Thursday, March 20, 2008
Paradise Lost
The dissolution of the music industry continues to have traumatic implications on our sharing of music through the Internet. The Apples iTunes' hijacking of Napster was a predictable homogeneous filtering of the downloading process to a respectable practice. Of course it had the effect of clobbering and sealing the doom of the traditional music industry and music distribution on two fronts: CDs were superfluous, and recording technology was now in the hands of the creative artists. A third element also played a role: the Internet provided musicians a means for distributing their music without a middle man.
Yet the pirating of music continues unabated, with successful appropriation of music files at no cost lauded as an achievement of honor. One university student boast that he has never paid for any of the music he plays and that he has enough files to play music continually for several years without interruption or repetition.
There are some who claim that the only illegal act is not downloading, but rather uploading. And though this might be accurate, the debate on the legality of downloading continues.
Sadly, this new distribution also represents a dumbing down of quality and standards, a decline that appears to have accompanied each technological advancement since the music peaked with hi-fidelity stereo analog production. Digital technology has introduced compression rates that preserves about 10+% of the original recording. There are generations of music listeners who have never heard anything else, so this compression becomes their model of audio excellence.
Yet the pirating of music continues unabated, with successful appropriation of music files at no cost lauded as an achievement of honor. One university student boast that he has never paid for any of the music he plays and that he has enough files to play music continually for several years without interruption or repetition.
There are some who claim that the only illegal act is not downloading, but rather uploading. And though this might be accurate, the debate on the legality of downloading continues.
Sadly, this new distribution also represents a dumbing down of quality and standards, a decline that appears to have accompanied each technological advancement since the music peaked with hi-fidelity stereo analog production. Digital technology has introduced compression rates that preserves about 10+% of the original recording. There are generations of music listeners who have never heard anything else, so this compression becomes their model of audio excellence.
