GuitarBilly wrote:Bardagh wrote:You know, I have a degree in Computer Science and Information Systems. I have worked a lot in web application development and e-commerce - I am pretty far from being a luddite. But for many reasons I prefer having CD's of any music I actually care about. I don't like listening to things on shuffle, and I find it far more distracting and annoying to flick around a touch screen while driving than just switching a CD. I reserve my phone for podcasts and shit like that for the most part.
From observation there is one thing I have come to understand - for a large part, people who rely solely on digital music (i.e. buying all their shit from itunes and listening to it through their phone) are the same kinds of people who would previously have just listened to the radio and maybe bought a single once in a while. They don't buy albums unless they're big pop culture milestones, and even then they will probably rarely listen to an entire album. They usually listen to everything on shuffle and probably use Pandora half the time despite it sounding like crap and playing the same shit over and over again. They will often times listen to their music on a tinny mono cellphone speaker and they're fine with that because music is kind of just background noise for them. In short, they are the casual music listeners that have always made up a majority of the public. They may be even more of the majority now than before, who knows, and musicians today are able to realize less and less money from these people, which sucks, but I don't think a whole lot of musicians other than the big guys ever saw any money from these people anyway.
That's only true for our generation. The younger generations (teens etc..) are ALL digital. My kid never asked me for money to buy a CD even though I tried to teach him about it. It's all downloads for him (iTunes etc...) .
That's a good point. My kid is only 3 so I'm a long way from that kind of observation. Still, a damn cassette boombox sounds better than a lossy stream on someone's phone, whether through some shitty earbuds or those tinny aftermarket speakers people buy. For decades consumer audio technology was focused on superior sound quality. Everything since the ipod has traded that for convenience pretty heavily. I have to think there will always be that percentage of people who are into music more than the average person, and will want higher quality in order to actually experience the music they love. Whether they buy vinyl, CD's, or if a new, higher quality digital standard comes about, people who care about music will hopefully ensure there is a market for something other than shitty 256kbps mp3s.
