The Future: No More Shiny Discs. Who Benefits?

But the downside for the record companies is that buying music will now be ala carte, one song a time and only the ones you really want, no more buying 11 lousy songs to get one good one. That's one of the reasons record companies did everything they possibly could to prevent electronic distribution and only began to embrace it when the popularity of iTunes forced them into it.

I think all the hand wringing and garment rending over iPods and online distribution is missplaced.

There's nothing sacred about the shiny disc, though if one had fallen from the sky during the 12th century people would surely have formed a religion around it.

The iPod, online distribution and mp3 format were not invented to punish audiophiles for their pride and vanity. They are both a response to the expense of both bandwidth and digital storage.

As the cost of both bandwidth and storage drop, which they are very rapidly doing, there's only one reason the resolution of available audio won't go up, not down. That reason is market demand, the consensus of the public as to what's 'good enough.'

At the same time, just as has always happened, musicians and audio engineers will probably continue to create much higher resolution audio than 99% of the market demands. That's the way it's always worked and it's much easier and cheaper to do it now than it once was.

Online distibution, then, should make it easier, not harder, for those who care about such things to get at the original, high-resolution audio since there won't be any need for separate distribution media, as there is now for CD, DVD-A and SACD. The ideal scenario is that you go online, click a button to select whatever audio quality you want, send some digital cash down the pipe one way and the file comes back the other.

This isn't a prediction, it's clear that the proliferation of high-definition television isn't doing anything to improve the quality of programming, just a recognition that if we can't get high-quality music it won't be because the technology prevents it, it will be because the market won't support it.