Lady GaGa will never exist outside the cloud.

That is all.

Buying digital music is like collecting stamps on the computer, it is way easier....

A point I forgot from my earlier post - how would I ever have realised that a "Young Ricky Wakeman" played Mellotron on "Space Oddity" without the album notes?

Truth is Puncher, many young people in this "download it for free, listen, delete, download something new" age couldn't care less who is playing on the tracks. In fact on many tracks the 'musicians' are sat in front of a computer keyboard generating all the sounds you hear.

kokomo:

In fact on many tracks the 'musicians' are sat in front of a computer keyboard generating all the sounds you hear

Ok, I'm not young anymore (turned 37 yesterday, sigh!), but Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Depeche Mode are all "computer music", so to speak. Sigur Ros is another great example.
I'm not trying to disagree with the overall notion of your post - I agree whole heartedly with it - I'm merely trying to point out that being "computer made" doesn't necessarily equal "bad". Although Lady Gaga is a prime example of crappola computer music.

kokomo:

A point I forgot from my earlier post - how would I ever have realised that a "Young Ricky Wakeman" played Mellotron on "Space Oddity" without the album notes?

Truth is Puncher, many young people in this "download it for free, listen, delete, download something new" age couldn't care less who is playing on the tracks. In fact on many tracks the 'musicians' are sat in front of a computer keyboard generating all the sounds you hear.

Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre to name a few. All these godfathers of electronic music would have used a Mac, if they had one, 30 years ago.

Don't try to generalize people who make electronic music!

DoubleU:

kokomo:

A point I forgot from my earlier post - how would I ever have realised that a "Young Ricky Wakeman" played Mellotron on "Space Oddity" without the album notes?

Truth is Puncher, many young people in this "download it for free, listen, delete, download something new" age couldn't care less who is playing on the tracks. In fact on many tracks the 'musicians' are sat in front of a computer keyboard generating all the sounds you hear.

Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre to name a few. All these godfathers of electronic music would have used a Mac, if they had one, 30 years ago.

Don't try to generalize people who make electronic music!

Rick Wakeman's prescence on Space Oddity can be found on the albums Wikipedia entry. Liner notes for the digital age!

Simon

kokomo:

Truth is Puncher, many young people in this "download it for free, listen, delete, download something new" age couldn't care less who is playing on the tracks.

Music for the Tassimo generation. So sad. Sniff :(

The amazing opportunities presenting themselves outpace any disadvantages, I think. It's just a question of adapting to the newer formats, and that is driven by convenience and access.

I've been watching "cloud" movies in HD for a long time now, and have bought very, very few DVDs or Blu-ray movies since. I pay what I'm charged for the movies I watch, they're available for a period of time, and then they disappear from my harddisk. Very convenient - particularly the fact that I can find such a large number of movies.

I watch trailers on the net, in order to decide which movies I'm actually going to go out and see at a cinema, or watch in my own cinema. Very convenient.

I use Spotify and other services to evaluate new artists or new recordings, before I buy them in higher-resolution formats. And it's also great for rediscovering older recordings, before buying those.

The net is great for finding information about the artists I listen to, in ways that far surpass anything there was room for on liner notes; and there are video interviews, YouTube videos, wiki-entries (constantly updated by die-hard fans).
If you're interested in opera, you would be amazed at the knowledge and focus of the people posting opera-videos to YouTube, for instance -- and a company (hint) which made this treasure trove easily available to customers through a quick search would find a very appreciative audience. (And it's not just opera, of course. Just about anything under the sun, really. Interested in chess? You can spend years just watching chess movies discussing games and theory ...)

Things are radically changing when it comes to the extent of and availability of content. And Trip's right - there's too much of it out there to fit on individual hard disks, let's just keep it out there, and access it when we want. And if you do want a copy, there are ways both illegal and legal of securing that.

The initial DRM on the iTunes Store was at the bidding of the record companies. Now that iTS is the world's largest record store, and the record companies are making money from it, they're relaxing that requirement. And there are a lot of other providers of A/V content, of course.

And while it's true that a lot of the music and video that's being downloaded is provided "free of charge" - it's also driving sales. As Puncher writes, and as definitely attested to by my daughter and her friends, they end up buying CDs by the barrel. But not the top 20s - they are circumventing the traditional gatekeepers, finding interesting music that would never end up in a record store and buying that instead. Which is good, I think.

At any rate - we had better get used to this change.

Check out Wolfgang's Vault if you're interested in live music performances (iTunes Store is offering something similar.) Or if you want to take your chances, here's a link that will keep you preoccupied. Each day, recording technicians upload live concerts - some nights there will be over a hundred new concerts here. There are some true treasures among them - you can go by the ratings on the right if you want to narrow your search.

