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Originally Posted by blessingx  I'm with you in desiring lossless or uncompressed recordings. We're in complete agreement there, but I wouldn't call 192 kpbs AAC uninspiring. On the vast majority of equipment, the vast majority of recordings and certainly the vast majority of ears it equals uncompressed and it beats cassettes, 8-tracks, satellite, FM, etc. So it isn't in the way of enjoyment even on quite decent setups. Recently Pangaea was kind enough to post in the Music forum a great deal for a Jazz box set which would you can get through Amazon for $18 for 256 kbps MP3 (which likely it pretty close to 192 AAC depending on MP3 and AAC encoders used) or $142 on CD. Buy the 256 kpbs, it's certainly sounds good enough.  |
I haven't been able to set up a proper comparison for myself, but I am quite open to the idea that my degraded, 47-year-old ears would have trouble distinguishing between high-bitrate lossy and uncompressed. My objection is more a matter of principle. No one would argue that file compression
improves sound; it's a matter of achieving acceptable download times and minimizing storage requirements.
But with consumer Internet connections commonly topping 5Mbit, and 500 Gb external drives selling for $99, I just don't see any reason to take any hit, even an inaudible one, in SQ. I routinely download 800 MB concert recordings in FLAC format from
archive.org/audio, and I don't consider the download times, or the storage requirements to be a burden.
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Originally Posted by blessingx And generally that more competition the better, but there are caveats. When Universal fought Apple, Universal needed Apple more (for distribution) than Apple needed Universal (plenty of other labels and iTunes already established). MS enters the market, increasing the competition by one (which unfortunately has damaged Creative - and likely Cowon, iRiver, etc. in States - more than it did Apple), but needing Universal more than it needs MS (after all they weren't selling a single track yet of the new Zune store). MS agrees to pay Universal per Zune which Universal demanded as they were to be 'filled with pirated songs' and thus sets a precedent. They did the same to Apple - which didn't budge. That's put one example, but a more obvious one may be that Apple was holding its own against the labels.
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Well, here we come up against Microsoft's business practices, which are distasteful in the extreme. Let's not forget how they took over the browser market: they simply gave away what was then an inferior product, and in so doing they drowned Netscape, who had created the market and had a better product, by far. Microsoft has an inferior product in the Zune, and they are, to put it mildly, late to the downloaded music game. So they will make deals that trade profitability for market share.
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Originally Posted by blessingx It's unlikely with success of Amazon, Zune, etc. each will be able to dictate back the selling price and its well known the labels think $.99 a track is far too low. If iTunes (the sole major distributor) loses power through more competition, it may actually hurt consumer pricing.
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As other distributors rise, and Apple inevitably loses market share, the recording industry will still find itself competing with free. I think the continued success of Gnutella net, BitTorrent et al will tend to keep them honest. People would rather not cheat, I believe, but if pricing is set at insulting levels, they certainly will cheat.
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Originally Posted by blessingx The danger could be though how Walmart dictates DVD prices which is not a good thing as it's kept its competition - film downloads - prices artificially high (including iTunes) by demanding they're not lower than Walmart can sell DVDs.
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Walmart, frankly, leaves me at a loss. The regulatory atmosphere in this country is basically a free-for-all, with little appetite for enforcement on the part of the regulators, never mind bringing rogue players like Walmart to heel. I have no idea what to do about them, as long as they are able to get away with the wages/working conditions that provide a hefty chunk of their profits.
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Originally Posted by blessingx Pricing is but one point though and there are plenty of players which don't play AAC (though open standard and not owned by Apple), not to mention smaller labels or bands appearing on one store, but not another. Plenty of great reasons to have many stores. In the end competition will hopefully be good...
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I think we agree on this point.
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Originally Posted by blessingx [...]but if the labels retain the same power they had before moving to the web, delusion of power elsewhere could be a net bad thing for the consumer, at least until it's more established as a consumer expectation (which may in the end be 'stealing' redefined by new consumers before any of these other issues are resolved).
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I live in hope that the major labels have so damaged themselves that they will not have the kind of clout online that they had in bricks and morter retailing. They are so clueless that their response to plummeting demand for physically packaged CDs has been to raise prices, not lower them. My last trip to Borders was highlighted by the thumping sound of my jaw repeatedly hitting the floor. I've got thousands of CDs, but it's been months since I bought one, other than from artists at their shows or in used shops. I am exactly the kind of consumer they should be making concessions to: I still prefer CDs to downloading, but for a variety of reasons, I rarely buy CDs at retail anymore.
