[Prog Rock Man]

I started with vinyl and it has been the longest lasting format that is still readily available. But it years of dominanace are weel and truely over.

I then went with cassettes when I got my first car. I had a Yamaha KX390 cassette deck which was excellent. But then CDs arrived.

I switched to CDs when music shops such as HMV and Virgin started to stock CDs and both vinyl and cassettes had virtually disappeared from the shops. Both my vinyl and cassette collections were sold.

With itunes I changed again and all the CDs have been imported and are now in the loft, varous downloads bought and I thought that that was that. Stored music files on a computer would be the final format.

Then I was sent an invite to Spotify and now 90% of my listening is streamed music.

Surely thats it. Or can anyone think of another format that could appear?

 

[krmathis]

Lossless encoded music through Spotify, iTunes Store, and like

 

[Redo]

I would hate to see CD's go the way of digital distribution, unless DRM-free 16/44.1 (or better) FLAC becomes the new standard.

 

[Prog Rock Man]

Both of the suggestions are improvements on what we are allready getting, as oppsed to a whole new format. Thast gives me hope that a laptop will last forever as a source and all that will change is the quality of the music file/codec.

I can see CDs going the way of vinyl and becoming more 'specialist'. I dont see it disappearing like cassettes.

 

[Prog Rock Man]

The lack of any other suggestions for a totally new format is good for use buyers, but not for the music industry. Lets face it, changing formats and the repurchase of music has helped keep the music industry financed.

Though, maybe, if we did not have to keep buying those albums again and again, we would look to expand our collections with otherwise ignored bands. If it was not for streamed music, I would still be ignorant of the Scandinavian Prog Rock and American post rock scenes.

It would appear that get yourself a computer and you will be future proof.

 

[acidbasement]

I'm still in CD and vinyl land, and have never used iTunes.

However, if I think about what format improvements might be profitable to both record and hardware companies and easily portable for ipod listeners (most people I know do almost all their listening from ipods, either using ibuds or crappy little docking minisystems), I suspect they would have to allow a person to ditch their bulky and crash-prone hard drive. Wireless streaming access to secure, online music libraries without much in the way of local storage. It would be bandwidth intensive, but with long-term vision that's a hurdle that could be overcome. It may also help record companies fight piracy if it means it's comparatively inconvenient to store music on a hard drive.

I do not like this vision, but I suspect it may be the way of the future.

 

[Prog Rock Man]

The only issue I have with streamed music is broadband. My connection is not bad, but it can cut out and in the evenings we get bandwidth throttling. I get round that by downloading what I intend to listen to during the day. As soon as British Telecom get their act together and improve broadband there should be no more problems.

Streamed music also saved me the £100 I was going to spend on another hard drive.