The Future of Recorded Music

This is not the future of recorded music. Those who download want to download for free, legal or no, and with freedom, i.e. platform independency. You are an Apple user, so you naturally see things in an Apple light. But Apple is a sideshow (to wit, the biggest developer of Apple software is iirc MS, and that only for legal purposes: to mitigate monopolistic appearances). On the operating system front, the really interesting conflict is between proprietary (meaning M$, not Apple) and free operating systems (again, not Apple). With regard to downloaded "software" including music, the conflict is between any number of legal proprietary models fighting for a piece of the pie and the much larger gray area created for example by p2p (peer-to-peer) clients, whose first well-known incarnation was of course Napster, but now appears in many other guises. I trust in the durability of the basic (base?) human instinct to own. And as far as I know, ownership is not a concept meaning "only on 3 computers" or anything of the kind.

There are two issues. The first is the music industry battle against p2p downloads. On that, I agree with Aganon that this and other floating ideas (like 'weed', which is a paid version of a p2p) will have a difficult future. It's hard to defeat "free, unlimited access, and grass roots".

The second issue is the question of fusion. This is the idea supported by the computer and multimedia industries that music distribution becomes networked and electronically distributed, and your pc or nettop receiver stores data to disc, and pipes music all over the house via your home Lan (ethernet, 1394, whatever). If this idea succeeds, Apple's music service might be one of the early successes, platform specificity aside.

Just because I'm an Apple customer doesn't mean I see everything Apple's way. (MS software is the bane of my existence, however.) And I certainly agree that free is cheaper than $.99. I don't think the Apple model itself will stop the theft. It may begin to supplant the purchased disk, however, and as it does it will have an effect both on what is recorded and on how it is marketed.

Regarding MP3 compression, every non-audiophile I know says they clearly hear the difference between 16bit/44KHz digital and the various compression schemes. As audiophiles we shouldn't completely discount the publics desire for good quality sound.

The question isn't whether they hear it--it's whether they care. I've yet to meet anybody who listens to MP3s, but thinks they're inadequate (actual audiophiles excepted, of course).