Retailers giving vinyl records another spin

Retailers giving vinyl records another spin.

And they said we were crazy.

I’m old enough to have owned records when that’s all there was and I don’t remember them being that great.  There have always been audio “purists” who feel that the analog sound is superior to today’s digital audio.  The absurd thing about records today is that I have to believe 99.9% of them are recorded, mixed and mastered as digital audio.  Only in the last step are they molded into analog records.  Anyone who is going to claim to hear the “more natural” sound in those recordings is fooling themselves.

Happy Birthday CD!

It was 25 years ago today that the very first CD rolled out of a Philips‘ plant in Germany. We’re beginning to see the demise of the audio CD as MP3 and other types of files become the preferred format for music use and distribution. I wonder if DVDs will live to see 25?

Is Physical Media Dead?

In a recent column in PC Magazine about the high-definition format war, Dan Costa claims:

no matter how you dress up a disc, it’s still a physical entity that needs to be mastered, packed, shipped, sold, and stored on a shelf—and that’s not what consumers want.

I really think he is wrong about that. Consumers have proven to like physical media and continue to purchase it in large quantities.

I would agree with a different comment he makes, that “all current technology trends point to a future dominated by digital distribution.” As storage gets cheaper and bandwidth gets faster, digital distribution will clearly be a bigger factor than it is now and will certainly take over in certain areas, but I do not believe that physical media is ever going to go away, particularly in the mass consumer distribution area.

EMI Music Launches DRM-free Downloads

Earlier this week EMI Music announced they would make DRM-free downloads available through Apple’s iTunes music store. I never thought I would live to see the day when a major music label would give up the fight for digital rights management.

Anyone who has even a passing interest in digital content knows there has been a long running battle between artists and distributors who want to protect their content from piracy and consumers who want to repurpose content or use it on multiple devices.

The industry argues that DRM is a necessary evil to prevent piracy and illegal downloading. In their view, the fact that it prevents using the purchased content on multiple devices is just an unfortunate side effect. Consumers argue that they paid for the content and they should be able to do whatever they want with it and make backups.

The industry counters that if they provide DRM-free content, there is nothing except the honor system to stop people from distributing the content to others, and consumers have shown in the past to be less than honorable. Consumers say if they were offered DRM-free content they wouldn’t need to turn to pirated material to do what they want with the content and they would pay for content they previously obtained illegally.

I can certainly see how the industry is going to be very skeptical of a public who has flagrantly pirated content for years, claiming that they are suddenly ready to gladly pay for content simply because it is DRM-free. This will be a very interesting test for both sides.

If people do not purchase the DRM-free songs or they quickly appear on file sharing networks every other label and distributor will say, “See, the public was lying. They just wanted us to make it easier for them to continue to steal our content.”

Personally, I would strongly encourage those of you who support the idea of DRM-free content to go and buy some EMI content from the iTunes store and not to post it on any file sharing service. There is no better way to prove to the industry that you are serious about wanting DRM-free content and are willing to pay for it if they will provide it. It doesn’t really matter if there are any songs you like or not. If you are serious, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is.

I’m Not Dead Yet

Like many before, a recent article in Slate discusses the oft-proclaimed death of the compact disc.

Yes, CD sales have been declining for years. Yes, it is almost certainly due to downloading and other delivery methods. Yes, there were hundreds of millions of discs worth $10 billion sold in 2005.

The article primarily deals with music CDs, but we have seen a similar trend with our business-to-business customers. In the same way sales of discs from chart-topping artists have declined due to downloading and music-sharing, we have seen a decline in the use of CDs by some of our largest clients. These are the companies that have the money and the infrastructure to support digital delivery.

While just putting a file up on a website and having people download it seems easy and free, if you want more than a handful of people to view it, you need an entirely different back end network to support that. There are many companies that make a very nice living proving hosting and bandwidth for streaming media. Serving media files to hundreds of viewers is very different from serving HTML files to a few dozen people.

When it comes to the smaller, independent artist, we have noticed the same thing described in the article happening to the small business customer. Smaller companies that cannot support moving to digital delivery for any of a number of reasons, continue to expand their use of CDs and other optical media.

CDs are still a great way to deliver your message. When you send someone a CD, you can be nearly 100% certain they will be able to view it or listen to it. They can use it in a variety of machines, and when they are done with it, they can give it to others.

For the smaller artist or company a CD provides a lot of advantages and can help increase the perceived value of your product. The illegal downloading of music and other digital content has helped to devalue all forms of digital content. Many people do not consider illegal music downloads theft simply because no physical item was taken. This contributes to the perception that digital music, movies and software have no real value. But a CD or a DVD, those are real physical items that have real value.

Sometime in the future digital delivery methods probably will kill the CD, but for now, the rumors of the CDs demise have been greatly exaggerated.