I'm linking to the ones in 24-bit high-res FLAC:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%28format%3A%2824Bit%20FLAC%29%20OR%20%28flac24%29%20OR%20%2824-bit%29%20OR%2024bit%29%20AND%20collection%3Aetree

It is rumoured that this is an unapproved leak of the coming iSlate (well, most likely iMagic) to be officially announced on the 26-27th of January.

Here's what it will do to publishing as we know it. It is being released with an OLED screen as an option - publishers around the world have been briefed on the capabilities.

Now, imagine browsing forliner notes and background info on this, while enjoying a performance. All the while controlling your A/V using the iMagic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqr3bwdfVg4

soundproof:

The amazing opportunities presenting themselves outpace any disadvantages, I think. It's just a question of adapting to the newer formats, and that is driven by convenience and access.[ Edited the rest of your post for convenience - Electrified]

Your post is huge (nothing wrong with that, though), but it seems it's all based, not only on the premise that perceived "convenience" is king, but that the rental movie industry is working on the exact same premises as the music industry.

I find that premise to be a logical fallacy akin to Erasmus Montanus' "A stone cannot fly, Mother cannot fly, ergo: Mother is a rock".

The reason I find that logic to be a fallacy is that most people most of the time, don't want to buy a movie at all, since we most likely won't want to watch that same movie again.

Music on the other hand is used quite differently - even if music is used in a plethora of ways. However you put it, music is most of the times listened to several times, sometimes with years in between, but none the less, listened to more than once (except for the real crappola tracks, of course).

Further, everyone uses music in quite different physical settings than one watches movies.

I'm with Electrified here. Another thing worth considering is the context of a song within an album, which is totally different from a standalone movie that is completely self-contained. Add this to the valid point about repeated listening to tracks versus one or two views of a movie and I think the comparison with sreaming movies starts to take on water a little. I have a feeling that film and music content are not travelling down the same one-way street...

I agree that in the future we will not own "New music" in the sense that we do now. The advances in miniaturised storage will make it unnecessary and people are also used to tapping into a common pool for entertainment.

Something will be lost however, there are some who like to own physical copy of performances. It may be an age thing but I get satisfaction from having a collection of records, tapes and CDs and I am independent of outside agencies when I want to play them.

A more serious problem relates to selection and archiving, the past does have some interest. Occasionally there are no modern performances that approach some particular past performance.  I have a very old 78 record I found in a junk shop but it has had a very hard life and  is now hardly playable. The performance by the particular artist is outstanding but I have not been able to find a version on any modern media. In fact if I search iTunes it does not exist. A more recent example is a twin tape cassette of a performance by Chris Barber in Germany. I can find no recognition of this either. I can make a copy myself and store it in my computer but whether the next but one operating system will be able to handle it when my tape players are defunct is a bit of a chance. Backward compatibility is not a priority in modern computers.

John:

I can make a copy myself and store it in my computer but whether the next but one operating system will be able to handle it when my tape players are defunct is a bit of a chance. Backward compatibility is not a priority in modern computers.

This is one of the reasons I have all my audio in lossless and/or uncompressed: You can transcode it to whatever it may be down the road - even have as many lossy conversions in whatever formats you choose because you can always go back and convert to some other format from your lossless/uncompressed "archive".

Edit: The other reasons are:

1) Quality

2) Convenience (i.e. I don't have to think about loss of quality if I transcode the file to some lossy format for use on any player, the web, flash, dvd, and so on), and, finally, number

3) Convenience once again (I get to use all my files as I choose in my work. I don't have to convert a poor 128kbps MP3 to wav for editing, video tracking or anything like it).

John:

I agree that in the future we will not own "New music" in the sense that we do now. The advances in miniaturised storage will make it unnecessary and people are also used to tapping into a common pool for entertainment.

Something will be lost however, there are some who like to own physical copy of performances. It may be an age thing but I get satisfaction from having a collection of records, tapes and CDs and I am independent of outside agencies when I want to play them.

A more serious problem relates to selection and archiving, the past does have some interest. Occasionally there are no modern performances that approach some particular past performance.  I have a very old 78 record I found in a junk shop but it has had a very hard life and  is now hardly playable. The performance by the particular artist is outstanding but I have not been able to find a version on any modern media. In fact if I search iTunes it does not exist. A more recent example is a twin tape cassette of a performance by Chris Barber in Germany. I can find no recognition of this either. I can make a copy myself and store it in my computer but whether the next but one operating system will be able to handle it when my tape players are defunct is a bit of a chance. Backward compatibility is not a priority in modern computers.

