More music
Steven Levy, author of The Perfect Thing, the biography of the iPod, has an interesting post this morning working through his music-buying habits and how they are or are not affected by iTunes, DRM, and the record companies’ dreams of financial domination.
Personally, I have switched to downloading (yes, legally) for the most part, because convenience is paramount for me. Yes, it is comforting to have a physical CD, and yes, the audio quality is better on a CD than even the new higher-bitrate AAC offered by iTunes, but do I really need to store all that plastic away, when I listen almost exclusively through iTunes and iPods?
I think that more and more, people are consuming music in a much more constant stream. It’s with us when we walk to the parking lot, in the car, at the gym, while we exercise. Truth is, it has always been in a lot of these places — on PA speakers, radios, elevators. But today, the iPod and other portable devices are offering us a personalized stream of music in our lives — in every environment. We make all of the choices. It’s a compelling experience that makes it well worth a small dip in audio quality (especially if you have a hard time discerning that dip).
So, why do I need the physical CD? The strongest argument is that today’s audio compression and reproduction technology is but a tinny speaker to what we will have as a standard in 10 or 20 years. But will it matter? In 10 or 20 years, will I really dust off all of those CDs and re-rip that music into the format of the day? Maybe… or maybe not.
When the next music storage standard comes along, I might very well just buy my music again in the new format. When CDs arrived, very few people transfered their audio tape recordings to CD if that same album (same performance) was available in CD. We just bought it again on CD, assuming that the record company had better master tapes. In the instance where we didn’t repurchase, it seems far likelier that a true audiophile would continue to play the music from its original-release medium (put that vinyl on the turntable).
Think about the niche of DVD Audio. DVD Audio discs promise your favorite performances recorded in 5.1 surround for your home theatre system (sometimes as a premium bundled with a standard CD). Here’s a situation where I would simply buy my favorite performance again. Re-ripping my CD just won’t help.
In the end, I think that for most music, I would rather enjoy the ease of surrounding myself with my favorite performances and trust that when higher-quality recordings are available, I can repurchase. Validating this theory on a minor scale (for me, anyway), is the notion that iTunes will allow users to ‘upgrade’ their old 128 kbps tracks to the new 256 kbps quality for only 30¢.
So, what do you do and why? I don’t think there are any wrong answers here, but it’s interesting to weigh convenience against quality.