Victory for the idea that free downloads and purchased hard copy can be complements and not always substitutes. NYT : “In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, “In Rainbows,†the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers.”
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/7634/whoo-hoo-for-radiohead/
Whoo hoo for Radiohead
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I downloaded it (and didn’t pay anything) when it first was available, and now I’ve ordered the CD (in good part because I heard it first and liked it).
On top of that, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca have it for $8.
122,000 sold during the first week for this album
vs.
300,000 sold during the first week for their last album in 2003.
At least one article I read blamed the difference on (“obviously”) the fact Radiohead gave the music out in a digital form. I think that is silly, though, because obviously all CD sales are way, way down from 2003.
CDs and MP3s are complements/substitutes depending on whom you ask.
If you ask someone who enjoys higher sound quality and has a stereo system capable of bringing out the differences between CDs and MP3s, then he would consider them complements.
If you ask someone who exclusively listens to music in crowded venues (so that subtleties cannot be heard) or on standard/poor equipment (S&P?) that cannot exploit the difference, then he would consider the two formats as substitutes.
The proportion is shifting in favor of substitution, due in no small part to “dynamic range compression.” This recording technique is washing all the detail out of modern music, and makes new CDs sound just as bad as MP3s anyway. Thus, people are not forfeiting anything when they download the MP3 and reject the CD.
There was an excellent link on LRC about this today (Jan 10), and the bottom of that article links to an even more detailed piece entitled “Imperfect Sound Forever”.
MP3 made piracy easy by compressing music to an easily transferable size. The recording studios, however, have taken away all non-legal reasons not to pirate — they compress the music before it’s even released!
“MP3 made piracy easy by compressing music to an easily transferable size. The recording studios, however, have taken away all non-legal reasons not to pirate — they compress the music before it’s even released!”
Well. . . yes, but not in the same sense. Today’s mastering process sometimes goes too far. But putting a song through $50,000 worth of compression equipment is not quite the same as converting it to mp3 on iTunes.
Right. It does, however, affect how much will be lost in the MP3 conversion process.
If I may take the outrageously un-Austrian approach of “unitizing” abstract concepts (e.g. “utils” = utility – ity), assume that music quality is represented by “quals” (quality – ity), with 100 quals representing the quality of live music.
Now say that properly mastering may keep the quality around 90 quals (keeping in mind that the CD technology does in fact have its limits), and that MP3 compression might take it down to 60 quals.
The trouble is that overdoing dynamic range compression (as is done on almost all pop and rock music in the last several years) causes the overall quality to drop to perhaps 70-80 quals, thus making the effect of MP3 compression significantly less noticeable than if it were done on a properly mastered track.
Forgive the nonsensical “quals,” but it was the best way I could sum up the idea.
By the way, I loved “Death Peddler” — I wish I could have heard it live!
Well, compression techniques has vastly improved and the quality loss from a CD to MP3 conversion at VAR 192kbps is virtually non-existent to most listeners.
And with the increase in storage capabilities and broad band access, better formats such as FLAC will soon take over the mp3-format, making CD’s useless.
The problem as I see it is that when buying a CD you get NOTHING more than the music and the physical product (the cover/booklet, plastic), but when buying a movie on DVD, there’s far more in terms of bonus materials, still making it more worth buying a DVD compared to downloading it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/technology/11sony.html?ex=1357707600&en=bf46591c45dc20e1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Sony joins the rest and will offer DRM-free tracks on Amazon. Now all 4 major players are DRM-free.
Bjorn, I had forgotten about FLAC and OGG when discussing this. The only thing that makes me sad about those formats is that I’ll immediately feel the urge to go out and replace my in-dash MP3 CD player!
I’m sure that the FLAC/OGG players will also support MP3, but I just gotta have the best, right?
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