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NY Times Article On MP3

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

TreyHarris writes "The New York Times has an article about how MP3 is changing the experience of listening to music. Most other articles have been hung up on how it changes the experience of purchasing music, which misses the point, so this is a nice change of pace. Pretty simplistic, but good for your clueless friends. Requires free registration. "

4 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Other change I see by wynlyndd · · Score: 3

    As the online distribution of music proliferates, I, unfortunately, see more and more artists becoming "one-hit wonders". There will be few incentives to generate the other music which is often just considered filler on the cd anyway. Personally, some of my favorite songs are the ones that never received airtime and would never be considered hits. But in a distribution method where people pick and choose what they want, all the other tunes will be lost by the wayside. There won't be these decisions how to arrange songs together. There won't be a 70 minute concept record. Only individual songs without connection to each other.

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    "Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
    1. Re:Other change I see by Signal+11 · · Score: 2

      Well, considering that mp3s are highly compressed and take up very little space on people's harddrives, I see no reason why the author / distributor couldn't pack in a hundred mp3s from that author. It doesn't cost them much (I believe hdd space is running at under $0.10/mb right now).

      Seriously - it's so cheap for them to distribute that it makes no sense to only keep a small collection of "one-hit wonders" on a server.

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    2. Re:Other change I see by Syslevel · · Score: 3

      I agree with what you say about 'one-hit wonders' and have another point to add:

      I often dislike an album the first time I listen to it. Oftentimes it takes two or three playings before I come to appreciate a collection of music. By reducing the music to a 'commodity' that people just download and discard if they don't like what they hear the first time, some of the music that I've come to like a great deal just would have passed through my ears once and been gone. Maybe it's a materialist urge in me, but the committment of having the CD and not being able to just delete it means something, and it encourages me to invest some attention in trying to hear what the artist is trying to deliver. Once the artist has a "foot in the door" in the form of an indelible piece of plastic that I can't erase and that I've paid for and probably won't discard, it gives him/her a chance to work the magic on me in a degree that an MP3 file that disappears immediatley into a sea of other files on my hard drive just can't.

  2. Mass media... by Signal+11 · · Score: 2

    Why does it take so long for the general media to pick up on this kind of thing? MP3s have been around for.. mmmm. 4 years? And only within the past few months have they been getting any exposure.

    The RIAA has been trying to maintain a stranglehold on music.. well... longer than I've been around. Yet strangely enough, that's not an often-discussed topic. Now, it's been cast into the limelight.

    Seriously now, I'd like to hear from journalists who work at newspapers - why can slashdot have a story up within a few hours of it becoming known, yet it takes weeks for a regular newspaper to "pick up" on the story?

    I don't think non-internet means of communication are so slow that it takes that long for stories to reach newspaper offices...



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