A music sales revolution
Friday, November 2nd, 2007
A few weeks ago Radiohead released their seventh studio album as a ‘pay what you want’ digital download. Since their completion of their six album deal with EMI, us Radiohead fans have had to wait longer than any other album release for this one, but it worth the wait. Despite not being able to secure a label through which to release the CD, the band decided to release the digital download version on their own. A music sales revolution, possibly, but do I embrace it? No.
Actually thats a lie, I pre-ordered my copy for £0.00, and enjoyed a great album without offering any of my hard earned cash to the band. I was waiting for the CD release before I was prepared to get my wallet out and you can forget the overpriced vinyl/CD box set at £40. The thing is that despite having a significant hearing loss, I have recently started to discover the difference in quality between MP3s and CDs, and I don’t like it. My entire music collection fits on my iPod, most of which is at 192 kps, and I’m having to re-rip my favorite albums to 320 kbs (the treshold at which I can’t tell the difference between the lossless CD and the compressed MP3, try listening to the opening of Money by Pink Floyd and you’ll know what I mean), so that I can continue to enjoy them. Lucky for me I have CDs of nearly all my music, so the only problem is the huge amount of time it takes to do rip them, but considering the trend in the music industry I suspect the CD won’t live forever, and then I’ll have a problem. The only thing that could save this would be improved technical specs of computers, the internet and iPods so that the sole digital distribution is at a lossless or nearly lossless format. Of course I will miss the artwork and ownership of the material object being bought, but were a consumer society and as such are damaging the planet and need to stop, so that can’t be all bad.
It’s with joy that I read here, the ‘In Rainbows’ CD release has been confirmed, and you can bet I’ll one of the first in queue to replace the low quality MP3s that the band gave me with a CD I can really enjoy.