no fake press release... just some boring story that no one will read.
Oh well, at least there is still some OMG PONIES!!
Does it support OGG?
The only thing that surprises me is how long this industry fought teeth and nails against this. Even now, they are only embracing the online distribution of digital media because they are forced to. Steve Jobs kicked open the online music market and he did the same again with online distribution of videos and now full features. It always takes a visionary with capabilities to take that first step - a smaller company would have been squashed early on. In some ways it's discouraging for small entrepreneurs like me because it paints a picture: don't you think I wasn't dreaming about an iTunes like music store a long time ago? Well, along with power and influence Steve also brought along the iPod, which was another puzzle needed to that piece. He basically had to put all the pieces together, singlehandedly (is that a word?). That's his genius and his vision and that's why he's cleaning up right now. Had I gone to Sony with a software just like iTunes on my laptop 5 years ago they would have just laughed at it. It sometimes takes a lot more than vision and talent to realize a business opportunity, some are tougher to crack than others.
The same can be said about the video distribution business - without Jobs and iTunes we'd still be in the dark ages - just look at the ridiculous blunder of Sony and the PSP - talking about not being able to see the forest before the trees! And in the case of Sony - they even had a content library they could have thrown into the equation. Well, I guess those higher rank managers must get paid those multi-million for their smashing good looks - can't be the types of decision they make or their vision...
I always thought that CDs were digital. Now I hear that digital music only accounts for six percent of music sales? I knew LPs were making a bit of a comeback, but I didn't know it was that big. Everyone must be really enjoying that "warmer" sound.
This story isn't complete without mentioning MP3 blogs and netlabels. Millions of songs were downloaded last week from the tens of thousands of MP3 blogs and netlabels dishing out free music from mostly non-commercial websites. A quick look at a few of the best ones will reveal that a lot of the music being served up is top quality.
- 3Hive
- Gorilla vs Bear
- Clever Titles are so Last Summer
- Music for Robots
Enjoy some free music.MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
just thought I'd pass that along...
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
What the hell happenned to the ponies?
/me does a little dance.
Finally, now my brain can begin recovering...
*whew*
~= scwizard =~
Remember that 30 years ago, we had vinyl and cassette tapes. Vinyl was easily rippable, although "ripping" one meant something a little different back then. Cassette tapes sounded like total crap. If you think about it, even *with* DRM, we've come a long way in quality and ease of copying. And don't worry about compression for the moment, this is just a passing phase while non-lossy algorythms become more streamlined and connection speeds get faster. DRM is a neccessary evil, unfortunately, because no record company, in their right mind, would agree to selling media without it. Thankfully, there are many quick, and fairly painless ways of getting past Apple's DRM if you're really worried about it (I'm amazed that record companies agreed to FairPlay, it's so easy to bypass).
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I find that "A Better CD Encoder" works just fine for me and does everything under the sun. Not to mention it is a Linux command line application. http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/
Just insert CD, execute abcde, and it rips and tags right to a directory.
Easy as pie.
Why does anyone need anymore than that?
Both a MPEG and ISO/IEC standard...
g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin
You can get opensource AAC tools here:
http://www.audiocoding.com/
Since today is April Fool's day, I don't know what to believe on Slashdot, but i'll tell you what i refuse to believe, anything involving China buying Google, a My Little Pony game, the RIAA aproving ANYHTHING, or that even Duke Nukem Forever finally came out.
Penguins: good mascot, better burger.
Unfortunately, the accessibility advantages of web-based solutions for digital music over traditional media sources has not ameliorated the need for more modern, more dynamic consumer-based solutions. Until the music industry follows the impetus of established consumer music patterns in the marketing of digital music, such efforts are doomed to mediocracy.
Thank God (or the higher power of your choice), the Ponies have left. Now, I need to visit my optometrist about that ocular replacement procedure...
Resistance... is futile.
For me it's cost over quality. Buying one song at $0.99 USD makes more economic sense than buying the $17.00 CD. However, sometimes the real CD sold at online stores can be cheaper than what iTunes downloads offer. And for me, my ears don't care about quality loss from burn & rip transcoding, but make sure to tag it as such. Sometimes I care about quality, and for those I buy the real CD. Online downloads complement my CD purchases, not replace it.
