The Death of the Music CD 483
Rick Zeman writes "According to the Washington Post, the next new music format will be...no format. From the article: 'What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you could create whatever you need. If you want to make an MP3, you make an MP3. If you want a DVD-Audio surround disc, you make that.'"
Sound's Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that may not be so bad. The reason that policy issues like extending copyright or introducing DMCA/EUCD-like laws are so hard to decide in 'our' favour is that nobody cares. And the reason for that is that these laws aren't enforced all that much.
If Microsoft really cracked down on Windows piracy, many more people would consider an alternative. GNU/Linux can compete with Windows on price and freedom to help your neighbour, but only if people actually are forced to pay for Windows, and kept from sharing proprietary software.
Indie music that is sold on reasonable terms (unencumbered CDs or DVDs, non-DRMmed Ogg Vorbis or MP3) or distributed under a Creative Commons licence that allows redistribution can compete with RIAA music on ease of use (i.e. pay once, listen anywhere), but only if the RIAA's restrictions are enforced.
I say let them DRM the hell out of everything. Hundreds of millions of people and the whole open counterculture that's come into being in the last decade versus the powerful media conglomerates. I think we'll win.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, just don't legislate DRM making it illegal for me to use the product the way I want. Make it a challenge, but don't put me in jail for coming out on top.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
I am buying a copy of a copyrighted work, not a piece of plastic. The only rights they can "reserve" are the copyrights.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:3)
Nice try, but those are all ongoing services, not a one-time purchase of goods.
"Intellectual property" is not like physical property.
Which is EXACTLY why all these laws attempting to burden "IP" to make it more like physical property are absurd.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but a physical disc is not a license. Does anyone here know what types of things can actually be licensed? Can Mars Incorporated license me a Snicker's bar under the conditions that I won't share it with my friend?
Certain types of things do seem to be licensable. As far as I can tell, it seems that intellectual property and other things that a person has exclusive rights to can be licensed. That is, they can extend those rights to someone under the terms of a license. However, there are also first sale rights that come with the purchase of a product, such as a CD. I have the right to burn it, destroy it, or do whatever else I want with it as the owner. That includes shining a laser onto it and reading off the reflected beam.I don't think anyone would argue that I have the right to read what's on the disc, license or not. It doesn't seem like the type of thing that is licensable.
In fact, if it were, then there would not be a need for the DMCA, because breaking DRM would have already been illegal. But, it appears that it was not. It required legislation to forbid such behavior.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're definitely correct. And Microsoft agrees with you. Last year I decided to sell my copy of Office 2000 on eBay. It is a retail-box version, which is not tied by an OEM license to any hardware.
Unfortunately, I have misplaced a few bits and pieces of the box it came in. I was ordered by the eBay authorities to delist my copy of Office. Owning the CD, with the jewel box, the CD Key, even the user's manual, does not 'license' me to that copy of Office.
Yes, but your inability to sell your copy of office on eBay is an eBay policy, not a legal issue. If you stood on the street corner and held up a sign that said "Office $10", then you would be within your rights (zoning restrictions, tax law, and all other business regulations not withstanding) to sell your copy of Office for $10.
It does not necessarily follow from that, however, that another user is entitled to execute the bits that are on the CD, if it is in violation of the click-through EULA that he must agree to to continue using it. But EULA's are another story, and quite seperate from the issue of whether music CD's are licensed.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
Several reasons:
1. I may not actually have read it or agreed to it. With software, you often need to buy the product before you see that what you are purchasing is actually not a product at all, just a license. Will music be any different?
2. I don't have the opportunity to negotiate it. The contracts are written by the lawyers for big media companies, and are deliberately one-sided, often containing terms that are not even legally enforeable.
3. Advertising (particularly for DVDs) frequently tells me that I can "own" content. If what I am really buying is a license, this is deception and fraud.
4. I may be a minor. In most jurisdictions, people under a certain age (usually 18) cannot enter into legally binding contracts. These people make up a large proportion of the target market for games, music and (especially) music.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Informative)
Eh, no. Copyright law says you need permission from the owner to copy those bits. Once you purchase them, you hold all property rights and can do whatever you wish with the bits, except copy them, as the right to copy them is taken from you and given exclusively to the author for the duration of the copyright term.
Take some time and read up on the first sales doctrine, and dont mistake intellectual property for physical property. The 'property' in 'intellectual property' is not the product itself, it's the right to prevent others from exercising their own right to copy their property. The fact that someone owns the _copy right_ should not be confused with the ownership of the _copy_.
That said, DRM is a grey area and the lobbying propaganda usually tries to argue that it's only intended to stop illegal copying, which would fall within the legitimate realm of a copy right. However, we all know that is not the case; DRM usually expands far beyond that exclusive realm, and tries to control what devices you can play things on, where you can play them, when you can play them, etc.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:4, Insightful)
Small correction: copyright law does not allow you to do whatever in all situations. You cannot publicly (which generally means charge money) show a DVD, even though you bought it. You cannot play a CD at your place of business (this might have changed in the last few years) I think there are a couple other exceptions which are generally designed to charge businesses extra money without interfering with people.
Of course if you have any questions or MIGHT be coming close to some such situation you need to see a lawyer.
Hall effect (Score:2)
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
The repurcussions of this are that in the future we may see normal PC's and media PC's become seperate markets. The media companies won't allow you to download or play a DRM media file on a normal PC but they will on your **AA company approved media center PC.
The future could be very bleak for the computer as we know it.
Exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
"What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you could create whatever you need."
The real:
Napster's To Go subscription service allows buyers to essentially rent an unlimited amount of music for $15 per month. A subscription-based service will be built into the latest version of Microsoft Windows; for between $10 and $20, users will access songs for a monthly fee but will be unable to burn them onto CDs.
You'll get the data files, but not the "buy" or "create whatever you want" parts, beca
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:3, Funny)
No. I am pretty sure they will DRM it sideways as well.
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sound's Great... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can always bring everything down to *.wav and then convert it to whatever you wish.
Converting DRM protected WMA files to WAV (and MP3s) [tech-recipes.com]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
IOP (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone in the world is a nerd.
Keep things simple. Buying CDs are simple. Hence, people will buy CDs.
Re:IOP (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IOP (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF does "no format" mean? analog? there is no such thing as data with no format. The article is talking about business trends, not techology and it is so light on facts that you can make up your own story about whether this unformatted "data" is lossy or lossless and otherwise just make guesses about the "stuff that matters", as we say. DRM, as it is implemented and embedded in various technologies is always tied to a format.
Re:IOP (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH, buying CDs is simple while they are not crippled with DRM. When 100% of the new CDs are sold with spyware-hidden-macrovision-drivers, people will understand what the word DRM means and maybe switch to another media.
Re:IOP (Score:2)
Not everyone is confused by downloading.
Dragging a file to a folder in the comfort of your home is easier than driving to the mall. Hence, people will shift to downloads.
Re:IOP (Score:2)
That being said, the recording industry as they now exist, with their RIAA and new ways to screw both artists and fans each day, need to die a slow horrible death.
Not gonna happen (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
A tipical
Because all the music industry has rights to their content, there is nothing to "give you*", so it's stupid to claim they want to give you LESS.
* For example, they can simply allow you (i.e. make it legal) that you can keep downloading shit via P2P networks. They even don't need to provide download service as the content is mostly out there on the Network.
Do they want to charge more?
As profit-making enterprises, they should be trying to charge more, which is no problem if they offer disproportionately more in return. If you're currently a net-thief (i.e. you steal more than you buy), you'll pay "more" if you buy everything. Folks who pay for all their content will probably pay (relatively) less than they do now.
>They're not going to give us more.
They don't care - they can give you use-rights to everything they own as long as you pay more. For example, if you approach a studio and offer them $10K in cash for "all you can see" I believe they'd accept it as they know they now squeeze (say) $3K per lifetime per customer of your traits. The fact that the average $3K customer sees 1,935 movies for those $3K and you'd see 24,292 titles for your $10K is of no importance whatsoever.
The article is correct in saying that the format of the future is no format at all but not because you buy data (and convert it any way you want) but because you buy use-rights to a song and you don't even need to own the data.
Music can be played someplace else and delivered to your earphone's via GPRS phone or DSL.
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Semantically true yet semantically null... interesting. The GPP was not talking about "give" as in "give away" -- he/she meant, they want to exchange less and to charge more... which is, itself, a pretty null statement of capitalism.
If the GPP's point is, the music industry will not go this way on its own, he/she was right. Of course if the new model provided more beneift for them, they'll
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like what happened with the switch from the (relatively) mechanically complex and expensive to manufacture cassettes, to the mind-numbingly simple and cheap CDs?
Hmm, does $4-$9 in 1980-dollars equate to $12-$25 in 2005 dollars? At 2.5% inflation per year, it doesn't even come close. Bummer.
A tipical
A tYpical **AA apologist comment modded insightful. At the same time it directly contradicts historical evidence.
Tell me, do you guys really believe this crap, or do you just post it as a form of trolling? Or do you all work for the **AA and they actually pay you to betray the rights of your own species to your soulless corporate masters?
