[rant]
I refuse to believe that lossless online music distribution is expensive because of bandwidth prices; the price of music is in the licensing, not the medium itself, which is inconsequential, whether it be CD, reusable flash, the internet, or whatever.
I'm not advocating anything here, but i want to illustrate a point:
Anyone who has ever browsed Usenet knows that the audio groups are FULL of lossless files. Premium Usenet access (that is, not the crappy access that comes with your ISP account) with a ~20GB/month limit is roughly $10/month, and unlimited access is about $20/month. The point I'm making here is that these binary Usenet servers are dealing primarily with copyright material, which means no licensing fees, and $20/month is enough to allow someone unlimited download access and still turn a substantial profit. And most Usenet users aren't what I'd call "light" downloaders.
Another case in point is AllOfMP3.com. Yes it violated copyrights, and yes it had its problems, but let's set that aside for a minute. Way back when it first sprung up, I was a user of the site. I used it because it offered high quality DRM-free files, a huge selection, and it was straight forward. AllOfMP3.com didn't have to bother with securing deals with multiple record companies, or negotiating special track pricing, etc... etc... I never really thought about its legitimacy, I liked it because it was simple, and a one-stop-shop.
The problem with legitimate online music stores is that they have to deal with complexities and bureaucracy ad nauseum.
Record companies are so short sighted and narrow minded that when you ask them to come up with a viable online music distribution system, instead you get a dozen bastardized systems, none of which are sufficient in of themselves, and all of which sell low quality DRM laden versions of tracks you can get on CD with fewer headaches.
Sure the free thing is an incentive to pirate music, but really people do it because it's simple, it's fast, and there's a wide selection of priated works available. The two examples I gave, Usenet and AllOfMP3, are both pay services, just not legal ones. People don't mind paying, they just mind paying for crap.
Anyway, what am I getting at here? The CD is a great format because it's really the only legal, cheap, one-stop-shop for (relatively) DRM free music. All major labels put their music out on CD's and sell it in major record stores. All of that music is encoded at 44.1Khz/16-bit.
And just to be sure, I do buy all of my music, but you certainly won't catch me doing it on any medium other than CD until that medium can be considered a total replacement for the CD.
[/rant]
) for decent upload rates, so as an incentive for consumers to lower their ratios, they will purchase fatter pipes, so the consumer isn't actually paying any less for the music at the end of the day, but the money is being widely distributed into bandwidth, as opposed to one HUGE pipe coming out of, say, Apple or the labels or whomever.
