This isn't a new topic, but it's interesting to see it resurface every once in a while, because as time goes on, opinions seem to be slowly shifting. Of all the times I've seen this topic discussed, this one by far has the most people saying that they now buy electronically.
From my perspective, it has some interesting echoes of The Great Vocal-Tolerance Shift which happened around the turn of the century. "I'm not paying for a god damned file on my computer" sounds very much like "I'll never listen to those idiotic cookie-monster vocals!" often heard among prog/power-metal fans in the past. But these days, after a steady drumbeat of threads titled "I bought my first growly-vocaled album, it's awesome, what else like this can you recommend?", the militant anti-cookie-monster faction is now a small minority among prog/power fandom. I see a similar shift underway with music-purchasing habits.
There are lots of people in their late 40's and up that aren't hip to the internet and downloading music let alone paying for it online. They have CD players and will continue to buy CDs.
Sure, but how many? Old + "not hip to the internet" generally means "not buying a whole lot of music". Record labels aren't going to go to the expense of manufacturing CDs if 10,000 people want an electronic format and only 1000 people want CD format. They'll just drop it. So people who want CDs will last longer than CDs will.
I never truely feel like I own a downloaded album (I've yet to buy an internet album).
Maybe that's the problem. Perhaps you should actually try buying an electronic album once. You might be surprised how you feel about it. For me, I totally get a feeling of "ownership" once I pay for an official electronic version of an album that I'd previously downloaded for free. Even if I had the illicit version on my hard drive for months, I'll suddenly start listening to the "official" version way more than I ever sampled the illicit version. Like you, before I actually tried buying an electronic album, I had no idea that there would be a psychological difference for me, but there is. So it's really not that scary! Give it a try sometime, better to do it once now and find out you don't like it, than do it 5 years from now and wonder why the hell you spent years wasting all that money on physical formats.
No artwork or liner notes and lyrics...
All downloads from the major vendors come with artwork these days. But yes, the continued lack of embedded lyrics and credits is the largest deficiency in the format.
Amen, brother. I'm not paying for a god damned file on my computer.
So all your computer software is free/stolen then? The reluctance to pay for "a file" is weird to me. The "file" is what contains the music that you listen to, which, in my mind, is the whole point of buying music. That file used to be stored on a piece of plastic, now it's stored on a piece of magnetized metal or silicon. So what? A refusal to pay for "a file" implies that you place 100% of the value of a CD in the packaging, with no value on the music that the artist has created.
The closest I've ever got to paying for a download was when I donated (voluntarily) a good 10 dollars for one Anathema song... ahha they needed funds to keep working on their album. ahahhahaha
And the insane irony here is that Anathema's new album is one of those (increasingly rare) albums that still is not available via electronic distribution! Argh, what flaming idiots!!!
It's the manufacturers of player devices who decide which media format the masses will prefer.
Huh? No, you say it later yourself, it's the *people* who decide which media format they prefer. The manufacturers give choices, and the people select among them. If people had continued to buy cassettes and cassette players, manufacturers would have continued to make them.
That said, the CD will stay with us for decades, just like vinyl has, because there will always be people who want to use their home studios' capacity to the max and enjoy the music as natural it was meant to be when recorded. This hi-fi level cannot be ever reached with listening packed mp3 files through the pisspoor three-penny earphones that come along iPods and phones.
haha, it's funny to see the CD now venerated so devoutly, when, for years I heard how the "cold, digital sound" with a sampling rate of only 44kHz was inferior to vinyl and then SACD/DVD-Audio.
Anyhow, there is no connection between electronically-distributed music and sound quality. You are not required to listen to mp3s through three-penny earphones. You can listen to them on your expensive stereo just like you listen to CDs, and they sound just as good. Then, if you're a real audio snob, electronic distribution allows much BETTER sound quality than the physically-limited CD. If you want to listen to 96kHz/24-bit recordings, that's a hell of a lot easier to do with electronic downloads than with a physical format, and it's outright impossible with CDs. So the idea that CD's 44kHz/16-bit is some kind of golden standard is just a belief built out of habit, not from a personal search to find the optimal level of audio fidelity for your tastes.
Being a DJ for school dances and other events I would have to say that the reason for most of that thought process is that we've had a truckload of new one-hit wonder artists in this decade.
Were there not one-hit-wonders before this decade?
Neil
uke:
