Re: (TV) OT:Apple unveils service to sell 200,000 digital music titles onl ine

["Philip P. Obbard" <pobbard@yahoo.com>]

--- Maurice Rickard <maurice@mac.com> wrote:
> I've also seen someone complain about the service not having any 
> Madonna, Foo Fighters, or Britney Spears.  To me that's a selling 
> point, but a cursory glance at the selection doesn't show enough 
> obscure stuff to catch my interest, so it seems possible that the 
> service might not know what kind of store to be--a "we have what 
> everyone else is buying" store only, or a "we even have stuff that's 
> hard to find in the physical world" store. 

This is a catch-22 for the label. If they only stock hard-to-find obscurities,
they might scare away mainstream music listeners. If they focus on stocking the
mainstream stuff, the incentive is too great for people to try a free P2P
service instead (where current mainstream hits are always over-represented).
The solution is stock rare AND mainstream stuff, but it's going to take years
to digitize catalogs, and it can't be free to do so. Ultimately, you have to
make the same choices owners of small video stores do - that while it's great
to have a hefty back catalog of films, nothing rents like the latest
Disney/Miramax/etc. picture. 

> And there are comments on various 
> Apple message boards claiming that a song encoded as a 192 kbps mp3 
> sounds significantly better than the same song encoded as an ACC 
> (admittedly, they tested this with "Hotel California," which of 
> course sounds crappy under any conditions).   If ACC's even worse 
> than mp3, I'd say this would go nowhere, but then the record-buying 
> (or, er, downloading) public has proven that they don't much care 
> about quality.

Hey, I'd love everything to be WAV quality. It bugs me that someone will take a
WAV, convert it to an MP3, email to a friend, who then puts out a CD-R with
that MP3 converted back to WAV - yet there's no surefire way someone can tell
that this kind of conversation and degradation of sound has taken place. But
the fact is that most people were content for decades taping their favorite
songs off FM radio, which is equivalent to 64kbps MP3. To put it another way,
most comparisons I've seen rate 128 WMA files slightly higher than 128 MP3, but
wider support for the latter and technical restrictions on the former mean I
generally only deal in MP3s. (Likewise, OGG is great, from all I hear, but my
RioVolt doesn't support it, nor to most desktop players.)

--Philip


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