Saturday, December 29, 2007

Whipsawed Again

The music industry was certainly not clever enough to come up with a way to get a whole generation to take a big step backwards in fidelity, but the fact that it happened is about the only tiny bit of good news they've got these days, since it means that they'll be able to re-sell you higher fidelity versions of stuff you've already got. Of course, people still won't necessarily pay for those lossless remasters this time either, but filesharing 10x larger files will be more of a pain, and if you don't know the provenance of the file, it is harder to feel like you're, you know, really getting higher fidelity. You might just be downloading a re-encoded mp3. Of course, this won't be a bonanza on the scale of the introduction of the CD, and the main beneficiary will probably be Apple, since it justifies the need for a 250, 500, 750 gig iPod.

No comments: