krankshaft format solution found

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 03 Apr 2011, at 16:31 , Jerry G wrote:
> If it's audio, I'm thinking either SACD or DVD-A.

Probably.  Neither of those ever really took off because, I think, there was no real consumer need.  I think convenience played a big role in moving people from LP and cassette to CD -- but is improved sound quality (from CD to SACD or DVD-A) really that key in the mass market?  I doubt it.  I think the driver in digital music uptake is, again, convenience.

I have a 2TB drive sitting on my desk that is not quite half full of mostly losslessly ripped music.  A present, it would play music (and a few audio books, etc.) for 4 months without repeating (well, except for cases where I have duplicate songs from different albums, or different releases, that sorta thing).  It takes up about as much space as a hefty-ish hardback novel.  I can search it easily and things do not tend to get misplaced, misplaced, or fall down behind the sofa. So far, it is out of reach of the baby (who is rough on optical disks!).

Now pretty much all of that is stuff I ripped myself, but I would happily forgo the ripping if I could simply buy CD-quality (or better) digital tracks that were already correctly tagged with all the right metadata.  I would not want to pay as much as I do for a CD, since clearly there is no physical product and thus no physical production costs, transportation costs, etc.  And if I can't "try before I buy" (in one way or another), then I am unlikely to take a chance on anything that I'm not pretty sure I'm gonna like unless we are talking about very low prices indeed.  

But, really, here again, we are talking about convenience.  There is considerably more competition for people's entertainment budget, in terms of both time and money, than there used to be.  Ultimately, someone is going to look for the maximum entertainment for some function of time vs. money.  How different people will define "maximum entertainment" will surely vary, but they will all look for it, whatever it is.  Only if someone defines entertainment as "kollekting rare vinyl editions" will they pay for that, and invest the necessary time to do it.  If someone's definition of entertainment is met more easily by listening to the radio -- or downloading the new hit single (legally or illegally) and listening to it a few times before downloading the next hit single (rinse, repeat) -- then that's what they are going to do.

The trick -- whether for artists or whatever the new paradigm in attempting to "organize" the music industry turns out to be -- is figuring how to capitalize on people's tendency towards the easiest path, and also how to make the most of what are likely to be a variety of different "easiest" paths of very different sizes and characteristics, depending on the particular interests of different kinds of consumers.

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/