I don't think so, lets find out why >>>>>>>
The age of digital music is very much upon us and, for the moment, co-existing with the world of physical media. Digital delivery of music (and indeed most forms of media) has enjoyed a massive boom over the last few years, most of the success owing to Apples tying of their Ipod to Itunes and its associated store. Portable digital players are now widely available and in price brackets to suit all pockets and the allure of carrying hundreds and thousands of tracks in a device smaller than the volume of a single CD case is rather formidable. So with most people inevitably transferring their music from their physical CDs to their computer hard-drives for transfer to their portable devices many are attracted to the simplification of cutting out the need to buy and rip CDs in favour of a quick download Factor in the fact that increasing numbers of people now even forgo a traditional stereo system in exchange for a speaker dock for their portable device and the (apparent) logistics of owning a physical CD are further reduced.
Digital delivery has does have its advantages over CD
It's almost instantaneous; you can sit at home, decide you want a particular album and have it purchased and available to you within minutes (even seconds!) of that initial decision. Consider the alternatives: You travel to a store, which depending on your location and situation could take minutes, hours or even days (if you work during the day for example). Or, you purchase from an online store which is going to take a minimum of a day (assuming you get next day delivery) So it's clear digital delivery wins this round
Cost. Now this is a point of contention, a new release RRP CD is pretty much guaranteed to be more expensive than an equivalent digital download, however many (probably a majority in actual fact) CDs are sold well below RRP value and can in a significant number of cases be cheaper than the cost of the digital download. I'll say that for brand new releases digital delivery wins, but it isn't a win in all situations.
Physical space. My CD collection, the entirety of which I have stored on my computer (In duplicate I might add, mp3 and Ogg Vorbis formats) takes up more volume (including cases) than my computer itself (which is a mid tower and not a small one at that), and about two CD boxes would engulf the volume of my 60 GB mp3 player (which also holds my entire CD collection) So it's clear that digital music wins the space round.
Backup. Most digital delivery services will allow you to re-download your purchases multiple times (some an infinite number of times) should you ever lose the files for whatever reason. Break a CD and it's gone, you need to buy it again. So in this case, which I suppose comes under durability or archiving, digital once again wins.
Now we come to the disadvantages and issues with digital delivery, and these are the crux of the matter.
Lossy Formats
All the major digital download platforms sell their music almost exclusively in "lossy" compression formats usually encoded at 192 kbs VBR 320 kbs. For most lossy formats music at this bitrate exceeds the bitrate considered "transparent” (Transparency being the audio quality where the compressed file is indistinguishable from the source material on the same listening equipment). Transparency is very subjective and many individuals will experience transparency at lower bitrates and others at higher. So the 320 kbs files are "CD Quality" in terms of actual listening quality, but some (probably most) people won’t be able to tell the difference between a 192 kbs mp3 and a 320 kbs mp3, so the question of the value of the actual file size must be brought up. A 320kbs mp3 library takes up over a third more space than a 192 kbs library while offering no better quality (to most), a happier medium would probably be 256 kbs which even the most golden eared of listener would probably have trouble telling apart from the source. 320 kbs seems a bit wasteful, especially in light of the fact that most audiophiles, those who care most about quality, will want to own the CD and choose their own rippers and encoders for “optimum” quality.
The question of file size though is aside from the main problem I see with purchasing lossy format music: you're stuck with that format. Transcoding Lossy formats to other lossy formats or bitrates is possible but comes at the expense of quality, so although you can do it, you can't at the same time, which is kind of a shitty situation to be in.
But why should you care if you're stuck in one format or another, you'll just use that forever, it'll be around forever, right?
Maybe, but then again maybe not. Basically by subscribing to a particular lossy format you're gambling on that format surviving the test of time, that it'll continue to be supported by software and hardware in the future and that no better format will come along that will allow for better compression (smaller file size with equal or greater quality). Most of today's common formats will probably survive for a good long while, but are we confident they will never be superseded? Given the relentless march of technology, it is almost certain that they will be, or (and possibly more likely) as mass storage gets smaller and more affordable, it may become more practical to store ones music collection in a lossless format.
Digital music is most widely available in mp3 format because mp3 is the most widely supported format for portable players, but is it the best format? The answer is… no.
Mp3 exhibits inferior performance to or lacks features of several of the other lossy formats available, since I’m not an audio tech I’ll just link in the wiki for the really technical shit. Aside from that there’s the issue of quality versus size, most other lossy formats can produce the same quality as mp3 at a lower bitrate (or better quality for the same size), and mp3 performs poorly at lower bitrates (below 96 kbs) than other formats.
The initial design on mp3 didn’t make provisions for parameters such as gapless playback or volume normalization (replaygain) which have since been shoe-horned in through ID3 tag specifications. The ID3 tag itself is a weakness of the mp3 format since the tag must support a given field in order for information to be held whereas other tagging systems such as vorbis comments allows the addition of any field to the metadata.
Mp3 is also encumbered by patents which means anyone who sells music in mp3 format has to pay up for every x number of units sold, most other audio formats are bound in a similar manner although the Ogg Vorbis codec which was developed open source is not while performing better or comparibly to most other formats (in particular better than mp3)
Lossless Formats
So what's a lossless format? Lossless formats compress the audio data without losing any while lossy formats compress the audio data by cutting out data that is (supposed to be) outside the range of human hearing. The major advantage of lossless formats in todays landscape is that they can be transcoded to any lossy format you please. Therefore by archiving your music collection in a lossless format you can take advantage of the best lossy formats available at any given time for your portable player or mobile phone. Unfortunately in order to be lossless these formats must be of significantly larger size than lossy (as much as 10x), so lossless comes with the benefit of flexibility, but at the cost of size. Given that you can buy a brand new good quality 1TB hard-drive for less than £100 these days the size cost is considered less of a problem to the audiophiles of today.
