Posted on 12/19/2004 11:51:15 AM PST by SamAdams76
On a short subway ride, Katie Braggs, 20, reached in her purse for her source of entertainment.
MusicWashington, D.C. - Scripps Howard Foundation Wire - Inside what looks a pack of cigarettes or a small deck of cards, Braggs has her lifetime music collection - some 500 songs - literally at her fingertips.
"Oh my gosh, I love it so much," the 20-year old college student said of her new Apple iPod, a sleek digital music player wildly popular among young people. "It's perfect for me."
Braggs has transferred most of the music on her CDs to her iPod, and she uses Apple's iTunes Music Store to download new music for 99 cents a song. To her, songs exist not on CDs or records, but in cyberspace - as digital files.
Spurred by the growth of the Internet, digital music will eventually usurp CD technology, fundamentally changing how music is distributed and stored, industry experts agree. Like records and tapes, CDs will retain some usefulness, but they'll largely be relics.
"If you're looking ahead, the CD is basically dead," said James V. DeLong, a Washington lawyer who directs the Center for the Study of Digital Property, an offshoot of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. "It's really impractical to be putting bits of information on pieces of plastic and then sending them all over the country in trucks."
Even with exponential growth, the digital music industry is in its infancy. The most glaring question is how the recording industry, which has spent millions of dollars fighting online piracy in courts, will adapt and profit from it, DeLong said.
Despite the recording industry's effort, unauthorized file sharing continues to grow. In November an average of more than 5 million users were logged onto unauthorized networks, more than double November 2003, according to BigChampagne, a company that tracks online file sharing and legal download stores.
Eric Garland, BigChampagne's chief executive officer, said for every song downloaded on iTunes, there are 100 swapped on unauthorized networks.
"Paid downloads are still a very small market," he said.
Nothing spurred the movement to digital music more than the explosion of file sharing on the Napster network in 1998, when millions of teenagers swapped their music collections online to the chagrin of the recording industry.
Its trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, sued the network, which operated on a central server, out of existence in 2001. No Napster-like Utopia for file sharing has emerged since, but several alternatives have surfaced, most of which RIAA has sued.
Today's file-sharing networks are decentralized. Called "peer to peer," users connect only with other users, not with a central server.
To eradicate P2P networks, RIAA would have to disable the software on every individual computer, Garland said.
The recording industry has turned to suing thousands of individuals who make large quantities of copyrighted material available over file sharing networks and to going after the makers of the software that allows for the activity.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to take up one of those cases, in which lower courts ruled that makers of programs like Grokster and Kazaa are not liable if their software is used for copyright infringement.
Even if the courts side with the record companies, Garland said unauthorized file sharing will always be around. Software developers are constantly working on stronger P2P technology that will soon be available, he said.
Garland said it's simply a generational divide: Teenagers who had the world's music catalog available to them on Napster simply expect that kind of access, and they'll keep switching computer programs until they get it.
"The people who did not experience that, they just think it's 'stealing music,'" he said.
Laith Mosley, 27, an avid iPod user, said he's downloaded music on unauthorized networks before, but since the RIAA has sued thousands of individuals, "It's not worth the risk."
Now Mosley uses iTunes. The service controls more than 70 percent of the market.
About 54 million songs were downloaded on paid services in the first half of 2004, up from 11 million in the last half of 2003, according to Nielson's SoundScan.
iTunes has sold more than 150 million songs in its three-year history.
"People with iPods are definitely buying music from iTunes, and by contrast with recent history, are buying more digital music than ever before," said Jeremy Horwitz, editor-in-chief of the independent iPodlounge.com.
Though there about a dozen cheaper digital music players, the iPod, which costs $250 to $600, depending on the model, remains dominant. That's partly because it works with the iTunes store, but also because the iPod has a sleek, elegant design and is practically effortless to use, Horwitz said.
"And no one else has been able to duplicate or supercede it," he said.
In the last three years, a subculture has developed among iPod users. Horwitz said interest in iPodlounge, a niche online publication, has soared to 1.7 million readers in November alone.
"It's definitely a fad," said Steven Kyle Joseph, 24, a professional actor from New York and an iPod owner.
Braggs, who attends Catholic University of America in Washington, said, "You walk around campus, and you see people with them everywhere. It's like everyone has one."
Braggs owns an iPod mini, which stores fewer songs than the standard iPod. Like cars and cell phones, iPod-minis come in several colors. Braggs chose lime-green, which she said reflects her personality.
Although the iPod is the digital music player of choice, there is no uniform way that users acquire music. Some, like Braggs, buy from the iTunes store or share with friends. Joseph still buys CDs, transferring the music to his iPod for when he travels or exercises.
The success of iTunes shows there is a viable market for pay services, Horwitz and Garland said.
To take the digital music movement mainstream, Apple would need to lower the price of the iPod and expand iTunes' catalog of about a million songs to 20 to 25 million, roughly the amount of music available for sale, they said.
Garland said Apple could also do better by allowing users to buy into a subscription service so that they only have to pay once. The thought of adding another dollar to the credit card tends to keep people from spending more than an average of $20, he said.
Horwitz said, "If Apple can attract enough mainstream consumers to the iPod platform - people who aren't familiar with tools for online piracy and prefer not to risk being sued by the RIAA - they can grow the legal market for music even further."
Gave Mrs. Puppage a 20g pod.....then got the Bose Soundock for it. Oh, baby!!
Honestly, that's not a problem. The iPod comes with a docking station. All you have to do is put the iPod in the docking station at night and each morning, you have a full charge that will easily get you through the entire day (unless listening to an iPod is all you do). I listen to my iPod extensively - hours a day - and I haven't once run out of charge. Just a total non-issue.
But I mostly use mine while I am away from home. Maybe I need two, one for everyday and one for away.
It took 3 networked PCs and several days to rip and backup all my CDs to my new 4G 40 gig iPod.
But it was worth it!
Ping
I confess I haven't tried this yet, but a good alternative is the Dell digital jukebox. I've read that they're better than I-pod, although I can't vouch for that from experience. But I've seen a fair number of students with them.
Here's the Dell web page. Warning: you get to hear music while you look it over. According to the web page, Dell is recommended by Oprah as well as a couple of PC magazines.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/dj?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
I wonder if you can upgrade an iPod with a new notebook hard drive or do they use a different type of drive ?
I know how to use peer to peer and I'm not that worried about RIAA. I use iTunes because I don't like stealing.
Just a thought: I ripped all my cd's before purchasing my iRiver, then had to redo the whole project because I wasn't satisfied with the quality of my files. If you can, you might want to try ripping a couple of your favorite tracks at a variety of settings, then listen to those tracks on a friend's player (ideally through the earphones you plan to use), until you've determined the settings that will best suit your needs.
(I'm now facing doing this all over again, as I contemplate migration from a player that supports vorbis, but not audible.com, to one that supports audible but not vorbis. Argh!)
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