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Streaming Surpasses CD Sales At Warner Music (ft.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The times are a changin'. "Warner Music Group has become the first major record company to report that streaming has become its largest source of revenue, surpassing sales of physical formats such as CDs and vinyl," reports Financial Times. Last year, Warner's streaming revenue surpassed its sales for downloads. It goes to show just how much of an impact streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are having on the music industry. Warner is the third-largest record company and has embraced streaming more quickly than the rest of the industry. "This rapid transformation is evidence of our ability to sign, develop and market artists that thrive in the streaming world," said Stephen Cooper, Warner's chief executive. The company reports that total recorded music revenue grew 10 percent to $610 million in the first three months of the year. Overall digital revenue increased 20 percent to $328 million, offsetting declines in physical formats like CDs.
If we're talking about music, it's not an "Apple proprietary codec" at all, it's AAC.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.
AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 specifications. Part of the AAC known as High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) which is part of MPEG-4 Audio is also adopted into digital radio standards like DAB+ and Digital Radio Mondiale, as well as mobile television standards DVB-H and ATSC-M/H.
If you have a device that cannot play AAC audio files in 2016, it's time to upgrade. Even an old Nintendo DSi from SEVEN YEARS AGO can play these files.
Apart from that, I do agree with most of what you said. If Apple continues on their current path, they're doomed. And I say that as a Mac/iPod/iPhone user.
None of my old CDs work anymore.
A few years ago I ripped all ~700 CDs in our household, many dating back to the 1980s. Although a few of them ripped rather slowly, I don't think that there was a single unreadable disc in the whole collection.
But maybe I'm just incredibly lucky.