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
A typical non-economist (and non-mathematician) slashdot post modded insightful. At the same time it's completely wrong.
Hmm, does $4-$9 in 1980-dollars equate to $12-$25 in 2005 dollars? At 2.5% inflation per year, it doesn't even come close. Bummer.
Actually, $9 in 1980 with 25 years of compound @ 2.5% inflation (your figures, not mine) is ~$16, so it's actually a pretty good estimate. I buy CDs at the rate of maybe 5 or 6 a month, and they're usually in the $12-$18 range. But that's just your random 2.
No..format? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No..format? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, that'd be ridiculously expensive and stoopid. A losslessly compressed non-DRM'd RAW/WAV file suits me...
Re:No..format? (Score:2)
Re:No..format? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No..format? (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Informative)
FLAC actually takes very little CPU power to decompress; less than MP3, certainly. But they only compress to about 50% so a CD full of them could only hold two albums instead of one, which isn't gaining a whole lot. So I tend to leave my FLACs at home and convert them to something lossy to take with me.
Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
I used FLAC for a while, and I found that it compressed rock to about
In terms of cpu draw, I found that ripping a CD was not CPU bound when using FLAC, but limited to the speed of the cdrom drive. Even still, PC cdrom drives can process the audio off of a CD on their own (See grey cable) which is a testament to how little processing raw PCM data must take.
Re:I doubt it (Score:2)
Just take the FLAC compressed size/the original size * 100 and output that is the music's "quality rating".
Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
That's probably overkill. FLAC decoding is all integer ops so you could do it on some cheap ARM chip without any problem. The ease of it is likely why FLAC is already supported [sourceforge.net] on various bits of hardware.
read between the lines (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm also willing to bet Microsoft conveniently has patents on whatever technology would be proposed to "secure" the digital file.
Re:read between the lines (Score:3, Insightful)
There is always an alternative. Many smaller and fringe musicians, groups and labels have nothing to do with the RIAA or any sort of DRM. Alternative computer OS's will never force DRM upon you.
In my opinion, many of the non-mainstream groups produce better music. At the very least, their music is different, unique, and new to my ears. New is good.
If you want to listen to the Beastie Boys or Christina Agulera you'll have to deal with DRM. But there are always alternatives.
Re:read between the lines (Score:2)
Re:read between the lines (Score:2)
Re:read between the lines (Score:2)
You're absolutely right. Great music is coming from all over the world, but remains obscure because it doesn't get the promotion that the corporate packages get. The real revolution will come when people - and I'm talking especially to you, kids! - start buying music because it's good, not because it's famous.
".no" format? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:".no" format? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:.no (Score:3, Informative)
Shoot... (Score:5, Funny)
m ... i don't know ... (Score:3, Interesting)
ALMAFUERTE
Re:m ... i don't know ... (Score:5, Funny)
Ultimately you're wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
Few things computerwise are increasing faster than the capacity of bandwidth. Hard drives are outpacing CPU's, but bandwidth smokes them both. Compression will be VERY undesirable in the future. Something like music subscription services will probably rule the future. Purists of course will swear by the viceral pleasure of having the CD, but the convience of being able to get whatever you want streamed directly to the players of choice as desired will carry the day.
If I were Cingular, I'd t
Re:Ultimately you're wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you mean that lossy compression will be undesirable. What could be undesirable about lossless compression? Does
Re:m ... i don't know ... (Score:2)
data file? (Score:3, Informative)
you mean raw pcm data, kinda like a wav file, or CD audio.
and you could create whatever you need
so basically encode into whatever format you want.
can't we already have this for quite some time now? most players play only mp3 and wma, so for now, you're stuck with those formats.
the CD will very likely be surpassed as the album format of choice.
you still need some media to transfer the original data. the CD will remain.
Re:data file? (Score:3, Informative)
Why do I need a physical medium to transfer data? I have cables and wireless connections for that kind of thing.
I read this, and it occurs to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
CD's are great because they have really good quality music in non-DRM format.
Keeping the CD's lets you rip to whatever new format or device that comes along.
Think it through...CD's are the consumer's best *and only* friend in the music business right now.
Re:I read this, and it occurs to me... (Score:2)
... Which is why the companies like Macrovision want to install malware [cdfreaks.com] on your computer to prevent you from ripping CDs.
Best friend is ... (Score:3, Interesting)
what will it be next week? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing "Death of ..." articles?
DT
If music stores still exist... (Score:3, Interesting)
It would certainly reduce the problems with shoplifting. Although you could do the same with a home PC if you had the bandwidth and a color printer.
no format? (Score:2, Interesting)
RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
if you are buying the flavor of the month pop garbage, it's your own fault for contributing to the studios coffers, so they can have someone new on the lineup next month.
