Culture

Culture

by Michael Ho




Plenty Of Legal Downloadable Music Now

from the more-is-always-better-right? dept

For a totally arbitrary, but supposedly "symbolic" milestone, the global music industry is celebrating that there are now over 100 legal music services available. Don't ask what kind of sites make it to the list, that's not the important part. The important part is that now music lovers have more music formats to choose from than ever. Woo hoo! So instead of making it easier for people to download music in a simple, transferable format, we now have a bunch of different formats that we have to track down from over 100 sources. Sounds like progress to me.

7 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

    May 27th, 2004 @ 11:11am
  • No Subject Given

    by Anonymous Coward

    Variety is the spice of life. If you want everything to be the same, you are either to stupid to appreciate have CHOICE or to stupid/lazy to want to figure out what is best for you and would rather have someone tell you.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

    • May 27th, 2004 @ 11:42am
    • Re: No Subject Given

      by Oliver Wendell Jones

      Wow, what color is the sky in your world?

      Mike wasn't complaining about the variety of music available, but the various non-compatible, proprietary music data file formats that are out there.

      Imagine if you went to the real world music store to buy the latest album from your favorite band but find out that it's only available on DAT tape, or Super Audio CD or some other music format you can't play?

      (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

      • May 27th, 2004 @ 11:50am
      • Re: No Subject Given

        That's happening all the time now with the new write protection schemes and the incredibly wide variety of them that have been popping up in music stores over the last year or two.

        (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

        • May 27th, 2004 @ 4:18pm
        • Re: No Subject Given

          by Brentis

          Yeah- but are they all free like Kazaa? I've learnt about more bands using Kazaa than I would've if I ever had to pay for them. Now, although not an avid concert-goer am actually considering attending some events.

          For example, just d/l'd some Black Eyed Peas Videos. They rock, plus that chick is hot!!

          lol, learnt..

          (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

        May 28th, 2004 @ 5:44am
      • Re: No Subject Given

        by thecaptain

        The myriad of different formats are a pain sometimes, I'll grant.

        But it wouldn't be sooo bad if we were allowed to transfer from one medium to another (CD to Hard drive is my favorite example). This is something that the industry pushes hard to criminalize, if they haven't done so already (I stopped paying attention, its become wayyy too ridiculous)

        However, if the file formats are all digital, then its really trivial to convert from one to the other (from wav to mp3 to ogg or whatever) with just a bit of googling, so choose whichever you like and work with that...I don't think its a real serious inconvenience.

        (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

      • May 28th, 2004 @ 6:50am
      • Re: No Subject Given

        by Anonymous Coward

        My sky is grey today. And again, variety is good. I can all to easily imagine a world where music is only available in WMA and that scares me. So give me the different formats, sites, etc. As with all things, eventually I (and you) will declare a winner by default (think VHS vs. Beta) and we can get on with more important things.

        (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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