Hots On #5: That's Not A Coaster!
You have to wonder sometimes about rationalizations. What societal restrictions are in place to keep kids from grabbing an apple from an outdoor bin at a supermarket? Mostly the possibility of being caught red-handed, I would think. And, for better or worse that's just not going to happen with people downloading Avril Lavigne songs on P2P networks.
At least, not immediately.
EMI recently introduced an option to purchase music through iTunes at a higher bitrate, from 128 kbps to 256, and without the DRM (digital rights management) choke chain that has annoyed and confused consumers since its introduction. The bitrate upgrade comes with a corresponding price inflation, from 99c to 1.29. (FYI, true CD quality is about 14,400 kps. The maximum bitrate for ripping CDs to iTunes is 320 kps).
At best, DRM keeps the purchaser from changing a song's file type or burning hundreds of CD copies; at worst, it puts spyware on your computer and renders the CD essentially unplayable. The trade-off? The DRM-free tracks include tags which encode information about the purchaser, ie. email and account info. Apple claims the tags act as a "proof of purchase," but of course they could also be used to track the origins of illegally traded internet files. This would make the feds' job a lot easier when it comes to tracking "illegally shared" content to its source. But what about stolen iPods or otherwise misappropriated files? What about, um, privacy? I guess the people who automatically give their phone numbers to the cashier at Target won't care one way or the other, but some people actually want to sort of keep their names and contact information from floating around in netspace for eternity. Rationalize that.
But anyway, this got me thinking about the number of people who mostly listen to 128kps mp3s on ear buds or computer speakers and consider that "listening to music." What most people don't realize (and probably don’t care about) is that the majority of downloadable music only contains a fraction of the information encoded at the source. By most accounts, 128kps is the lowest possible bitrate before digital noise and other compression artifacts become audible; the difference between playing an mp3 through iPod headphones and playing a 1,440 kps CD playing through a powered tube amp and perfectly aligned speakers is basically the difference between dinner at the Four Seasons and a can of Spam. Sitting in front of a hi-fi and getting lost in the spatial dynamics of a Primal Scream or Talking Heads record is more like standing in front of Guernica at the Bilbao, an experience for which even a nice pair of headphones can only provide a thumbnail.
Same goes for mp3s vs. CDs. It will be interesting to see, ten years down the line, whether CDs become the kind of fetishized music medium that vinyl records are today. 25 years after CDs entered the market, vinyl maintains a small but lucrative market share for both indie and major labels. Even with the growing presence of FLAC (free lossless audio codec) mp3s, which allow for compression without sacrificing the origin file's size, online, CDs remain the best-sounding, highest-quality medium available. So in that sense, as long as donwloadable files are limited to a quarter (at best) of possible bit depth, there will always be a small but devoted clientele for CDs. Thank goodness.
-photo by digitalapollo on flickr