One of the best lossless formats is flac (free lossless audio codec) developed by the XIPH foundation, the same folks behind Ogg Vorbis. Flac has garnered a lot of support because it outperforms most of its peers on most scores including compression, encoding, decoding and quality while being completely patent free.
Value For Money?
We must also consider here value for money, we already discussed how digital delivery is often and usually cheaper than CD, but is it good value for money? I think not.
In order to illustrate my point I decided to do some research. I chose an arbitrary album high in the Amazon.co.uk best selling chart and compared the price of the physical CD and the digital download on a variety of online stores (that was available and not pre-order) this happened to be Lady Gaga - The Fame. What I found was this:
| Store | CD | Download | Bitrate | Format |
| Amazon.co.uk | £8.98 | £6.49 | 256 kbs VBR | MP3 |
| HMV.com | £8.99 | £6.99 | 320 kbs* | MP3 |
| 7digital | / | £7.99 | 320 kbs** | MP3 |
| play.com | £7.99 | £6.99 | 320 kbs** | MP3 |
* HMV don't tell you what bitrate the file is in on the item description, in their help section it claims "depending on the supplier most are provided at 320kbps" which means you could be getting anything, and there is no mention of CBR or VBR
** play and 7digital both tell you the files are 320kbs in the description, but neither indicate whether this is CBR or VBR, even in their help sections.
Amazon offered the album at the cheapest download price and with the most information available, play offer the album at the best CD price while offering the best quality mp3 at an equal price to HMV. 7digital proved to be the poorest value offering downloads for the same price as play will sell you the CD (shipped) at £1 more than the same quality file elsewhere.
So consider the value of the mp3 here. For a saving of £1 you get your music faster but in a less flexible form. And it may not even prove to be a saving if you have to buy the exact same music in another format in a few years time, while your CD can be ripped over and over in any format you choose.
When you consider that lossy digital music isn't as "valuable" as a CD why is the cost not much lower? Is it overheads? Does hosting the content cost almost as much as running a warehouse?
Lets look at another digital distribution system: Steam. Steam sell PC games via digital delivery. A brand new major developer title costs on average about £29.99 on Steam (this is comparable to retail price in the UK, bear in mind that in the US Steam downloads are usually cheaper than retail, thus we are effectively getting shafted by Steam in the UK, BEAR THAT IN MIND) and in terms of size weighs in anywhere between 4 and 15GB (depending). If we take the last game I bought, The Last Remnant, £29.99 on Steam, around a 12GB download I believe, that's about £1 for 400MB of data. Compare this to a digital music download that costs you £7 for less than 100MB of data! So Steam, who are shafting their UK market are managing to host and deliver digital content, cover the costs of overheads, make profit for themselves and make profit for the games publishers and developers for 28 times LESS cost to the consumer than the digital music providers.
Something is seriously fucked up here, and I'm pretty sure it can be summed up in one word: Greed. Someone on the music side is being unreasonable and greedy bastards. They're charging an inflated price for an inferior product because someone is lumping additional costs onto the cost of that product and it's pretty to work out who it is: LICENSE HOLDERS.
There are two license holders who're lumping additional charges onto the cost of your music
The licensee of the music: the record companies
The owners of the intellectual property governing your digital technology format: MP3!
The record companies you probably could have predicted, but I bet most of you were not aware prior that MP3 is licensed technology, and if you want to sell music in that format you have to pay, and that adds cost to the consumer, you and me bub. But that alone can't account for why music is 28 times more expensive than games, the MP3 license charge simply isn't big enough, the remainder has to come from either the digital distributor or the record companies, and given all the knickers getting in knots over royalties from services including Pandora, YouTube, MYspace and even Itunes I'm going to have to slap my wager on the record companies being the problem.
>Rant
What really grabs my goat about this is that all these services can be run at a profit for all parties in the States but the license holders in the UK (and Europe) are demanding such high royalties as to make the running of these services unfeasible. Pandora no longer service anywhere outside of North America and YouTube have been forced to whore out the site to commercialism in order to turn a profit, yet satisfactory arrangements can be made in the US. Who the fuck is being unreasonable here? Someone, and maybe even several people need to wake up and smell the shit, because the state of the commercial world smells like shit, and it is going to drive more and more people towards piracy (which smells good in this analagy). People WANT to support the bands they love, but we all know now that it's the record companies who are not only taking the biggest slice of the pie, they're taking the whole thing and trying to steal other peoples, then they cry when anybody fights back, and it's really hard to care.
/rant.
Of course one way digital distribution platforms could enhance their value is by promising to replace all music purchased from them with files in newer better formats for free as they become available, but I think that’s somewhat unlikely unless the cost of bandwidth falls to zero between now and then.
So that’s about it really. I don’t think digital music is worth the cost, in fact I think we’re probably being ripped off to a not inconsiderable degree.
Next blog (in this vein) will carry some recommendations on good software to get the best out of your digital collection. Watch this space.
freedoms_stain, out.
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