Would Selling MP3s Revive the Labels?
This afternoon I walked into a record store with the urge to spend and found several things I wanted, but left without buying. All the things I wanted were $19. At that price I want a premium product, which CDs aren't.
MP3 is by far my preferred format, so if I bought these CDs I'd have had to rip them. That means putting them in a stack of several hundred others waiting to be ripped, then eventually loading them into the computer, maybe typing in the titles, and waiting for the rip to finish. I didn't buy because I realized that paying premium prices for a do-it-yourself product doesn't make sense.
MP3s are so much better than CDs that you can never go back. With MP3s you don't have to hunt around for physical media. A computer GUI (though not my Archos MP3 player) is easier to use and has more features than a CD UI, particularly for setting up playlists. Skinnable MP3 players look cooler than hardware CD players. With MP3s you don't have to load and unload the CD player, and you don't have stacks of jewel boxes and loose disks accreting by the stereo. An MP3 player is tiny compared to the CD jukebox and 500 disks that it replaces -- you don't have to haul boxes of MP3s every time you move. In comparison to MP3s, CDs just suck.
I don't want CDs and the labels won't sell me MP3s, so as a result I'm not buying anything at all.
In the eighties the labels embraced CDs and were resuscitated by a huge wave of demand for the new media; what's happening now would have happened then if the labels had been too scared to leave vinyl behind.
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Comments (7)
Read More Entries by Lucas Gonze.
I'm not paying!!!
I'm so pissed at the industry I don't even enjoy free music anymore!
crap
Shopping is the embodiment of thinking. You think with your wallet.
crap
do you need to go shopping to began to think ?
What about the things that digital formats forget?
About packaging as a value-add: the CDs I wanted were Sigur Ros, which have really fantastic packaging.
What about the things that digital formats forget?
For example, album art, liner notes, inserts.
I still collect records. I have over a thousand. I also have a ton of CDs. I'm an avid music fan. I used to work in radio a long time ago. There's a component to being a music fan that doesn't involve just listening to the music itself. It's rushing to get a record because it comes with a free poster. It's buying a record just because some sound engineer who recorded another band you like worked on the record. It's realizing that a lot of work goes into cover art as well as recording.
Now $19 for a CD is absurd. I'll give you that. And I want to point out that probably 90% of the music I own is on independant labels.
Maybe the reason that major labels aren't making money any more is because there really isn't any value added to what they produce today. Think about Sgt. Pepper's or The Who, Live at Leeds. Both of those records came with posters and inserts and all sorts of other collectible stuff. That kind of thing used to be common. Today, you rarely see that coming from a major label-- especially at no addittional cost to you.
Derek Vadala
MP3 not for classical music
When you like (western) classical music as I do, the user interface does not make that much of a difference. Not only are the prices even more excessive, it is hard to get recent classical recordings at all.
The thing with the Music publishing industry is that what they do is not the best way of doing it. It is like the proberbial T-ford any colour as long as it is black.
I do not mind buying (fair price) music. I do not mind burning my own CD but I insist on the format of my choosing.
Publishing music imho is a service to the artist(s) and the public. The industry is the middle man. It acts as if (and legally they maybe do) they own the place.
When a certain work is mine, I might want to change it into an other format (for in the car for instance) that is something I consider fair use.
Rip the CD's
Except for the fact that CD's cost so much, and that there's a non-zero chance that it will be corrupted, I'd recommend ripping your own, so that you can encode it into the format you want (maybe you want Ogg), at the bitrate you want.