Re:RIAA (Score:3, Funny)
Re:RIAA (Score:3, Informative)
Thats the artist/producer control. Not RIAA.
>Back in the day when LPs were popular, you could buy a disc with just the one song you wanted.
You can do that today. Its called CD singles.
Example;
http://www.mattscdsingles.com/acatalo
Re:RIAA (Score:2)
Re:RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, as long as it was the single.
"Now you're force fed tripe from the industry pushing their flavor of the month, big breasted, tiny brained, diva wannabes."
No you're not. The industry has always promoted the artists it thought would sell big, regardless of quality. If you're too damn lazy to look for music that you like, that's your own problem. There are hundreds of CDs released each week, and any good music store has hundreds or thousands of CDs available for purchase. If you go online, you can purchase just about any CD you want. Quality music publications are available both online and off and are filled with reviews of a variety of albums. Take advantage of these resources and find music for yourself instead of complaining that the music industry is still promoting easy to sell artists after all these years.
Dying? (Score:2)
Proof of ownership (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proof of ownership (Score:2, Insightful)
I have many, many LP albums that are greater than 20 years old. I have a bunch of CDs that are older, too. (the CD media itself might die, of course).
The people with bits spattered all over hard drives and CDR disks in various formats don't have anything that maintains 'collector value' nor anything that anybody will want to bother sifting through in twenty years.
But we live in a 'short attention span' era- buying
If that means better sound quality, great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I buy loads of music, and have a reasonably high-end computer-as-transport, headphone rig to listen to it. But I've yet to buy a single track online because of the quality issue (and drm). I buy and rip around 10 cds a month. Its a pain in the a$$ for me to find the music that suits my eclectic taste in CD form and then rip it to
If we could buy stuff in whatever format the artist wanted to output it in (pre-mixing/rendering even (opensource music)), the last remaining desire to have hard copy would be nullified for me:)
Magnatune already does this (Score:5, Interesting)
From the FAQ:Other nice things about Magnatune are:
A New Type of Store... (Score:5, Interesting)
To prevent the industry (CD Retailers) from going entirely bankrupt though, perhaps the CD stores (current ones) could instead become "customizing stations", in which customers could request certain songs and have a professional (label, case, everything)CD made for them. Sure you could do it at home, but couldn't you always order a CD from Amazon? And since all the shop would really need is a burner, access to a database of songs, and a computer, it could be as small as a stall!
From the way I see it, the CD Retailers will:
A) Go out of business...
B) Take their shop online!
C) Merge with an existing online retailer (most likely)
D) Do the CD creation for customers by downsizing their shop to a music stall (in the mall).
Duh - CD format is exactly that (Score:2)
Um, hello! (Score:2, Informative)
The only improvement to be made is to up the sample rate and bit depth.
The increased sample rate would more accuratly represent the music especialy at higher frequencys. This is because the nyquist sampling therom (1/2 sample rate = highest detectable freq) is a minimum requirement for capturing a frequency at that limit -- it doesn't mean that it's at all accurate.
The highe
Re:Um, hello! (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm. Actually the theorem says that once you sample at twice a frequency, you can use the samples to exactly reconstruct anything at that frequency. So it's exactly accurate, if you do the right thing when you play it.
That's for unlimited precision samples, anyway.
Start buying CDs now! (Score:2, Insightful)
Store them in your basement for about 10 years and make a killing on EBay!
Duh! (Score:2)
Fine as long as lossless (Score:3, Interesting)
and to me even a high quality mp3 is lossy.
Big on ideas, small on real info (Score:2, Interesting)
There seems to be no real "meat" to this article, they talk about how we will get "raw data files" which we can encode to anything we want. That's really nothing new to me, and I get the feeling that the article is written for people who are not techinically inclined and don't care about the details (which basically renders it useless to me). I mean "the new format is no format, what we will get is a data file"...but what format would the datafile be in?
One interesting thing that the article almost hints
Dumbest quote... (Score:2, Informative)
"If you just want to listen to music on your computer, think about what you have to go through to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song.
"There is a simplicity to the CD player."
Ok... So to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song on my computer using a CD, I have to either go to a store and buy the CD, or order it online and wait for it to get to my house. I also have to shell out $12-18 for the whole CD (depending on whether or not it's on sale), even if I only want that
Music Hell (Score:2, Insightful)
So... (Score:2)
Wrong, wrong, wrong.. (Score:4, Insightful)
MP3/downloads-type purchases will saturate out at a certain level - the general public will always go for the "real thing", which will probably still be CDs for the forseeable future..
