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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.
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...
... no record company, in their right mind, would agree to selling media without it.
Only until recently, all record companies sold digital, lossless, DRM-free music. All CDs that I buy are DRM-free, not because I have been avoiding DRM CDs (although I would), I just haven't encountered them from the artists that I am interested in. I doubt that the CD DRMs are hard to crack (just disable autorun?), but with their warnings stickers, that it may break my CD player, my CD drive, or my PC, and that nobody will refund me the CD or the damaged hardware if that happened, makes me not want to buy it at all even if I didn't mind the copy restrictions. So yeah, 100% of the CDs that I buy come from record companies that didn't add DRM.
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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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!