| Subject: Digital music, ipod, overcharging may be it's downfall |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 12:30:40 06/10/04 Thu
In reply to:
Betty
's message, "RIAA & goofy laws." on 17:09:22 02/01/04 Sun
My Iriver multicodec portable CD player cost me about $34. Multicodec?-Not only will it play oridinary & burned CDs, but will also MP3 & WMA files on the disc. I can fit 170-200 MP3 & WMA data files (songs) on 1, 10 cent data disc. It's a great little machine. 2 AA batteries last about 16 hours, & the sound quality is much better than FM radio. I also have a pocket sized version made by Memorex for $29. It plays the smaller, mini discs, they hold about 70-90 songs on a 3" 10-cent disk. The 2 AA batteries last a whopping 20 hours!
So I can even understand why anyone would spend hundreds of dollars on mini-drive based portable players like I-pod, except for rich dudes in search of a new toy. Besides, you can take your music disc out of a multicodec machine, put it in your pocket or notebook, take it anywhere, or copy & munipulate it in seconds.
My DVD players, & computers, of course can also play the disks.
Music sources-I'm not telling, but anywhere I can get the music cheap or free. I've even converted my vinyl records to CD & mp3 files, as long as the record wasn't scratched, then I look for a new source of the song I already paid for at least twice already (one when the record came out, once when the CD came out... CDs scratch too).
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The jingle v the single
(Filed: 10/06/2004)
The music business is pinning its hopes on legal downloading, but over-charging could be its downfall, cautions Neil McCormick
I spent a recent long-haul flight comfortably ensconced in my own musical world: 10 uninterrupted hours with my MP3 player set to random. I knew I ought to get some sleep, so I made a bargain with myself to turn the device off when it played a song I didn't like. But, of course, it never did. This is the beauty of MP3 players. With storage space for thousands of songs, all of which you have personally chosen, it is like listening to your own private radio station, without ad breaks or irritating DJs.
Iconic: the iPod
Technology defines and shapes the music-listening experience. The quick-fire intensity of vinyl singles (78 and 45rpm) was challenged (if not entirely superseded) by the more expansive experience available from long-playing 33rpm albums; transistor radios, ghetto blasters and the personal cassette player developed portability; video and MTV made music a visual experience. The CD, curiously, for all its popularity (and the massive sales boom it brought to the music industry) did little other than offer the (apparently false) promise of durability and spare us having to haul our overweight posteriors out of our chairs every 20 minutes to flip the record. The new wave of digital listening devices, however, appears to be transforming the way we consume music. And they could polarise generations in a way that music itself hasn't done since the 1970s.
There is a new social stereotype emerging on the pop culture landscape: the iPod bore (just as Sony's trademark Walkman quickly became a generic term for compact portable cassette players, so Apple's iPod seems to be the default designation for portable MP3 players). Usually (though not exclusively) male and middle-aged (or older), the only thing the iPod bore likes more than listening to his music collection is comparing it with someone else's. I know this because I am becoming an iPod bore myself, a realisation I came to while perusing a recent in-flight magazine. Having flicked desultorily through the usual celebrity puff pieces, I found myself closely studying a page made up of hundreds of lines of tiny type detailing the contents of iconoclastic singer-songwriter Beck's iPod. When I looked up, I noticed that all the men sitting around me were engrossed in the same page.
When CDs were introduced, the music business made enormous profits re-selling us music we already owned. The MP3 player, on the other hand, encourages us actually to listen to this music, much of which has probably been collecting dust in some forgotten corner of our collection. This is not necessarily good news for retailers, since once you've loaded your iPod with a 8,000 songs, you need never go into a record shop again.
Younger listeners who have not yet amassed a massive music collection can download MP3s from the internet. Having suffered from falling revenues for years, the music business is pinning its hopes on legal downloading, but it seems to me that they are seriously misguided. Following the UK launch last month of the legalised Napster service, rival download retailers Sony's Connect and Apple's iTunes Music Store arrive in Europe this summer (iTunes could be launched as early as next week). But they are vastly and perhaps fatally overpriced, charging an average of £1 a track (Napster retails albums at £9.95, which is comparable to the current cost of a new CD, despite the fact that hosting electronic files involves only a fraction of the costs of pressing and distributing a disc with printed sleeves). It would cost approximately £8,000 to fill an iPod with legal downloads.
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