The RIAA is over. Apple makes it easy for people to spend their money on music but the RIAA way is not the future. Sales are only a small piece of the picture. More and more, reputations are not going to be built on radio play but on web play. Bands that understand this are going to be here tomorrow and the rest are going to look like slaves to greedy pigs. Portable music devices can hold more songs than the average radio station can afford to broadcast. To the user, it's all killer and no annoying adverts. The "Industry" is fighting back with satellite radio and FM crap flooding but it's not good enough. Players like Apple are going to help transition the industry to it's less centralized and less parasitic future. The free market forces and free software will move in and make life better for everyone, especially the artists.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This keeps coming up. Note that the writers aren't calling CDs analog, but rather comparing the physical media of CDs to (digital) downloads which are delivered absent of a physical media.
As a record store owner and the webmaster for RecordStoreReview.com I have a pretty good read on where things are going. This gradual decline in physical sales is about to reach the tipping point where the distribution model crumbles and downloads increase exponentially. It might not happen in 2006 but 2007 is very likely. At the store level, there just isn't sustainable profit from physical sales.
A couple more might join the fray, but the lines have essentially already been drawn, with everyone gunning for iTunes to take chunks out of its share. That could well happen; the ongoing supremacy of Steve Jobs's baby is far from guaranteed. Once someone else figures out a model that works better for the consumer, actually listening to and providing what customers really want, all bets will be off. And, sure as eggs is eggs, it'll happen.
I don't buy that. What the consumers want is 95% of what Apple is already delivering. Consumers prefer ala carte music tracks to forced albums or subscription models by far. Consumers want ease of use and they want simplicity. They want an all-in-one solution. The only way you can beat Apple now is on price or on freedom (no DRM portability-type freedom). Apple probably has enough clout to beat most competitors on price and the RIAA simply isn't going to agree to any less restrictive DRM or DRM free solutions.
Its too bad "all bets will be off." Apple keeping their dominance is a bet I'd gladly take.
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Elephant Essays - Custom Ivy-league papers at community college prices.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
This is the funniest April fools joke yet. State of digital music. Ipds. ROFL. How do they come up with this stuff?
I mean look at the "news story" -- just a bunch of fluff sayng absolutely nothing new (or nothing that hasnt been repeated a thousand times on slashdot), nothing of any technical or scientific interest and designed merely to get a bunch of Apple fanboys to feel good about themselves to get Apple some good publicity and to get designtechnica (whatever the fcuk that is) some extra hits.
As if that would ever be put on Slashdot. I mean only stuff that matters gets shown here. But it makes for a funny joke. HAHAHAHA
...I can purchase a dead tree book, and read it in 1,000 chairs if I choose, and save it, or lend it, or sell it, I can rip the pages out and retape them back together legally, I can refer to it, translate it into klingon for funzies if I want to,etc, and 1,000 years from now no one will have to deal with it being in a closed format or be in a form that you need some museum-level technology to even access..
I don't see the booksellers demanding that a book can only be read by 5 people, then that's it, no one else can read it, and you can't move the book to another location after the 5th place it has been, or whatever. In short, very few restrictions, just a bare minimum, even though those are being pushed with too long of copyright provisions, IMO.
And this Apple digital middleman skimmer DRM is allegedly the *better* example of DRM. The *better*.
Screw it, today's digital content middlemen pushers/skimmers/conmen are *obnoxious* in what they have done, hijacking advanced human technology and putting restrictions on it by distorting the legal process and subjugating human social expansion for their own narrow minded purposes that only profit them, and not many other people. THEY want every single tiny advantage that modern technology can bring, but they don't want YOU to have exactly the same advantage. That's the real issue here, the big picture. They seek to have a fuedalistic control over advanced technology, just like in ye olden days when it was illegal to teach anyone to read outside the clergy or a few "royal" jerks.
We are at a serious crossroads right now, we as humans can REALLY expand, or we can severely limit knowledge and culture by controlling it, merely by legislating access to technology to the rich priveleged few, at the expense - economic and social- of the vast many.
Apple foots all the bill while one measly digital file is duplicated over and over. iTMS is pure profit for the music industry.
F*ck the RIAA! Buy used CDS!
That's not the real problem. As long as the signal before DA conversion did not contain any frequency components above 22.05 kHz (the Nyqvist frequency for CD audio), it is perfectly possible to fully recover that information. For more realistic DSPs of the kind used in audio DACs, the cut-off has to be a bit below the Nyqvist frequency, i.e. 20 kHz.
The problem is that any noise above the Nyqvist frequency before the AD conversion will cause aliasing into the audible domain. That's why it's a good thing to do sampling during recording at 96 or 192 kHz. Then you can use a very steep digital lowpass filter before downsampling to 44.1 kHz.
