What it SHOULD mean is a lot more songs will be available online to try-before-you-buy with the ability to hear a song in it's full CD quality glory a few times before you buy. At least, DRM will let you do that....
...I'm sure you'll hear more in the future.
Three things I hate...
Money grabbers...
MP3 may become the next GIF, with these tossers claiming royalties. US$0.01 per sold download with $US 15,000 minimum. So people such as Emusic would have a lot of money to pay...
So use the LAME encoder (at 128kps, 44hz stereo VBR please) which doesn't touch the stupid precious Fraunhofer code.
...money grabbers...
MP3.com's has not managed to settle with the latest big company scared of loosing it's grip over the industry. They must pay US$118M for 'royalties lost' to the Universal Music Group. Fox News reports.
I used Mymp3.com the other day and I must say it is exactly what I've been looking for. The first thing I did when I got a powerful computer and a cdr burner was to convert all my Faith No More CDs to MP3, burn them onto a CD and hit 'random'. MyMP3.com would let you do this by simply prooving you own the CD (by putting it in your CD drive and clicking 'yep', beam it up biAtch) and yay, you can stream those songs. I loved it... but it isn't working at the moment because of the stupid crap above.
...and money grabbers.
In Australia and the US we pay a special tax on blank tapes and recording equipment on the assumption that these will be used for illegal taping purposes. In Germany, these same taxes are about to be put onto computer equipment such as printers, CD burners and even modems.
This tax is the reason a minidisc component for my stereo with a digital out costs $250 more than one with only digital in. It's frigging stupid. I use Minidisc to record my band and want to be able to make digital copies of those discs but I can't. The SBLive with digital in and out also costs $200 more than the one with just digital out for the same reason.
As I was saying...
Yesterday (was it? it feels like a year ago) I said 'if copyright was abolished' what would happen on the net? Copyright is already abolished. Most people would think nothing of downloading an MP3 and never buying the CD, reading a short story by someone and never buying the book it came from. Everyone swaps CDs, tapes CDs, tapes from the radio, TV etc. The music industry as it is at the moment is screwed. Completely. No amount of laws will change what is currently happening on the net.
Windows ME, the new version of Microsoft Windows 98 will have changes that will allow software to lock certain parts of your computer, such as the digital out on your soundcard, or your harddisk to prevent music pirating from digital files. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Computers are as computers are, once a music file in on a computer it can be recorded. Just like radio, and tape, and minidiscs, and VCRs. Get over it. The industry (recording and IT) are bending their technology to the old music rules when they're already nullified.
What are they going to do? What is going to happen to music? Personally at the moment I have access to so much damn music I don't have time to listen to it all. It has lost a lot of it's specialness. I still find tracks I love every now and then, but it's just so much easier to ignore the shite. To brush over something I may like if I listened a few more times... but why bother?
I don't know where I'm going with this. At least some people are trying new things. I'm more interested in this than anything at the moment. I can see it all falling to bits in the next year or so.
Not that long ago...
...there was no such thing as CD, vinyl, tape, recording devices. Muscians made money by writing music and performing it. Most bands still do. Most bands these days make all their money touring, and nothing from sales. It wouldn't be hard to slip back into the old model.