MP3 A-OK
Today, Matthew, I'm mostly going to moan about.... MP3s.
Before the internet was discovered, kids such as myself (back when I was a kid obviously, I'm slightly older in a linear fashion now, though perhaps not mentally) used to swap music by the time-honoured process of copying a tape. This was usually done in a tape-to-tape machine, or for those without this technology, by playing on one machine and recording on a completely different one. This worked, although you often heard the dog barking and the toilet flushing as well as the music you wanted.
Despite one bought tape being shared around half a school, the world kept on spinning, record companies made loads of money and everybody was happy.
Later on, a scientitian would grow a CD in a laboratory and the musical landscape wobbled about once again. Now (well, 15 years later when CD-burners and blank media became affordable) copies could be made with no loss in quality, or at least they could be copied to tape.
This raised an interesting situation. Most cars had tape players still, yet now most music was bought on CD. So, everybody copied stuff to tape. Nobody, least of all the record companies, raised an eyebrow.
But then somebody discovered the MP3 file format, lodged in a crashed meteor. The only previous ways of storing songs on computers took up huge amounts of disk space, yet now it was tiny and without much of a loss of quality. It was also very easily copied.
So now it's practically a hanging offence to share music. If you download a song from Itunes, it only plays in Itunes or on your Ipod. It also costs 79p per track, which is very expensive considering there are no manufacturing, packaging or distribution costs involved. You can't play it in your car or on your home hi-fi. This is why I will never install Itunes or buy an Ipod (I have a far superior, and cheaper MP3 player instead). CDs often now come with copy protection so you can't rip them or copy them.
Record companies quote diminishing profits and say that music-sharing is going to cause a collapse of the economy, and that Madonna may be forced to take a shelf-stacking job in Tesco. But this is rubbish because CD sales are just as high as before.
I, like most people, still buy CDs of bands they like, but might experiment a bit with downloads of unknown artists. Yes, the music may not have been paid for, but it simply wouldn't have been purchased in the first place. Like when Microsoft say that piracy of MS Office costs them a fortune. If the people who had a pirate copy were forced to pay £300 for it, they simply wouldn't and would seek a cheaper alternative, so the figures are meaningless.
There was a really good finishing point to all this, but I can't remember it now.
Before the internet was discovered, kids such as myself (back when I was a kid obviously, I'm slightly older in a linear fashion now, though perhaps not mentally) used to swap music by the time-honoured process of copying a tape. This was usually done in a tape-to-tape machine, or for those without this technology, by playing on one machine and recording on a completely different one. This worked, although you often heard the dog barking and the toilet flushing as well as the music you wanted.
Despite one bought tape being shared around half a school, the world kept on spinning, record companies made loads of money and everybody was happy.
Later on, a scientitian would grow a CD in a laboratory and the musical landscape wobbled about once again. Now (well, 15 years later when CD-burners and blank media became affordable) copies could be made with no loss in quality, or at least they could be copied to tape.
This raised an interesting situation. Most cars had tape players still, yet now most music was bought on CD. So, everybody copied stuff to tape. Nobody, least of all the record companies, raised an eyebrow.
But then somebody discovered the MP3 file format, lodged in a crashed meteor. The only previous ways of storing songs on computers took up huge amounts of disk space, yet now it was tiny and without much of a loss of quality. It was also very easily copied.
So now it's practically a hanging offence to share music. If you download a song from Itunes, it only plays in Itunes or on your Ipod. It also costs 79p per track, which is very expensive considering there are no manufacturing, packaging or distribution costs involved. You can't play it in your car or on your home hi-fi. This is why I will never install Itunes or buy an Ipod (I have a far superior, and cheaper MP3 player instead). CDs often now come with copy protection so you can't rip them or copy them.
Record companies quote diminishing profits and say that music-sharing is going to cause a collapse of the economy, and that Madonna may be forced to take a shelf-stacking job in Tesco. But this is rubbish because CD sales are just as high as before.
I, like most people, still buy CDs of bands they like, but might experiment a bit with downloads of unknown artists. Yes, the music may not have been paid for, but it simply wouldn't have been purchased in the first place. Like when Microsoft say that piracy of MS Office costs them a fortune. If the people who had a pirate copy were forced to pay £300 for it, they simply wouldn't and would seek a cheaper alternative, so the figures are meaningless.
There was a really good finishing point to all this, but I can't remember it now.
posted by Nej at
3:08 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home