Captain Ed notes that the RIAA continues to be clueless about the future of music. Rather than embrace digital distribution, they’re still fighting with consumers.
I’ve bought precisely one physical CD this entire year, and only because it was from a specialty artist whose works weren’t available through iTunes. For the rest, it’s been all through iTunes. Why would I pay the anywhere from $12-$16 for a plastic disc that sits on my shelf since the first thing I’ve done with every CD I owned for the last few years is import it into MP3 format anyway? (And don’t even get me started on the asinine use of copy-protected CDs. You have a fair-use right to make archival copies of music for your own use, and if the record labels don’t like that, they can sod off. Besides, the level of copy-protection on those discs is simple to break and ensures that it’s easier to get a pirated version than to play the music you bought. That dog just doesn’t hunt.)
iTunes gets it right. Yes, I’m limited to using iTunes and the iPod to listen to my music – which since they’re both the best music players in software and hardware, isn’t a particularly onerous restriction. The real brilliance of it, though, is the fact that I can take my music and burn it to a perfectly usable CD. If iTunes didn’t let me do this, I wouldn’t use it. By allowing me to take what I purchased and have it in a format that won’t go away for some time, Apple ensures that even in the unlikely scenario that the iTunes Music Store goes away, I still have access to my music and could theoretically burn it to whatever format I like. (With some minor loss in quality, but not enough to be a huge concern.)
The RIAA doesn’t give a damn about consumers – they’re acting as gatekeepers to try to keep the old system of producers and promoters awash in cash while artists and consumers get the shaft. When it’s easier to find a song and purchase it for $0.99 than it is to pull it off some P2P network, piracy will go down. With iTunes, it is. The RIAA could have gotten on this bandwagon years ago and made a killing rather than suing teenagers and alienating their audience. If the RIAA goes down, the fault won’t be due to piracy, it will be due to their own arrogance and unwillingness to listen to the market.
Perhaps if the record industry focused its attention on desperately needed reform of corporate radio, even traditional CD sales wouldn’t be slumping. What point is there for mainstream music consumers to purchase the CDs of the few artists given radio airplay whose songs are played hour after hour, and stay on the stagnant charts month after month? The concept of variety of product appears to be lost on radio, if not the record companies themselves. The sooner they realize that radio is the enemy and not 12-year-old girls using free music downloads, the more likely they’ll be to change their current course to obscurity.
Radio is all but dead, for the reasons you mentioned. It’s just too hard to have a station that plays something other than the typical top-40 crap and have it succeed. The economics of radio suck, mainly because it’s still expensive, it’s highly regulated, and there are only so many frequencies to use.
With satellite radio starting to really kick off this year, there’s another nail in the coffin.
Besides, I thought video already killed the radio star? 🙂
Jay,
I have never downloaded an MP3 file and still buy CDs (almost always used — I agree it’s loony to shell out $18 over the counter for one disc). Perhaps I’m a dinosaur.
But my understanding is that MP3 files are compressed and that while they offer a fairly good approximation of the original recording/mix, they lose some audio quality in the process. Sure, 95 percent of music “consumers” don’t care; they just want something to play through their headphones while they’re jogging or driving. There is a minority of us, though, who want the best possible sound reproduction of music intended for active listening (such as classical and jazz). None of the audiophile publications such as The Absolute Sound and Stereophile have any time for MP3s.
It’s fine if people want to download “dance trax” to MP3 files, but if MP3 becomes the default format then soon it will become, for all practical purposes, the format. Where will people go for software that will be worthy of the excellent sound systems they’ve assembled, sometimes at considerable financial sacrifice?
Convenience and price are valid considerations, but so is quality.
There are some lossless formats like FLAC and Apple Lossless that offer full-quality sound with some level of compression. The reason they’re not very popular yet is that they just take too long to download.
Apple’s format, AAC (which is an open standard MPEG-4 format with added copy protection) tends to have better audio quality than MP3 – and I’d imagine that if there were demand for lossless music through iTunes Apple would offer it.
Well, if you ever have the urge to turn on the radio, there’s always Sioux Falls’ only all-electronica radio show, the Campus Crusade for Cactus, hosted by the DJ Dark Suguaro (yours truly) every Saturday night from 9-12 PM, only on KAUR 89.1 FM, Augustana College Radio… 🙂