Back in February, Helene did a post called Digital Themed Bookstores that generated some interesting comments (mine included-( g)). It is an good conversation to segue into a discussion about diminishing CD circulation. Now we could say that all of our Cd's are just in the hands of customers, but since all locations (I believe) are in double digit circulation decline in this category we have to wonder what is really happening. We have talked about downloads as the culprit so now here is a Blog from PC World that talks about that. Overlooking the typos and read the comments as well. Are Musical Cd's Already Passe?
And about those grammatical faux pas and typos; I seem to notice a lot more of them lately as more news articles are beginning to look and sound bloggish. Have you noticed this as well?
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
2 comments:
First, the easy question. I have noticed a lot more typos. I think this is more a case of editors-in-chief deciding not to hire more editors to review that which is contained in their publications (internet or otherwise).
Of course I don't think they are passe. Some of the comments that have been added since this blog posting agree with mine (sound quality, artwork).
If the Big Four music distributors (through the RIAA) decided to treat their customer base like customers instead of criminals or easy money, then P2P wouldn't be such a problem. Just look at Trent Reznor's new album. Yes, you can say that he's guaranteed a larger percentage of sales because of his group (Nine Inch Nails, NIN for short) being marketed by one of the major music companies for most of his career, but the methods he is currently using will keep and/or win customers, not alienate them...as long as the quality of product is present. Which brings me to…
While MP3 is the mainstream choice there are plenty of other options (OGG, FLAC) that haven’t been DRM'd and provide better sound quality which is what I’m looking for. Reasons for these other codecs not being used are many, but a couple are because the music industry is slow and wants to maintain control. Also, downloading a lossless file is going to take quite a bit more time and until most people are using always-connected devices with limitless virtual storage capacity solutions, the reality is that hi-fi audio is not very portable.
I can even envision a time when you will be able to create a playlist based upon the high-quality music you have paid for, but it will all be attached to an account on a server that you will access through your always-connected device. Thus, no downloading, only streaming. This would require massive bandwidth if most people are online all the time, especially in the case of HD movies, and later on, with holographics.
From a news release on Akamai titled Akamai Brings High Definition To The Internet:
"To realize this same vision and fidelity in the online world, a 2-hour feature-length [HD] movie would need to be encoded at a bit rate of at least 6-8 Mbps, which would result in the file being a size of 5-8 GB. This presents numerous technical challenges to deliver such a high-quality, large file. For instance, delivering a file encoded at 6 Mbps to an audience of one Nielsen ratings point (1,102,000 households) would require 6.6 Terabits of sustained bandwidth, and that doesn’t even take into account latency and network congestion."
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