The statement about the high-frequency response of LPs may or may not be true. However, the microphones used in those recordings most certainly did not have any significant frequency response above 20 kHz, so there wasn't any high-frequency information to record other than electronic noise.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
It is surprising to note digital music is only six percent of total music sales in 2005. So digital music is just starting and its a good time to come out of the hype see what professionals use.
Everybody now days use mp3. Is that the only music format available? No. There are other music formats available which are far more superior to mp3 but not widely known yet.
Ogg is similar to mp3, but its a completely open and free format. That is, if you want to create audio (eg. Music, podcasts, etc) create in Ogg. You are not breaking the law. The mp3 is a patented technology.
If you are an audiophile, its shame to play mp3 in your HiFi. Consider FLAC. The FLAC is the ultimate audio format, its loose less, high definition and again completely open and free format. There are FLAC players in the market like iAUDIO X5.
I have evaluated the Tomahawk Desktop, its Linux based multimedia OS, you can use it to convert your CDs to either Ogg or FLAC. Its amazing, its just drag and drop! To transfer to your Ogg or FLAC player, its again just drag and drop!
Another advantage of Linux is you can play without getting hit by viruses and worms.
Why did you people tag this as Gay, Ponies? Is Apple now full of gay ponies? I mean I dont like apple much either, but I wouldn't go that far.
Fake essay cheating sig scam = banned
The music on CD's IS digital, moron. So comparing "digital music" to "CD's" is just silly. What I suspect you really meant was 'Internet-downloadable digital music' and presumably only that purchased from a RIAA-approved source in a proprietary format including an offensive and obnoxious DRM system (as opposed to that shared between individuals via whatever mechanism), as compared to 'purchasable digital music delivered on physical read-only optical media, including both "order [online or by phone] and wait for it to be shipped", and "walk into the store and pay for it at the register" (sometimes including the offensive DRM, sometimes in a standards compliant format)'
Wow...calm down there fella. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but its the first time I've posted my sig and I feel justified in doing so.
First it isn't fake. Its a real site, real US writers write real papers. Second, there are plenty of legimate uses for such a service besides cheating. Its basically the same as P2P, you can use it responsibly or irresponsibly.
Myself, I just like writing.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Let's see...analog equals vinyl.
digital equals plastic
Okay...and I win what?
Dude, nice subject change!
I'm not sure the death of physical media is that close and I hope local stores never go away. Pressed CDs are a better backup than the dye based things I can burn. Cheaper physical media might change that opinion, but I will still enjoy the artifact.
Here's a store to add to your site that I hope people will visit.
Here's something you can visit now.
Getting rid of centralized broadcasting and the RIAA means getting more of the above in one form or another. Excellence deserves recognition and reward. Denying those rewards is the RIAA's crime.
I hope that small and regional music stores flourish. Without the RIAA shoveling s^H hits, a local store can still be a good way to match people to good music. Suggestion schemes can only go so far. Sometimes you need to step into something completely different. Regional music stores can also have a web presence, as noted above, and they can be an important part of local club scenes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sure, it's not my opinion. Her perception comes from watching other people's computers fry when they play with music. I did not dig into her about it, the way people like you might, but I can imagine those computers fried due to a combination of RIAA vigilanti attacks on P2P networks and WMP performance. Whatever, it's a common view that has nothing to do with iTunes. All she knew about Ipod is that other women at the gym spent lots of time programming playlists on them. I don't know anyone who likes WMP.
Non free programs have a tendency to suck and things on Windoze that Bill Gates wants to own have a tendency to break. You can never tell when Steve is going to take some feature away, or when Bill's "security update" will break it all. For all of that, Ipod is what I recommended to her as long as she's stuck in M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Cool. Name five...
Every time the topic of digital music comes up on /. there's a bunch of hypocritical audiophile geeks who go on and on and on about how mp3 is "low quality" and we should all use flac or 320 VBR.
What the hell? How many of you guys have sat through a blind test to see if there's any difference whatsoever? Why should people fill their hard drives and their portable drives with useless junk that is flac or mp3 320 kbps? Enough already.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
People had been clamoring for online music distribution for years, now have been calling for online video distribution for years, etc. Jobs just acknowledged the obvious. That doesn't make him a genius, it just makes him the only non-idiot in an industry dominated by idiots.
This space available.
Those rings are for suckers. The only thing that truly keeps bit loss at bay is a green magic marker. The Green marker when used on the edge of the cd keeps the red laser from bouncing off the disc and thus you get to enjoy the full 16-bits.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
willy, does mommy know you're using her to spread FUD on the internet? Perhaps an email to J so she can pass it to her would help end this travesty?
I would've modded your ass into such a higher plane, they would've needed HUBBLE to track you...