> All-you-can-eat _streaming_ subscriptions are fine, I was talking > about buying music. AFAIK the original poster was talking about Pay > For Sure.
With Rhapsody you can't purchase music *files*. If you choose to purchase music you create a playlist with the music you want to purchase which is then burnt directly to CD *within the Rhapsody program itself*. The resulting cd is lower than cd-quality, but free of DRM. So in purchasing music from Rhapsody you never encounter DRM of any kind. If someone finds it convenient to purchase music this way I won't argue, though I myself am not willing to trade the quality for the convenience at this point. The only way you'll run into DRM (in this case, Play For Sure) when using Rhapsody is if you use their to-go service which should really just be looked at as an extension of their streaming service rather than as "buying" the music. You mention having to pay for bandwidth...most folks I know here in the states don't have quotas on how much they can download in a billing period. Perhaps that's something that's more of a problem in other areas. > If the recording companies think it helps their revenue in any way CDs > will disappear fairly quickly. Frankly, I hope CD's do disappear quickly. The idea of having to go and purchase media and carry it around with you seems rather antiquated. When I look to the future I don't see a bunch of consumers with individual little copies of media that eventually become unplayable as devices become obselete or hard to find (a la cassette, betamax, and even record players). Rather, I see a model not unlike the Rhapsody/Napster/Yahoo model...the "celestial jukebox" model. Devices will become more portable, bandwidth cheaper, and soon all the music in the world will be available in high-quality (lossless perhaps?) anywhere you want to be. And your example (or perhaps it was someone else's) of finding your father's or grandfather's record collection will be irrelevant: with how cheap storage is virtually all the music that is made will be kept on professionally managed servers and much less music will be lost over time than is currently lost. Here's just a hypothetical: Imagine a "celestial jukebox" type model that would deliver music to portable devices (say, like Rhapsody's supposedly upcoming cell-phone service) in addition to fixed installations, and would continually upgrade itself to offer the best quality music as new compression and even multi-channel formats are developed so that I wouldn't ever have to repurchase music. Maybe some service could even be developed whereby you could "own" the music. I don't know exactly what that would look like--I really wouldn't care that I didn't own the music but some folks might. That would be my dream setup. I feel like the services are 75% of the way to that goal right now. The technology is here, and if there is demand and the solution is economically viable, then record and other distribution companies will step up to the plate and provide the services consumers want. I wouldn't be nervous that you're going to be stuck with low sound-quality. Even in the streaming-music area there are now 3 competitors who will certainly be battling to deliver more artists and higher sound-quality at a lower price to woo customers to their sides. People value quality, and the technology to provide consumers with higher and higher sound-quality only continues to improve. There is still plenty of economic incentive to provide high sound-quality. The distribution model needn't be limited to CD, however. With how easy it's become to copy and distribute CD's and other music formats I don't blame the record companies for being nervous about piracy. If they choose not to sell their music in an unfettered format then that's certainly their right. I don't feel as though the consumer is "entitled" to owning anything if a company doesn't want to sell it. Customers can use their pocketbooks as leverage and as the technology evolves companies will find ways to offer what the consumer wants but in a way that makes it sufficiently difficult/disadvantageous for the bad guys to rip them off because that's the only way they're going to make money. The current generation of DRM will likely not catch on en masse as it's too limiting and also too inconsistent across different music stores. But this will be worked out in time. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