 

Have you tried searching for vintage Jazz performances on Spotify? There is an almost inexhaustible supply on there including a Chris Barber perfomance in Germany in 1954 and the legendary Duke Ellington at Newport a couple of years later. There is a lot of music that continues to exist in Spotify's corner of the cloud long after it has become economically viable to sell the music in other formats, or indeed 'sell' it at all.

Simon

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I am between views on this subject – as I have different opinions based on what I do for work, home and leisure usage, using both analogue/digital formats.

As a listener, I prefer vinyl to CD, CD to stored digital music and stored digital music to streamed – and as I'm now a rather old, recovering vinyl addict, I still have more LP's ( around 3,000 ! ) than CD's (around 800 ).

I have “leapfrogged” buying downloaded itunes /mp3s, and either still buy a CD, or listen via Spotify/Napster/lastfm.

But it depends what I'm doing – before festivals, spotify/napster are perfect for previewing bands/artists to see – and as others have said, also to check a potential CD purchase.  Last week, on New Years Eve, our party music was a Spotify playlist – piped around the house and sounding fine via Blab 2000, Blab 6000 & 4000 and some ceiling speakers. The lack of fidelity is not relevant with drinks flowing and friends/kids round. By contrast, on New Years day, I treated myself to two sides of my recently bought, newly pressed Chris Wood 3LP pressing via my much loved Beogram 7000/mmc2 - a real analogue pleasure.

At work, we often play Napster via the Sonos desktop (for convenience/variety)  using various Beolabs. But on our flagship systems - Beosound 5 and 9000 - we play CD's or lossless copies, and they sound a lot, lot better !!

I think many people will increasingly listen “casually” via streamed services, but will still want to own something tangible – particularly music you value.  I got the Topic label collection recently - "Three score and Ten - A voice to the People" a stunning hardback book, full of pictures and articles with 7 cd's inlaid in the covers - try downloading that !!

Live music – at a local level and at smaller regional venues and festivals – is still very much an opportunity for artists to sell their CD's – and many performers rely on the “merch” table to make a viable living. I've yet to be sold a download / itunes gift card at a gig. And even if this becomes feasible from a technical view – what do you get signed ??

So – I think people will still “own” music - but in differing ways

Nice subject simon .....and I'm sure there will be nearly as many opinions as there are formats...

This a very good post, with some excellent follow-up comments.

My thought to the posted question goes back a few months to an attempt one evening to download ( legally, I think ) a film I wanted to see. I pay a monthly service for this.

Nothing. The "502 " message popped-up that night, and for a few more days, too.

When the service finally came back up, my reaction was to burn every film and I had sitting inside the computer onto DVD. This is what I have always done with MP3 and CD music, with the really enjoyable music recorded onto our BS 3200 hard drive. I can watch my film whenever, and wherever I want it. Steve Job's comment that no one wants to own a film or music seems strange given the volume of ITUNE sales.

So streaming whilst in London's " Cloud " or elsewhere in this shrinking world is really fun until your favourite server goes down.

Thanks to everyone for the excellent replies to this thread!

As a final postcript I checked through my Amazon account this afternoon. In the two months since subcribing to a Spotify premium account which in theory makes it less necessary to own CD's, I have downloaded 2 albums via paid-for MP3 and purchased a further 14 on CD, which is way ahead of the previous two months so I am not sure it's having quite the effect I expected!

Simon

I have the free Spotify account (only via invite now apparently) which allows me to stream/listen but not download, while displaying the odd advert - more than acceptable for my uses. Today my "Revolver" remastered CD arrived - I'm well impressed, still the only way to fly for me (I particularly like the stamp (or even fine art) analogy - a downloaded image being OK for some,  but it's just not the same)!

I also got an email from Amazon - as I'd recently bought the CD I've been given a £3 credit to legally download something else! I'm sure I'll use it but whatever I download I'm almost certain to buy the CD (if I like it).

Also the news reports that album sales have plummeted but downloads have increased by a huge margin - clearly I'm a dinosaur or a stamp collector!

Currently listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows" - after returning early from the local Pub quiz (the snow is chucking it down here with spectacularly large flakes). It doesn't look like I'm going to work tomorrow and so I'm making up for my premature exit from the Pub with a few Tinnies and the remastered Beatles via headphones.............everything seems alright in the world to me!

Blast - my drink fuelled (but well thought out and articulate) post has gone off to Mod land for approval!

Nevermind I'm sure it won't sway anyone's opinion anyhoo!