Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
I usually don't feel like supporting an artist unless I feel that the album is worth buying. I don't think it's worth supporting an artist who can only produce 1 good song. Also, most the the CD's i've bought recently have been $15. You can often find old stuff for even cheapter, $10. I find that the quality and freedom are well worth the extra cash.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Exactly my point. It's really a whole different ball-game now. I've been playing ball with a bunch of indie labels and artists, and we're achieving some pretty stunning distribution numbers. Some of the top features on my MP3 blog have been downloaded over 60,000 times each. My own music had a quarter-million downloads last month -- and this is for electronic music, where 10,000 record sales is considered a hit.
My friends in Taxi Doll are just an indie group going it alone (as of this writing), and they've managed to got their music into films staring J-Lo and Harrison Ford. They're taking advantage of digital distribution and free downloads to help them get the word out, and they've got plans to expand the strategy in the future.
Why are people still talking about the music industry like it's 1997? Whole genres have broken off from the major outlets, and started hacking it alone. There are tons of indies on sites like Beatport and CD Baby selling digital downloads and CDs with no DRM. Imagine that -- music producers giving people what they want, rather than force feeding them crippled songs.
There's a huge undercurrent in the music industry right now, and the storm is brewing. The old industry is a sinking ship. Some of us have been saying it for years, but the day of reckoning is coming quickly, now.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
Smart artists would do something like an oscommerce store (or whatever) where you can buy a flac/mp3 download for, say, 40 or 25 cents, two downloads allowed in case your hard drive dies and you're in the 99% of the world that sucks at backups. Cheaper for us, more profit for them, world+dog-riaa is happy.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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.
Re microphones: see the specs for the Neumann U87 (a classical high-end microhone) on the manufacturer's website:
- Neumann U87 historical scanned specifications (pdf): 20-16,000 Hz.
- Modern Neumann U87 Ai specifications: 20-20,000 Hz.
Where do you get the idea that in the old days, microphones could handle high frequencies much better than now?Apart from the technology, from psychoacoustic research it is known that frequencies above 16-18 kHz contribute extremely little to the listening experience, i.e., music with the range 18-22 kHz filtered out is for most people indistinguishable in double-blind tests from music with that range included. (Although it depends on whether the sound card is resampling the signal from 44 to 48 kHz, producing aliasing along the way) At least that is the picture I get from reading on hydrogenaudio.org.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.