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong.. (Score:2)
Times change (Score:4, Interesting)
user friendly (Score:2)
If internally something better than flash memory comes along, that is fine, but it should not change th
A case for DMML (Score:3, Insightful)
Just think...a new public, open standard called Digital Music Markup Language. Then you can use a convertor utility similar to XSLT to decide on what format you need...only problem is converting digital music to text is very costly in terms of space requirements. 2-3GB per song, as opposed to 2-3MB.
Kidding aside, it would be cool if there was a public standard for a raw binary format, where you *could* use an XSLT-like translation utility to turn it into whatever format you want.
I see people moaning about how the record companies won't "give" this to consumers. I'm cool with that. It's just one more reason to keep me from "giving" them any of my hard-earned money.
Undead Media (Score:2)
Random thoughts (Score:2, Informative)
Given the number of clocks flashing 12 in this world, don't understimate that value.
2. I've invested in an audiophile grade system--I've got two Macintoshes--one next to my de
Re:Random thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
Fair nuff, though any decent content download system would provide different bitrate versions of the same content. Audible does this, for example, giving you the choice of bitrate/format when you download audiobooks.
The point being don't spend forever telling me how much you love your music
Re:Random thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)
2. I won't trust you, because it was proven time and time again, that audiophiles lose their ability to distinguish 128 from 192 and CD from MP3 as long as the testing is blind. 128Kbit MP3s are good enough for more than 90% of the people. And the latest OGG/AAC/WMA/MP3Pro are good enough for 99%.
3. That doesn't work. You are not an authority figure, so there is no reason to repeat after you anything. We can all think for ourselves and it is obvious that you can buy an album digitally just as you can buy a single track. In fact, right now I am playing an album (5 albums, to be more exact) and it is in MP3 format. BTW, I am quite happy that I don't have to change CDs...
4. You can't piss people off with that. We will just pity your stupidity. You can eat your placebos as much as you want, of course, but everyone else knows that there is no way to tell iPod playing MP3s from your super-dooper $3k device playing 48bit DVD-audio or whatever else, as long as the testing is done blind.
They sure have a difficult time understanding (Score:5, Interesting)
The old way being you pay them 30-50% of the hourly minimum wage for a three to five minute recording on a stable physical medium.
They keep squeezing their heads to come up with new ways to keep this old form of business going, but it's fading every day.
The new music transaction format is much different. There is a completely different amount of music that the consumer gets for the same amount of money.
Now you buy an old hard disk that has 10 to 100 Gigabytes of MP3 or OGG compressed format audio of hundreds of albums in a certain genre or era of music. Some of it you keep, some of it you discard, some of it you will never listen to, some of it you pass on to others, some of it you alter, sample, or mix, and some of it you never know who the artist is.
Of course, you don't buy or trade these old hard disks full of unknown music from the music industry companies. It's not their business model. They couldn't even conceive of selling music in this way. They are doing everything that they can think of to actually put people in prison for selling or tranactioning music in this format.
But it doesn't matter. There has been a fundamental change in the nature of the distribution and storage format for audio in the past ten years. The music industry, which is a contradiction of terms in this new era, will have to come to terms with it.
Our terms.
One last thing, guys, don't put anyone in prison for listening to music. It will have long term nasty consequences, even including bloodshed when the penality for copying and listening to illegal music begins to approach the penality for kidnapping and killing music industry executives. And it won't stop or change the transformation that is happening in the entertainment industry. the new technology is a marketing challenge, not a criminal act that requires inprisonment.
We'd like to think that you won't let all this tough talk and macho posturing about putting people in jail and conficating their life savings for listening to music get out of control. But, frankly, we're losing our confidence in your ability to think rationally.
After all, it's only rock'n'roll.
good luck with those Napster songs on your iPod! (Score:3, Informative)
That's nice except that according to Napster: You can't listen [napster.com] to NAPSTER-downloaded songs on an iPod.
So you won't really be able to listen to them via a digital music player such as the iPod.
more confusion for the consumer who doesn't follow this stuff blow by blow.
Data file? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So the new audio format will be... (Score:2)
Re:No format (Score:5, Informative)
Where do you get all that? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's just that you'd have to download it and either view it on your computer or print it out yourself instead of getting it physically in a store. In fact, an artist could put out multiple versions of liner notes, etc for the same album - and instead of having to by several copies of the CD, you can just pay a few extra cents to download all the versions. I think this could be great! Get the future version of the iPod photo, and you can view your cover art and li
Re:God, music is dead. (Score:2, Insightful)