Re: The Future of Music (was: Re: e-book pricing)

From: Brian Atkins (jbatkins@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Aug 01 2000 - 17:49:09 MDT


[Non-member submission]

I would not pay for a MP3 track (not even 10 cents). The quality just isn't
good enough for me to spend money on. Besides I predict the whole format
will die out within a max of 4 years as increasingly cheap bandwidth and
storage allow pirates to trade perfect digital copies of CD tracks instead of
lossily compressed ones.

In two years or less you are going to be able to buy a 360GB hard drive for
under $500 that will hold 400+ CDs in perfect quality. You will have the
bandwidth on your home (and perhaps wireless) networks to stream those
CDs to anywhere you want. CD players will eventually die out.

P.S. Creative launches 6GB portable MP3 player:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-2374345.html

"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> QueeneMUSE@aol.com wrote:
> >
> > But... weren't you thinking, ok but let's see what happens if you
asked the
> > Napster traders to voluntarily donate a dollar.. hell even a quarter,
let's
> > say *directly to the artists* (since everyone seems to think it's OK
to rip
> > off big companies but not artists), every time they download. What do you
> > think would happen?
>
> I wouldn't do it every time I downloaded, but for the songs I wanted to
> keep? Sure! In a flash! But the payment would have to be automatic;
> I'm not going to spend eight hours finding the email address to send the
> Paypal payment to.
> --
> sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> http://singinst.org/singinst.html



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