cliveb wrote: > We all like to think of record companies as idiots, and indeed they have > shown themselves to be so many times in the past. > > But I think there is a more rational reason why they only offer lossy > downloads: > 1). To offer lossless would require them to pay for more bandwidth. > 2). To cover the cost of the extra bandwidth, they'd have to charge more > for the lossless option. > 3). But 99% of their customer base couldn't give a rat's about the > difference between lossless and lossy, and would therefore never pay the > extra. > 4). Conclusion: there is simply no business case at all in offering > lossless.
I think there is a business case albeit not that massmarket. FLAC downloads are very popular on the net ! so there is a significant demand and a lot of people recognise that they are better than mp3, I think there is more than 1% . If you could get distribution and pricing structure rigth, it does not have to be mass-market to be viable at first (HD tracks proves that, they probably sell only 1000's of some of their content ), the initial cost is not that high not like pressing CD's . The greatest problem as I see it is the market lock in in small sub-markets with different copyrigths holders . If one could create a global lossless download system with global pricing etc ,the market share would be big enough for real business. The US itself is just big enough to support HD-tracks. Sweden (where i live ) is to small to harbour any lossles download provider , i suspect it is like that in many markets . So there are many markets where the copyrigths mess makes a whole lot of aditional trouble compared to the US , I'm quite amazed that iTunes managed to wrestle that at all , and if I remember correctly it was some time before iTunes emerged outside of US and the content is still probably not the same in all markets and the pricing is different seems they managed to implement parts of the old broken regional system inside iTunes to make record labels happy . . Bandwith is cheap if using torrent technology , if your service included a torrent client and a buyer as part of the deal also uploaded to other byurs while dl the purchase it would not be nice. Also bandwidth is getting cheaper, suppose this is not a problem in a couple of years . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mnyb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4143 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=95541 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
