Since I started using the Squeezebox I have developed a new enthusiasm for music, and my purchasing of CDs has gone through the roof. I also noticed others on this forum saying the same. So how come CD sales are down 20% year on year again?
Of course the answer is that although in general hard drive storage of music dramatically increases ones appetite for music, CD sales are down because of increasing piracy. Hard drive storage also makes piracy far far easier than in the past. Squeezebox audiophile fans like ourselves are just a special case because we need lossless encoded flac files which are generally not available from friends or file sharing web sites. Indeed such is our demand for music that not only do we increase our rate of CD purchasing, we also spend hours carefully ripping and tagging our music. >From this, record companies should learn that they could dramatically increase demand if they found a piracy safe method of selling digital music that offered customers something more than the zillions of mp3 files floating freely around the world today. Good as my tagging efforts are, they are nothing compared to what would be possible if the record companies really embraced the embedding of text and images into music files. Also I could save hours of my life not having to rip CDs anymore. So I think the record companies need to (a) Create a new DRM standard that is truly platform independent and that customers feel safe with eg using a SIM card. If the customer looses his sim and his hard drive, he must be able to get another and download the music again. (b) Make sure the audio is at least CD quality and possibly even better (eg 24bit). (c) Fill the new standard with text and images eg the words of every song, at least a pic for each track etc etc. (d) Create a new HDCP equivalent path for digital audio connectors to protect the content from piracy. (e) Push Governments to support their efforts by making encryption breaking tools illegal. Neither Apple or Microsofts DRM efforts to date come anywhere near accomplishing these things. The trouble is who is going to create all this for them? Only companies like Apple and Microsoft have the skills to push such a far reaching vision. Sony would be next on the list but the company appears to be floundering because it tries to tie people into proprietary formats and it cant write good software. Maybe they will fail and the future will become music on demand services. Then you pay a monthly subscription and get access to zillions of CDs. However its unclear if all the bandwidth that would entail is feasible... and it still requires new audio formats and standards. -- willyhoops ------------------------------------------------------------------------ willyhoops's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10563 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34928
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