Limitations/iTunes
I have tonnes of stuff to put up here… however right now we are stuck accessing the internet through my phone again, just like in shiny old Newark airport. Apparently WordPress is rather top-heavy when it comes to the number of items which need to be displayed on the screen and thus shoved over my tiny internet connection, so we’re gonna have to wait until tomorrow for the uploading of my mysterious goodies. Intriguing though, right?
Anyway, in the meantime we have the news that Apple has officially become the US’s largest music retailer, freshly beating Walmart to the number one place. I find it somewhat terrifying the Walmart was the number one retailer previously. Actually I find Walmart quite terrifying in general. I suppose that this is yet another nail in the coffin of CDs, but it’s a little sad that the harbinger of the conversion to digital music lacks the higher-quality DRM free material that Amazon, eMusic and DG do. Not terribly surprising though, and I’m sure Apple is going to start seeing seriously increased competition from Amazon before too long.
Signs Of The CD Apocalypse
The imminent death of compact discs draws nearer! On the one hand, there is this report that 48% of teenagers bought no CDs last year. None. 0. That’s up from 38% the previous year. On the other hand we have Apple getting all high and mighty about becoming Americas second largest music store, just behind Walmart. I’m predicting that with DRM free, high-quality digital music stores popping up all over teh internets, Apple is going to start feeling some pressure from the likes of Amazon and Co. pretty soon. And quite rightly so.
We just need the quality gap to close before our favorite polycarbonate pitted media altogether. That is, stores need to hurry up and start selling lossless audio files as an option. Otherwise, everyone is going to get so inured to the unquality of low bitrates that we’ll probably all start talking with compression artifacts littering our speech. Or something equally not-quite terrifying.