Toad

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we pretty much have had this since the 1960s:

1960s --- Vinyl
1970s --- 8-track
1980s --- Cassette tapes
1990s --- CDs
2000s --- Digital files

What's on the horizon? Or are digital files here to stay?

al_bundy

depends on how tech goes

only reason digital files became so big is storage became cheap enough to make portable players with a lot of music. quality wise digital files are pretty crappy compared to CD's.

i still prefer CD's since i can always reimport my music if the PC crashes or if i upgrade or whatever. with digital there is a new store every month and they are not all compatible with each other

Toad

Maybe I should've put this in Music Talk. Decisions, decisions...

Dan

HD DVD Audio.

(at least, that's what I'm hoping for...)

zombiezilla

It'll be right up there with SACD & DVD-Audio. As in, practically non-existant (after lots of expensive & extensive hype for a medium that is not enough of an improvement over the current disc-based system to warrant a NEW disc-based system).

mikehunt

cds are digital

SoSpacey

mp3's will just go away when storage becomes cheap enough to store lossless audio instead og compressing everything down so we can have quantity.

uncompressed audio on a 6tb Nano

DaveWadding

you ever seen those toothbrushes they have now? ToothTunes or something? You press the bristles on your teeth and the vibration pouts the music in your head. That's the next big thing probably.

Not the toothbrush...but the piping music straight into your head.

Hollowgen

i honestly can't think of a better follow-up than that.

[email protected]

The next big thing is already just arriving - you won't buy songs or albums, you'll just pay one subscription fee and have a massive library at your fingertips. Why own a dozen or even a a couple hundred albums, when for $12.95/month you can have every song ever recorded? That's gonna be the future; "owning" music will be obsolete....

astrochimp

I predict 8-track will make a comeback!

UAIOE

Phonograph cylinders.

zombiezilla

....and that's when I'll quit buying music entirely.

GHackmann

Our university basically has something like this, minus the subscription fee (which they're subsidizing for us with no option to opt-out -- thanks for spending my money for me, jackasses.) The DRM makes it incredibly aggravating to use.

"You want to transfer your song to your MP3 player? Sure, just subscribe to our optional portable player 'service charge'."

"Third-party media player software? What's that? Here, have some pop-up ads instead." (One of the first things I did after installing their client software was block their adserver.)

"What's a Mac?"

"Sure, you can have the right to play that song -- for 30 days. Then you have to get a new license for it, so cross your fingers that our license server isn't down when that time comes."

"Oh, you wanted to renew a song that we don't offer anymore? Here, let me delete your local copy for you."

"Search by song title and artist? Don't be silly."

No way I'd willingly pay $13 a month for this kind of "service".

mndtrp

Uncompressed audio files, which still falls in the "digital files" category. I guess I don't have the foresight to see what will come next.

Supermallet

Eventually we'll just have to have all of the artists and musicians at the beck and call of every person who wants to hear them, so they can hear a live performance every time.

Seriously, though, I think digital will stick around for quite a long time. And Toad's timeline is a little wrong. It really should read more like:

Vinyl: 1920's-1980's
Cassette: 1980's
CDs: 1990's-2000's
Digital Files: 2000's

8-track was really more of a blip on the radar than anything, with most of its applications being niche, and its popularity with the general public was quite short. Vinyl has been the dominant form of releasing recorded music for most of the 20th century, and is still being produced in quantity today, although its popularity has waned. Interestingly, people are now beginning to return to vinyl, finding a warmth (whether perceived or real is up for debate) in the playback that CDs and digital files do not possess, or so is the claim.

I think we'll see either a move towards uncompressed digital files or lossless files (files that are compressed, but when played back are indistinguishable from the master) such as FLAC. Given the ease of transmission and playback of digital files, I simply don't see a technology coming along that will be a serious contender. The worry here is that, as someone above posted, this system will be co-opted into subscription services that offer massive catalogues for a monthly fee. As far as I'm concerned, they're just a scam. First, as mentioned above, would be compatibility and DRM problems. Second, if you should ever stop paying, you lose access to all of that music. Third, the chances of these databases really have a truly expansive list of recordings (i.e. different recordings of various classical and symphonic pieces) is probably nil. Luckily, I highly doubt that this will ever become the dominant form of music distribution.

B5Erik

I'll always want something physical for music storage. Something (relatively) permanent. CD's are great that way - they clearly are durable, which makes them superior to digital file storage on a computer or MP3 player/Ipod. What happens to your collection if your hard drive crashes or your MP3 player/Ipod breaks? You have no collection at that point, and a lot of money wasted if you paid for downloads.

I bought records in the 70's and 80's, switched to CD in 1987 and will stay with the format into the forseeable future. I would go for a higher sampling rate CD format if it became widespread and was affordable, but the new CD/DVD Audio formats were just botched from the beginning from a marketing standpoint and they've pretty much died. Nice. I was actually hoping that they'd succeed, but I suspected all along that they wouldn't. Joe Sixpack can't hear the difference...

But I'll never go for music file downloads and storage on my computer. I've had a computer go down with hundreds of free music files lost, and I won't have that happen with files that I actually pay for.

benedict

Brain interface?

hdtv00

"(after lots of expensive & extensive hype for a medium that is not enough of an improvement over the current disc-based system to warrant a NEW disc-based system)."

Bullshit, quality had nothing to do with it. The complete and utter lack of music is what killed it, simple as that really. Not an improvement....dude get better gear.

zombiezilla

...and that leads to another point; I have been a musician for over 30 years, and I don't WANT to buy any more fucking audio gear of any kind. The stuff I have is good enough (which is the same reason why I refuse to go HD-DVD or Blu-Ray as well). If you hear a difference that you're willing to shell out bigger bucks to hear, more power to ya. But A/V wise, I'm pretty satisfied with where I am at right now. I don't WANT the next big fucking thing. I have everything I want already. And I'm not alone.

innocentfreak

I know I would subscribe but only if no DRM. Every label and artist would have to be on the same service and I would have to be able to continue to use the music even when my subscription isn't active. Otherwise I will stick to buying the occasional CD.

zombiezilla

You're absolutely right in what you would require from such a service. But it won't happen. The industry is so f'n greedy that it will not work together like that until it's too late, if at all. And it may be far too late already, after the internet P2P boom of the last 10 years or so.

And the DVD industry is about to find this out with their "format war"....it's not "win-able".

Supermallet

I don't see what the format war has to do with music distribution.

zombiezilla

SACD vs DVD-Audio....both are obsolete, for all intents and purposes....nuff said.

Supermallet

SACD and DVD-A never even got the level HD and BD are already at. Also, by the point those formats came out, people had already migrated to large collections of portable music. They wanted stuff they could listen to in the car, at the gym, etc. They weren't about to migrate back to sitting down in the living room to listen to music. It was never destined to happen. Most people still sit down to watch their movies, and as they get HDTV's, will look for more HD content to use on those TV's. So it's not a very good comparison at all, sorry.