1. Home recording is becoming more accessible and easier to do, and in most cases, a home recording done right can sound just as good as a professionally produced album.
2. The Internet makes it possible for independent musicians to gain world wide popularity. This trend will continue, and in a few years it will be just as easy to become famous on the web than it would be to get signed to a major label.
3. You can make more money on your own as an independent musician than you can working for a label. Sure, on a label you can sell millions of cds, but the money goes through so many hands before it reaches the artists – a lot of signed musicians get hardly any money. Yet, I’ve seen some bands on the Internet make a living wage just by accepting donations for free downloads.

These three conditions make labels obsolete. The real future of music will not involve online mp3 sales, or charging a flat rate for unlimited downloads. For that to occur, you would need big labels to coordinate. Rather, I believe in the future, labels will die out, and musicians will release their music for free on the internet, because they want to. Some musicians will inevitably become popular enough to support themselves on touring, merchandise, and donations. Others will continue to share their music online for the fun of it.

I find it impossible to purchase lossless music formats. I’m worried that the quality of what is available from iTunes for example, is worst than the original CD so I still order CDs rip them with EAC and then toss them in a box. Have you heard of anyone selling music in a lossless format like apple lossless or FLAC?

Incidently, I read an article on-line about the superior sound quality of HDDs versus optical discs. Just a note.

Wired magazine had a good artice on the state of music copyrights.

I am a serious audiophile. Not rich though. But I can hear the difference in sound when I change cables in my system. What I can say is that 99% of this article is simply ridiculous. MP3 as an alternative to CD??? Mr Greenspun, please have your ears checked, your hearing is most likely seriously impaired. LPs an alternative to CDs??? Of course, and bicycles as alternatives to cars. Now, regarding SACDs, a serious audiophile that I know claims that it is not a problem of format but of know-how of recording studios. A well recorded CD is such a rich source of sound (yes those 700 MB of information) that you simply must buy an expensive audiophile CD player to hear the full quality of sound recorded on it. He claims that in fact on the best hi-end CD systems the quality between CD and SACD is negligible. And on cheap SACD players, SACD record DO sound worse than CD records on expensive CD players. And a well recorded CD will sound better than a poorly recorded SACD. Audiophiles know it so they do not rush to buy SACDs and spend their cash on futile updates of their listening equipment. And the rest of the crowd just doesnt care about the extra quality of SACD anyway. That is why SACD market is so slow. It is simply because CD delivers 99,9% of what people need. That the CD shops on the corner of the street close down is most likely caused by the overwhelming competition of online shops and the fact, oh yeas, that a lot of people prefer to pirate music instead of paying for it (which does not have much to do with CD format, does it?). And they do not care for the fact that MP3 is only for the deaf. It should be noted here that the Windows Media Player compression is infinitely better than MP3 but hey, it is Microsoft, Microsoft is boo, as are recording companies, do not buy their products even if they are superior. Be a good socialist, beat those who are richer than you and steal the music. After all artists create music for fun, right? Why pay them for their hobby? Ditto recording companies, ditto Microsoft, ditto …

While I usually like and agreewith your ideas, there are some serious flaws in this argument. While I agree with your assertion that the record companies don’t make anyone (other than themselves) happy, I think your appraisal of music consumers is off base.
First of all, the idea that people will simply turn on the radio, watch movies or (gasp) read books is obtuse at best. It’s not like people are Sims who need “entertainment time,” regardless of what form that entertainment takes. If someone wants to listen to a CD, they want to listen to a CD–usually a CD by a specific artist, or at very least, a specific sub-genre. This is why regular radio won’t cut it for most.
This same reason is why the average consumer is quite willing to pay more than $10-12/month for for music. Satellite radio is fine for background noise while you’re at work, but if you’re in your car and want to listen to Sleater-Kinney, no one is going to flip to the “Rock” channel and wait until one Sleater-Kinney track *might* show up. They want a disc full of the girls. (And God help you if you’re in the mood to hear Meredith Monk–don’t hold your breath.)
The conventional CD is dying, yes, but I don’t think your replacement path is parallel with the real future. This is more like it.

Let’s see – artists release CDs and ask the music industry to sell them. But the music industry controls the media, so most popular radio stations play only a narrow hit-list of music (exception, CKUA, http://www.ckua.com, in Alberta). Thus the average listener has no way of expanding her musical horizons — except by downloading, which the RIAA is trying to stop.

I’ve purchased CDs from artists I had never heard before simply because I’ve been able to sample their music via downloading. Had I not had this technology available to me, the music industry would have lost those sales.

Internet ‘radio stations’ filling specialty niches also have provided a rich source of new music to listen to, thus educating me further.

All that file-sharing has done in my case is change the type of music I buy. Now, as a better-informed consumer, I can actually buy the music I want to hear, rather than what top-40 stations, and media advertising, tells me to buy.

what about the people that don’t have the money to pay for any of this stuff?

cd prices have jumped upwards of 18 bucks for a $2 manufacturing cost. the rest is split here and there, but buyers don’t care where it goes. buyers care if the cost was worth the purchase. sales are declining — it isn’t worth the purchase.

looking at mp3’s, they are cheap and easy but you either need a $400 ipod or a $500+ computer to play them. if the person buying the computer has low tech skills, they’ll probably buy a store packaged pc with tons of hardware to run the latest operating system, which they have to learn the skills to use. of course prices drop, but they get replaced with newer and better.

…this is not easier than copying your friend’s cassette copy of a copy of iron maiden’s greatest hits to play on your $5 tape deck.

it’s not about which technology is better — a lot of people just want to listen music at some point, and they shouldn’t be required to be sitting on a nest egg or college degree to do that.

CDs have the failings of production and size that you mentioned, but not the technical ones. The “LP is superior to CD” is definatly a myth. SACD and DVD-A are superior, but it is debatable whether the human ear is actually able to hear the difference. No person can detect sound much more than 20 kHz: cds go up to 22, which is perfectly adequate. 5.1 surround is the only real advantage. Besides the high price of DVD-A and SACD, the music biz is also forcing strong copy protection, which makes them _less_ desirable than cds for a mp3 enthusiast.

The recording industry has seen a signifigant drop in sales which the of course blame on piracy. The more signifigant stat is that in the same period they have had an almost idendical percentage drop in new releases. Less new records = less sales.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.com is a great forum to get answers about the technical side of digital music. The first lesson is that no opinion about music quality is good without double-blind testing. Our ears are easy to fool, and the placebo effect is the only thing that makes a $1000 cable different from a $10 one.

CDs have the failings of production and size that you mentioned, but not the technical ones. The “LP is superior to CD” is definatly a myth. SACD and DVD-A are superior, but it is debatable whether the human ear is actually able to hear the difference. No person can detect sound much more than 20 kHz: cds go up to 22, which is perfectly adequate. 5.1 surround is the only real advantage. Besides the high price of DVD-A and SACD, the music biz is also forcing strong copy protection, which makes them _less_ desirable than cds for a mp3 enthusiast.

The recording industry has seen a signifigant drop in sales which the of course blame on piracy. The more signifigant stat is that in the same period they have had an almost idendical percentage drop in new releases. Less new records = less sales.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.com is a great forum to get answers about the technical side of digital music. The first lesson is that no opinion about music quality is good without double-blind testing. Our ears are easy to fool, and the placebo effect is the only thing that makes a $1000 cable different from a $10 one.