Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
It actually went vinyl->CD. Cassette was an alternate format to vinyl, not a replacement, and provided a means to have music in a portable format.
I knew lots of folks with LPs and turntable to play them. Many also had cassette players. I can't think of any offhand who only had cassette players, or replaced vinyl with cassettes. (I still have a turntable, and a lot of vinyl.)
Sure, And people migrated because they thought it offered value (like getting a cassette player to complement the turntable and have portable music), or because they thought they had to (like conversion from vinyl to CD). MP3 players bear the same relation to CDs that cassettes do to vinyl - they're portable.
We are nowhere near the point in the evolution of ebooks where people will migrate because they think they have to, as paper books are going away. So the question is what additional value an ereader and electronic books offers over paper. Portability is one potential source of value, but may not be sufficient by itself.
If you have the MP3s, you can burn your own CD if you want to.
You get the physical CD, I think, largely because everything may not be available as MP3s. iTunes encourages checking picking - getting only a few popular songs to load on your iPod - and has raised the bar for bands because it's much more important to make the album especially strong to make it worth having. It's almost a reversion to the period before the 60's, when what most kids bought were singles, and albums were things others bought for you as gifts. Albums had the singles, and filler of varying quality.
As FM radio became dominant, playlists expanded, and more bands wrote and recorded their own music, the LP became the focus, and people bought albums, not singles. There was more pressure to create albums that had more to offer than a hit single or two.
The rise of the MP3 and the emergence of iTunes has reestablished the importance of the individual song, and if you can get just the few songs you want, why buy the album?
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Dennis
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I was a kid in the 80's and my older siblings were in their teens, we owned no vinyl records and purchased only cassettes. CD's were prohibitively expensive for us until well into the 90's and alot of our collectivions were copied. Most of my early musical loves were discovered on cassettes, and they were the only way to listen to music in the car.
I forgot about burning CD's, it is an important point. People are not exactly going to print and bind ebooks.
The flexibility of different formats always has a significant impact on the art it carries, from the original length of an album being tied to the sides of an LP (CD's caused a bloat of material and weaker albums for a long time). Ebooks could see a resurgance of the short story for example, where value for money considerations are more flexible due to the lack of scaling required to control printing costs.
MP3s create a new landscape for bands and I would expect to see live performance return as the staple of a musicians living as well as merchandising and physical albums presented in a more upscale way.